Google Shares Its Approach to SEO
This past Thursday, a data scientist affiliated with Google named Sean O’Keefe provided some tips and insight into the way Google handles SEO and the best way to capitalize on it. He also shared that Google makes roughly 200 changes to the 7,000 sites it manages on a daily basis. Unsurprisingly, it can be quite complex to manage these changes and consistently take advantage of SEO.
By breaking it down into 3 main categories, O’Keefe has provided some very helpful advice on how best to benefit from all the changes that Google makes to its SEO strategy.
1. Small Adjustments
This refers to minor changes that you can make to boost the traffic on your site. Google has been able to consistently observe organic growth across a wide number of its sites by implementing many such small changes. By using its Google My Business site as an example, it showed how making changes such as improving metadata, adding canonicals, and updating the XML with hreflang tags all lead to the organic growth of the site.
Google’s own words on the subject are as follows: “The Google My Business marketing site, for example, saw a near 2X increase in organic traffic partly because the team implemented a number of web fundamental best practices, such as showing search engines what URLs to index by implementing canonicals.”
2. Don’t Resist Change
It may seem challenging that Google makes SEO-related changes so rapidly on a daily basis, but search patterns themselves are always in a state of flux. The habits of users and their search behaviors are never consistent and often experience change. The best course of action is to adapt to these changes and embrace them so that you can benefit from increased traffic. Resisting these changes will only lead to losing traffic.
On this, Google has said: “For example, last year, we focused on fixing Google Search Console errors, implementing structured data, and adding AMP to the Think with Google site. After we fixed one common AMP error on a number of URLs, those impressions increased by 200%.”
3. Consolidate Properties
There is sometimes a tendency to create many micro-sites or, in some cases, flat out duplicate sites. Google doesn’t recommend this as multiple sites with the same content doesn’t benefit anyone. This is why it’s better to have a single large site instead of several smaller ones. Generally speaking, it’s best to consolidate these avenues as much as possible.
Google had this to say: “Creating one great site instead of multiple micro-sites is the best way to encourage organic growth over time.”