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Until the day someone builds up a company to rival Google, Google will continue to be the standard for Search Engine Optimization.
That is why marketing companies dedicate thousands of hours each month working on coming up with more and better ways to accomplish their clients’ SEO.
If you are going to have any success with SEO, knowing and understanding what “RankBrain” is and does is extremely important.
RankBrain – In 2015 Google released an update on their ranking algorithm to add machine learning (data inputs feed information to rankbrain and based on calculations it uses this to give better results). After rankbrain was implemented, it was believed that every search query went through an interpretation model (taking into consideration things like location, previous searches, words of the query, etc) all in an attempt to give Google users the best experience.
Great…how do we use this to improve our businesses SEO?
You ask and we deliver.
1. Content needs to be high quality and engaging
In the past a business could just overwhelm the internet with useless articles plastered with keywords so that the algorithms could find them and rank their business better.
This is no longer the case. Google has gotten smarter and so have the audiences. When you write content for your page, it had better contain content that will engage an audience. Part of every algorithm in use today is going to take engagement into consideration. If you are writing crappy content, the Google SEO gods will not reward you at ALL.
2. SEO is no longer just about keywords
Google has evolved. They spend millions upon millions of dollars every single year trying to enhance their user experience.
6 years ago a business could concentrate on keywords to drastically improve their SEO standings. On-Page, Off-Page, Landing pages, etc. These efforts didn’t even have to be that professional. The business attacking this the hardest, would get the most rewards.
This is no longer the case. Google can now cross query searches.
Example – A user wants to know what is the best large screen TV to purchase and they type “Best Large screen TV to purchase”. Instead of just throwing up the website that has the most keywords associated with that search query, Google will now look at every single person that has searched that query or any query similar, as well as keywords and see what sites provided the most useful information. Meaning which articles did the majority of these people actually click on and spend the most amount of time on. Those pages will find themselves at the top of search engine result pages.
Google is concentrating on ensuring that their users are getting the best information for their queries. One factor they base this on is how many clicks a specific page is getting and how long users are staying on that page.
Moral of this story. Keywords are important, but not as important as the useability and engagement of the content.
3. Apply the Pillar-Cluster Model
Pillar-Cluster model is an SEO strategy that is subject based using internal linking strategies to improve on SEO ranking.
Pick a pillar subject such as SEO. You create what is called a pillar page. This is the foundation of this subject. It will be a high-level overview of the subject and then have a bunch of other pages hyperlinked to it regarding that pillar subject. Like:
On-Page SEO – hyperlinked
Off-Page SEO – hyperlinked
Technical SEO – hyperlinked
Keywords – hyperlinked
I think you get the point. What you are doing is spreading domain authority across the entire cluster that works to enhance SEO for the entire website.
Meaning if your pillar page has high domain authority it can spread across the entire cluster or vice versa.
It is a very smart strategy so that any page can lend authority to any other page in the cluster.
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