How To E-A-T Your Way to The Top Of The Search Engines

By Peter Brittain on June 5, 2020 in Ranking Factors

Hopefully, you will have already realised we are not talking about eating food to help your SEO, much as that might appeal to us all. Instead, the acronym E-A-T stands for Expertise – Authority – Trustworthiness. Given that E-A-T is something that Google’s algorithms are focused on, it is something every website owner needs to understand.

Those three words mean that Google has moved on from just looking for quality content. A quick point to make here is that does not mean that you should let your standards drop and stop producing quality content. That requirement has not been abandoned, however, Google are taking things a step further.

Google is continually striving to make its search engine results as close to the user’s intention as possible. Taking that stage further means they want the destination that users arrive at to give them the best user experience possible.

Put yourself in Google’s shoes for a moment and imagine you had to determine what websites are going to achieve that goal, and which are not. How about fake news websites, or websites with lots of content, but otherwise full of affiliate offers for sale?

What about those with misleading sales messages or hyped up claims? And, how about websites that look like they offer content, but it is really just sales copy dressed up as content?

Does Hiding Your WHOIS Details Hurt Your Website’s SEO Ranking?

By Peter Brittain on September 15, 2019 in Ranking Factors

Whenever you register a domain name, details such as your name and address and the date of registration are held by an organisation called ICANN. If someone wants to determine who owns a website, they conduct a WHOIS search which will tell them. For privacy reasons, many web owners hide these details, but this raises the question as to whether this will negatively impact your SEO rankings.

To address this, we need to understand what Google’s entire ranking algorithm is designed to achieve. Google can only survive if web users continue to use it as a search engine. This means that the results that Google presents for any given search term need to be relevant and show websites that the user would be happy to visit.

The degree to which Google establishes whether any single website is worthy of showing up in its results is established by taking multiple factors in to consideration. For each of these, Google’s algorithms then apply a score to that site based on what it considers to be a positive or negative indicator.

When it comes to your WHOIS details there may be many valid reasons why you would want to keep your details private. It could be that you want to avoid your employer discovering that you are running a website. Another might be to avoid strangers knowing your home address. Whilst these are perfectly reasonable, unfortunately, Google knows private WHOIS registration is something that potential spammers use, and this is where it could impact your ranking.

4 Steps To Fix A Drop In Your Rankings

By Peter Brittain on September 25, 2018 in Ranking Factors

As soon as they sense a drop in their ranking many business owners panic and think that they are on the slippery slope to page 5 of Google. Thankfully, in most cases the situation is temporary, and even if the drop is sustained, there will be an explanation for it.

What it will mean is carrying out some simple checks to determine why the ranking drop happened. Some of those checks will involve using SEO research tools so it might mean you need to employ a SEO consultancy or agency to carry them out.

Here is a guide to 4 of those checks that can be made in order to find the culprit and reverse the drop.

#1 Is Your Website In Full Working Order?

It is astonishing that many business owners do not look in on their website on a regular basis, and so if anything happens to go wrong on it, they do not become aware of this until their rankings start going south.

There are some really basic things you need to check such as the expiry dates of your domain registration or your hosting. Yes, it does happen that a website disappears from rankings because the business owner forgot to renew their hosting service or their domain.

Also, check if your hosting company is having any problems or outages. While most hosting services will be up well over 99.5% of the time, it could be that 0.5% downtime that is the issue.

What Factors Can Impact Google Rankings?

By Peter Brittain on August 3, 2015 in Ranking Factors

One of the biggest mistakes many website owners make is failing to measure the impact that their SEO activities have made. This is akin to following a diet and exercise program, and then not bothering to check your weight.

There are two specific SEO metrics which Google looks at very closely to see if the visitors they send to a website via their search results are having a good experience. These are ‘Page Views‘, and ‘Session Time’.

If you have a business with an online presence, it is not enough to have people visit your website; you want them to engage with the website and the content therein. The more that they read articles, watch videos and click through multiple sections of your website the better.

The level of engagement that a visitor has with your site, is measured by a metric called ‘page views’. A high number of page views tells you that visitors are taking an active interest in your website, whereas a low number suggests they are disinterested in looking through it.

This data is measured by Google, and if they see that visitors are clicking through to lots of pages on a website they will increase the ranking of that site. The reason for this is that they want their search engine results to show sites that encourage activity. One way this is achieved is with great content that users find interesting.

Compare this scenario to a site which has little or poor content and as a result, visitors very rarely click through to other pages. The page views metric will be low, therefore, Google reduces the ranking of that site.