As an SEO consultancy in Austin, our clients look to us to help them design and execute a well-crafted digital marketing strategy that gets results.

And since putting together a comprehensive SEO strategy is such a key part of what we do our team is always on the lookout for factors that can impact our efforts.

Google Ranking

If you’ve been paying any attention to the world of SEO, you’ve probably read about – or unfortunately been impacted by – one of Google’s many updates in 2018.

One of those updates – the “Medic” update –  caused some websites that had been either hacked or spammed to rank higher than websites whose owners had obviously put a great deal of work into them.

Authority and Links

A lot of experts have been saying that while links are currently important ranking factors for Google, it seems that we’re trending more towards what Google considers “authority”.

In fact, Google has been ranking sites higher in the search engine results pages (SERPS) which have multiple pages of information on the same topic.

These authority sites will, naturally, draw more links from others who are writing in the same niche, so it’s no surprise that this is happening.

So what does this mean?

It seems that while link building is important, to make the most of any backlink building strategy…and to get the best results in any digital marketing strategy it requires links both to and from authority websites.

In other words, your links will need links to be able to pass on any link juice.

If you’re doing a link building campaign it’s important now, more than ever, to do a thorough analysis of your competitors’ link profiles before you spend any time at all putting in your first link.

Why?

Because you want to learn how many links you’re going to actually need to see if you’ll get a good enough return on your investment.

Google could be favoring sites with a huge number of links, so your time might be better spent using other traffic building methods and just let your links grow naturally over time.

Content optimization

Content optimization has always been important to any comprehensive SEO strategy, but it’s becoming even more important than ever.

Unless you’re dropping huge sums of money into building out your link profiles your content has to be optimized to help your website rank higher in the SERPs.

This doesn’t mean only optimizing the actual words you’re using and the HTML coding, but it also includes things such as:

• Adding supporting data through internal links
• Microdata
• Schema

Relevancy

Niche relevancy is increasingly becoming important as a Google ranking factor.

Research is showing that linking from generalized domains delivers little to no impact, whereas niche specific sites linking to your site will help your ranking in the SERPs.

Importance of Niche

As noted earlier, niche relevancy is playing a bigger part in Google’s ranking factors.

This means that if you link to a smaller site it really needs to be focused in a niche for it to pass value to your website.

We’ll continue to see a continued shift towards topical authority as Google will continue to expand its ability to determine what information is pertinent to a particular topic.

So what this means is that at some point in the next few years, only authority link signals that are specific to your niche will push your rankings higher.

Ranking signals differ by niche

In 2018 we saw that ranking signals were applied differently to the different niches.

So for example, the ranking signals used for the health/weight loss niche would be different than those used for the loan and/or credit card niche.

SEO experts think that this is because Google used machine learning for the first time in 2018 to help it analyze each page based on its own merit.

They used the law of averages such as how long the content is, the averages of keywords as well as the different keywords used to help them determine ranking for each search.

This allowed Google to create a ‘link profile’ that let them analyze the sites that have too many links, the pages that look unnatural, verses those that look natural and have fewer average sort of link profile.

This means if you have a lower number of links overall to rank better in a SERP.

Load time

As we continue moving into 2019 we see that Google is making page load time a more important ranking signal that it’s been in prior years.

This was announced by Google at first when they were doing quality score updates for ads. Then, they began implementing it into their quality score for the SERPs, ranking websites favorably with a page load time of 3 seconds or lower.

Any website with a page load time over that would, theoretically, be negatively impacted on their paid or page positions, whereas faster loading sites (less than 3 seconds) would likely improve their ‘quality score’ with Google.

Note, however, that for now Google has only applied this ranking factor for search using Chrome user experience data, not crawler data.

Mobile & SEO

Mobile index optimization is yet another Google ranking factor you need to be aware of as the trend is still moving towards mobile first.

In fact, mobile search has now overtaken desktop, pointing to a definite, continuing shift towards mobile search.

