New, unconfirmed Google ranking update ‘Fred’ shakes the SEO world!

"New, unconfirmed Google ranking update ‘Fred’ shakes the SEO world!"

I love this headline from searchengineland; we get this news a couple of time a year and it never fails to make me laugh!

It looks as if Google could have released yes another algorithm change that take a long hard look at the quality of a websites links before deciding whether that sites ranking needs to be improved or demoted.

But again it, this new ‘Fred’ update seems to have caught the SEO industry off-guard as is sending waves of panic across the community, but why this always makes me laugh is that if these SEO practitioners did their job right in the first place and looked to place good quality content on webpages with good quality (not spammy) links linking to the content then there wouldn’t be a problem.

The worry look on the faces of SEO professionals out there is a clear sign that they know that they have done something bad (black hat SEO) in the past and they are scared that their past is going to come along and bite them in their @rse.

I for one (as well as others like me), sit back and actually watch our ranking improving; I was struggling with one competitive term that seemed stuck as #8 suddenly yesterday leapt to #2, and I’m seeing positive moves across a range of sites and keywords.

I’m sitting pretty, I just wish all of my colleagues would learn and start doing their jobs properly!

Why is it so hard to rank well on Google?

I have recently been involved with a discussion about ranking on Google on LinkedIn, it has become more difficult to rank highly now, but why, these are my notes on it.

Any web marketer or somebody who owns a website realises (or should realise) the importance of high search engine rankings. Any webmaster who is serious about succeeding online should know that you need to be on the first page of Google results, but more importantly you need to be at positions 1, 2 or 3.

There was a time when achieving high search engine ranks was not really very difficult, all you had to do was create content, didn’t particularly need to be useful or of high quality, dump some keywords in it loads of times and *BANG* you were done and could with little effort rank highly.

Google changed a few its indicators around 2005, so with the same content you just had to throw some links in (predominately from link farms, article networks, blog networks and directories) and you ranked well.

From about 2007, things really started to get really difficult, and as every year marches forward Google just keep making the SEO role more and more difficult.

Today, there is a huge amount of competition out there in all markets. Achieving a page one rank in Google (and the rest of the search engines) has become extremely tough, unless of course you are working smart.

Working smart will often mean here the ability to choose the right set of tools – tools that can rocket your web visibility by taking your website from the lower ends of search engine results all the way to very top. See a previous post - Internet Business Promoter (IBP) Axandra Software Review.

A page one rank is all you need to rocket your web traffic that will blow your mind, however, traffic is just one side of the coin and if you want to convert traffic then you need to look at Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO), but that’s a completely different subject.

Anyway, the real reason why it’s more difficult to rank on Google is that they want to present the very best results to us searchers, and their tweaks and modifications to their algorithm is all just designed to ensure that the sites that are well liked, with the best content rise to the top – it’s that simple really.

Internet Business Promoter (IBP) Axandra Software Review

IBP SEO software, also known as Internet Business Promoter, is still available, but it is now called SEO Goat. The IBP SEO tool still works in much the same way as described below.

I’ll say right from the start that the way most SEO software products try to rank your webpages doesn’t really work. They can help you decide which keywords to use and where they should go on your page, but they cannot magically push you to the top of Google.

IBP SEO software, originally from Axandra, took a slightly different approach. Instead of looking at your page on its own, it analysed the pages already ranking in the top 10 and then gave you a report based on what those successful pages were doing.

I’ve been working in digital marketing for more years than I care to remember and, to be honest, Internet Business Promoter, or IBP as it was better known, was one of the most useful SEO tools I ever used.

Obviously, it’s a good idea to analyse your pages to make sure they are well optimised for your chosen keyword or keywords. But Google doesn’t work from a simple checklist.

Google doesn’t care about your optimisation in isolation. It wants to know how useful your site is compared with the other sites competing for the same search term. That is why it makes sense to compare your page against the current top 10 results.

And that is exactly what the IBP SEO tool does.

How the IBP SEO tool works

Once you enter your primary keyword, IBP runs a search on Google, or your preferred search engine, and analyses the top ranking pages for that term.

It looks at where those pages have used their keywords, how often they have used them, whether they appear in the title, description, headings, bold text, and other important areas of the page.

It then presents the results in an easy-to-follow report. In simple terms, that report becomes your roadmap for updating your page so it can better compete with the pages already ranking well.

This on-page SEO analysis is not the end of it. IBP also looks at inbound links, so you can see whether your page needs more authority as well as better optimisation.

That matters because SEO is rarely just about one thing. A well-optimised page with weak links may still struggle. A badly structured page with strong links may also underperform. You usually need both.

One of the great things about IBP is that it does not promise a shortcut to SEO success. It gives you structured advice, but it still takes time, effort, and a bit of judgement.

And, just like anything else in SEO, there is no guarantee it will work.

