Keeping Up With Google and the Evolution of Websites

How old is your website? When did you first go on the web? If your website has not been updated significantly in the past year or two, you could be losing out on traffic and conversions and not even know it.

You see, websites are a lot like cars, over time they need to have maintenance in order to enhance and maintain their performance. It’s time to go under the hood of your website, and see just what’s affecting your web traffic.

Are You Up-to-Date With Google?

In just 20 short years, search engines have changed how they index websites. Google, which is what most people think of when they think of a search engine, has changed their algorithms with the Google Panda, Google Penguin, Google Hummingbird, and Google Pigeon. The most recent update benefits mobile friendly sites on mobile search.

While Google is not the only search engine, it leads the rankings with nearly 90 percent of all search engine market share. The next largest market share is Microsoft’s Bing search engine with 4.5 percent, followed by Yahoo and Baidu. Very often in modern parlance, when you tell someone to use a search engine to find something, you are telling them to “Google it.” However, you do need to cover your bases with all the search engines – even that 4.5 percent can make a massive difference in your traffic. The American Marketing Association notes that there is a shift away from keywords and clicks into what happens after the click. In other words, your content is king – not your keywords. Moreover, longtail keywords are taking over from generalized search terms – meaning that “pizza” will get less traffic than “pizza delivery 24 hours Fort Lauderdale” or “pizza Woodfired Ocean Ave Fort Lauderdale.”

Website Tools You Should Be Using

If you think you need some help in getting your site ready to welcome those search engine bots, you are right. Tools such as Google’s Search Console are there to help you get found. You can make sure that Google is able to find your site, and look over your content, remove content you no longer want shown, and tweak your content in a way that delivers search results. Bing Webmaster Tools is essentially the same, offering a user dashboard, reporting tools, diagnostic tools, and notifications to help you optimize your site and make it easy for Bing bots to find and index – thus making it easy for this search engines users to find you.

You may also want to work with a third-party tool such as Raven Tools to bring all of your search engine reports onto one screen. You can audit your site, schedule and automatically generate monthly reports, and work with a broad array of tools in order to keep your website tuned up and purring like a kitten.

Everyone has their favorite tools, and the reasons that they use them, I’d really love to hear from you and to know what tools help you do your job and keep your website in tip top condition.

About 4 Step Studio

4 Step Studio is an online marketing agency that specializes in website design and redesign, SEO, social media and more. Our team of experts focuses on helping small business get found online, while educating them on what will make them successful in the digital world. To learn more about what we can do for you, visit our website at www.4StepStudio.com