Keep in mind, however, that the number of clicks on the SERPs in mobile is much less than on desktop so local SEO and features such as “click to call” and “knowledge graphs” will be more important to mobile users.

And of course, it will become even more important to optimize your site for the mobile crawler by using a responsive page.

Voice search

Google maintains that “72 percent of people who own a voice-activated speaker say that their devices are often used as part of their daily routine.”

Should the trend continue…and it very likely will…it will continue to become even more important to optimize for voice search.

Voice searches aren’t the same as those you type…they’re more natural in tone and conversational in nature. This means they tend to be longer than typical text search queries because users have discovered that they can typically type in a few keywords to find what they’re looking for.

Voice searchers also tend to be locally focused because people tend to use them from their mobile phone to help them find what they’re looking for.Some tips:

Use the same phrases that someone would use in your neighborhood

• Include keywords such as “near me” in your title tags, internal links, anchor text and meta description
• Use landmarks near your business
• Include titles of nearby institutions that apply to your business

Link velocity

As part of the shift towards authority is the ranking factor of link velocity.

Instead of adding 20+ links per week in a short time, go with 10 to 20 a week of solid links, unless you’ve got an authority SEO site, then high link velocity doesn’t have a negative impact.

Bottom line, authority wins, so you’ll get away with faster link building than if you’re doing link building on a smaller, less well known site.

Anchors

Anchor texts are important; you’ll need a range of them.

Google is giving preference to websites that use branded (a/k/a “natural”) anchor texts over websites that appear to be “over-optimizing” their anchor texts.

The trend seems to be more towards links becoming less valuable, unless the links go to big, authority websites, which Google is giving preference to as these websites have massive amounts of content that many people link to.

And, most of these websites are also trending towards “no-follow”, which doesn’t help if you’re trying to use them to help build your own influence.

That said, smaller websites can potentially become more valuable as many of them do offer “do-follow” links, so this is something to consider.

As Google’s algorithms get better at finding relevant content, and when microdata, speed and schema play a bigger part and can more easily be indexed it’s not surprising to see links becoming less valuable.

Feature Snippets/Knowledge Graphs

As noted earlier, we’re continuing to see the rise of voice search and mobile search in Google’s business model.

This means things such as feature snippets and knowledge graphs will become increasingly more important as ranking signals.

Google wants to eventually become the single source for web users, preventing them from ever having to Google’s pages, which is why knowledge graphs and feature snippets will become increasingly important as ranking factors.

The best way to optimize for feature snippets is to pay attention to your content and microdata.

In terms of your content, take a look at:

• Your H2s
• Format (bullet points, numbers, etc.)
• Knowledge graph

In terms of microdata:

• Use a plugin or schema/microdata installed table (this tells Google the list format, making it easier for Google to create a feature snippet with your list in the SERPs)
• Keywords (best, buy it, top rated, etc.)

In summary

Content

Do those things that will make it easy for Google to digest your site and create content that is as relevant to your keywords as possible.

• Analyze and optimize the specific codes
• Headers
• Bold tags
• Lists
• Rich media – images, videos, embeds

Microdata and schema

• Metadata (author Meta tag)
• Social metadata (e.g. Opengraph for Facebook, Twitter cards, LinkedIn cards, etc.)

Optimize for mobile crawler

• Check mobile renderings
• Use responsive pages for best results since it’s only one page for Google to crawl

Link types to use

Guest posts that are well crafted and researched

Aged and tested websites

Editorials on authority websites

Niche directories (e.g. internet directories, citations, etc. – use tools that will show the organic traffic the site is getting before using this strategy)

Do-follow links from less influential websites (will provide a trust signal, so still useful)

No-follow links from the bigger websites (e.g. Wikipedia, Forbes, Inc., etc.)

Avoid/not useful:

• Scholarship links (edu links are still fine)
• Do-follow blog comments (ease of acquiring these makes them useless for ranking factor…and can even be a negative signal)