What IBP included

IBP was originally a suite of SEO tools from Axandra. These tools allowed you to:

1. Research keywords in your niche or market
2. Optimise your website for those keywords
3. Find link opportunities to help improve rankings
4. Track your website’s position in the search results

SEO has moved on since IBP first came out. Google now looks at far more than keyword placement. Page quality, trust, user behaviour, site speed, content depth, links, and overall site experience all play a part.

That does not make IBP useless. Far from it. It just means you need to treat it as one tool, not the whole answer.

Used properly, the IBP SEO software gives you a clear way to compare your page against the pages already ranking. That can be very useful, especially if you are trying to work out why a competitor is above you.

But you should not expect magic.

Even if your page looked very similar to the pages in the top 10, and even if you had more links pointing to it, Google could still be looking at other signals. Design, site structure, bounce rate, time on site, old penalties, brand strength, and content quality can all make a difference.

So all in all, if you are serious about improving rankings and want a structured way to optimise your pages, IBP, now SEO Goat, is still worth looking at.

Download it for a free trial.

SEOPressor Review: How to dominate Google search rankings when using WordPress

Effectively SEOPressor vs Yoast SEO

The first time I managed a WordPress site it came with Yoast already ready for me to continue the SEO, and for a long time I really didn’t know any different; but I became concerned that my SEO work wasn’t having the effect that I needed, so I started my search for a new WordPress SEO plugin.

After a fair bit of searching and testing I landed on SEOPressor, and loved it, but if you want a little more detail then hopefully this short review will help.
Start taking a closer look at SEOPressor today, click here for more information.

So which SEO plugin is best for your WordPress website?

If you’re just starting out or you’re simply looking to make the most out of your website content with videos, articles, categories, tags etc. then Yoast SEO should be good enough for you.

On the other hand, if you are serious about marketing your website and squeezing that little bit extra out of your SEO, then I would highly recommend using SEOPressor Connect.

For the basic stuff they can both pretty much do the same thing, but never versions of SEOPressor now comes with some really great features that really does push your rankings higher.

For a FREE eBook about speeding up your WordPress site (to improve rankings), just enter your details below.   Name:   Email:

click here for your free autoresponder

Choose up to 3 Keyword/Phrases
OK, it’s the free Yoast SEO plugin that only lets you choose a single keyword/phrase for SEO purposes, but to get multiple keyword focus on Yoast costs a minimum of $69. Whilst you do pay for SEOPressor, the standard version lets you focus on three keywords. Making it easier if you don’t know (or not sure) which term to rank for immediately.


Real-time LSI Recommendations

The best part of the latest version of SEOPressor is real-time LSI recommendations; it will actually recommend Latent Semantic Indexing keywords to use, this is important as Google uses LSI to better understand what your webpages and website is all about. Once you enter your primary search term(s) into SEOPressor the LSI keyword recommendations start suggesting other useful keywords and terms you should be using in your content to get Googles full attention and to ensure that you really dominate the rankings for your chosen term(s). This is not available on any other WordPress SEO plugin and is a priceless addition to WordPress.


Real-time Keyword density

If you’re heavily into your keyword density (which I’m not) then this is a really useful feature as you see your keyword density on the fly, it can be really useful if you want to get the keyword density down you can see it going down as you add more content in real-time rather than having to ‘run’ a request.


Over optimisation alerts

If you are working on a page that is overly optimised (which could seriously damage ranking), you’ll get a real-time alert letting you know that something has gone wrong and you need to look more closely at your optimisation.


Social SEO

Usually when you share content, the social platform you are using will automatically pick and display the Description of the page, whilst this can sometimes be all you need, but social channels are more personal that webpages and Google search, so it makes sense to alter key landing pages to add a little more personality into your description. This is particularly true if you sell to Businesses and Consumers – typically Businesses might only see you on Twitter and LinkedIn (SEOPressor doesn’t actually support LinkedIn yet), but you could in theory have a more professional description on Twitter to that on Facebook to help talk to your different target audiences.


Internal Link Manager

SEOPressor allows you to effortlessly fix, build, and manage the perfect internal link structure to increase your reader’s retention and reduce bounce rate.


Other great features:

SEO Score: SEOPressor let's you set a lower limit for SEO score, if the content you have created doesn't pass the limit it won't let you publish it.

SEO Checklist: SEOPressor uses a checklist approach so that it becomes easy to create great content time after time, useful if you have a team of content developers and you want the same quality from the team.

Overall

SEOPressor just seems to have been built with Google rankings in mind, and take it for someone that has been in the digital marketing space for more years that I care to remember, this works the closest to how Google actually thinks and ranks, making it a clear winner in my books.

For a FREE eBook about speeding up your WordPress site (to improve rankings), just enter your details below.   Name:   Email:

click here for your free autoresponder

SEOPressor Review

This is a quick video I put together that explains some of the key differences.

 

Best of luck with your SEO :-)

Get Google reviews easily

Reviews on Google could have a small (and positive) impact on your search engine rankings, but more importantly they allow potential customers to see what a great service you offer, which will help drive traffic to your website and aid conversions.

