Why Your Website Must Keep Pace With Google Updates

Google Updates: How SEO Experts Keeps Pace

A website is a practical necessity for nearly every Sonoma County business. Search engine optimization is a vital task to make that site effective. Thanks to the pace of Google’s frequent updates, effective SEO is always a moving target. Nonetheless, a few sound practices will help your site keep pace with Google’s ever-changing algorithms. It pays to know what it takes to earn a high Google rank, and why working with a Santa Rosa SEO company can help you meet that goal.

Maintain Mobile Mojo

The hoary cliché “You never get a second chance to make a first impression” gained traction for a reason: It’s true. With webpages, your next potential customer is most likely to have their first impression on a mobile device, even if these viewers move to a bigger screen for subsequent visits. Google pays attention to the nuts and bolts of a site’s mobile formatting and awards higher rankings to mobile-optimized sites, even for searchers using big screen devices. With these stakes, testing your site on a spectrum of mobile devices is essential. For a Sonoma County small business, this effort is an expensive and time-consuming headache. This reality makes a compelling case for working with a SEO company.

Feel the Need — The Need for Speed

Google’s web crawler records the loading time for your site’s pages, and this metric is another search engine rank factor. There are many ways to display content on a web page, but Google’s load-time metric makes it imperative to maximize efficiency with your page’s coding. While do-it-yourself webpage tools yield acceptable results, a professional website design firm can produce faster-loading pages and gain you an edge in the search rankings. In November 2021, the often-secretive search powerhouse aided the web community by releasing its Page Insights Tool. Google will continue to raise the bar on load times, making coding efficiency an ongoing task for website maintenance.

Earn Backlinks

Quality backlinks receive heavy weighting in Google’s search ranking algorithm. A backlink is a link from another website with a high ranking. While many website owners pay to create backlinks, Google looks for organic links — links earned with quality content — and consistently revises the crawler to weed out the pretenders. Backlinks are the happy byproduct of content that prioritizes customer service over in-your-face selling.

Google’s site reviewers reward authoritative articles, creating an opportunity for local service providers to showcase their expertise. Adding a blog or a collection of how-to articles with a local angle is one path to earning backlinks. There are no shortcuts; earning this validation is a months-long process. Here’s the good news: once established, your backlink reputation is an enduring competitive advantage.

Frequently Freshen Your Site

If your business has an extensive site with a high ratio of stale content, you are impairing your search ranking. Google remains secretive about many practices, but SEO professionals unanimously believe that the search engine looks for and rewards fresh content. Even small amounts of fresh content can yield a quick payoff, with a rank moving upwards in days. Cycling new content onto a website at least once a week is well within the ability of any business, including sole proprietors. A professional web marketing company can help businesses of all sizes deploy a site that excels with this valuable search engine metric.

Augment With Social Media

Tapping web resources outside of Google is another path to future-proofing your website. Easy-to-implement social media posts bolster your backlink and freshening efforts. Announcing a new blog post on Twitter and Facebook only takes a few minutes. Nonetheless, if you build either social website into your strategy, you must commit to frequent updates. The unfavorable customer impression from a neglected site is worse than no social media presence.

Understand the Role of Schema

Schema is HTML code that spells out relationships among the information items on your website. The Google search algorithm understands this arcane code better than inferences drawn from the plain language of your content. When built correctly, schema adds valuable context to your site.

Industry professionals believe that schema creates a snowball effect; as a site’s ranking improves, well-executed schema markup code yields further rank improvements. Nonetheless, adding schema code to your site demands care. Google downrates sites that engage in clumsy keyword stuffing. A SEO company with a proven marketing track record can help you make the most of schema markup code.

Tap Local SEO Talent

Quick-fix attempts to game the Google algorithm are the path to web marketing failure. Instead, your website should embody the daily professionalism you deliver for your customers. Fitz Designz is the marketing and SEO company Santa Rosa service-based businesses rely on. We’re a local business with international training. Elegant simplicity is the hallmark of Fitz Designz, and that approach has won the trust of local businesses for more than a decade. Contact us today; we look forward to working with you.