We all trust what other people say about businesses (we tend to ask for personal recommendations ourselves), so the reviews act to reinforce the positive messages that you put out to the market. In addition, businesses can strengthen their relationship with their market by engaging with them directly through their reviews on Google.

Leaving a review is quick and easy to do, and can be left on a desktop, smartphone or tablet and you’ll start to see those wonderful review stars in your listings as reviews get left for you, they make your business really standout from the crowd.

Remember, people can leave a review for you on Google whether you like it or not, so you are best engaging with the reviews to ensure that you get the most from it.

Here is my simple three step process for getting more positive reviews on Google and use it to create more business for yourself.

Step 1: The most important thing is to ensure that your business information is verified on Google as only verified businesses can respond to reviews.

Here is more information on how to verify your business on Google (https://support.google.com/business/answer/2911778)

Step 2: Encourage customers to write a Google review for you.

Simply remind your customers once they have had a positive dealing with you to write a review for you on Google, reviewers do need a Google account, so it can sometime mean that not everyone can write a review for you (I know, it seems crazy that some people out there don’t own a Google account!).

If they search for your business name on Google, they should see a full panel in the results with your businesses details on them, they just need to click the “Write a review” button.

You could always email them a link to your page to make the whole process easier for them!

Step 3: Be active and engage with reviewers

It helps people to decide to leave a review if they see that you engage and thank reviewers, others will see that you value the input of customers and will want to leave you their reviews too.

How to rank for RankBrain

Launched in early 2015, RankBrain is Google’s machine learning technology, it uses artificial intelligence to help Google understand exactly what you want to find with your search and delivers you highly relevant search results.

So how do you rank for RankBrain?

Actually the answer is rather simple and something that I’ve been advocating for years now, we know that RankBrain is effective for the 15-20% of the queries that Google has never seen before; this clearly indicates that these are natural language queries, typically long typed out queries or more likely voice queries asked on smart devices (smartphones, tablets etc.).

So optimising for these is easy, just write in natural language, write for humans, write for your target audience. If in doubt read your content out load to see if it makes sense (again, something I’ve been advocating for years), if it doesn’t make sense then your content isn’t correctly optimised and it need rewriting.

As a content writer, you tend to find that the highest quality content is written in a very natural way that is conversational.

So that’s it, check your content, check that it reads well and you will improve your Google rankings.

Data or Creativity?

Had an interesting chat with an old colleague of mine the other day who came through the old school marketing ranks (to be fair, so did I), he spent a lot of time in a senior data role in a telecoms company we both worked for; and he has kept the strong ethos that marketing should be strongly data-led first and foremost, it should be the driving force behind the strategy and tactics of the business.

I disagree to some extent, there are obviously times when data is incredibly important (predominately if you are doing some qualitative research on what your target market(s) think about you or you are analysing analytics from campaigns or web site etc), but this should only inform you and not be the single driving force behind any major business decisions or campaigns.

Data (just like technology) enables opportunities for marketers, but the creativity is where the real value is created.

I think we see this problem occurring everyday, big brands push their flashing advertising on us, but very little of it sticks in the minds of the consumers – they lack the creativity needed to be memorable (and therefore successful), I’m sure the data says the execution was perfect, but if it doesn’t hold consumers interest or create that desire, you’ve lost the war.

So yes, data is important, let it drive discussion and debate in the boardrooms (I’m all for that), but never let it drive business decisions; creativity is what’s needed to drive the creation of the value, and it’s this value which will ultimately decide whether your strategies and tactics are successful.

From Just One Pound

Going off at a slight tangent this post, but at a recent networking event I became interested in the scalability of businesses and in particular how businesses can start from nothing and grow into huge financial concerns.

I was talking to a group of small business owners, one of which was the very proud owner of small retail business that literally started with one pound and had grown it from there into a very sizeable business indeed and is now turning over many thousands of pounds in about 18 months.

Unfortunately, she had some to a sticking point in which she was struggling to get the business to grow further; it all seemed to stem from the fact that she had started the business with no real vision of what she wanted the business to be or do and so she didn’t really have any idea on how she wanted it to grow in the future.

We talked for a while and I realised that as well needing some assistance with asking the difficult strategic questions (who is the customer?, what do they value?, how is she value better than her competitors? etc), she needed something very visual to grab hold of in order to help her move forward.

As she started the business with just £1, I started to look at business milestones from the point of view of how that simple one pound coin, had grown. How quickly did she double that pound? With that £2 how didn’t did she double that to £4 etc, I started to draw it out for her and she liked the concept.

I’ve replicated it below, the simple idea is that from a single £1, doubling your money each step, it’s just 21 steps to you making your first £1m.

She’s pinned this on her office wall and she marking out these 21 milestone steps, dating each step as see goes, she has found visualisation of her business incredibly powerful, she is also undertaking a proper strategic review to ensure that she is making her money doing the very best activities.