Search Engine Update – The Effect of “Freshness” and “Social”
How site updates, blogging and social media activity are affecting ranking
The last couple of months have seen major changes in the way that Google evaluates websites for search positioning. There is a vast amount of commentary about this on the web including some “guidance” from Google directly related to the key factors that dictate how well a website will rank. Sifting through all of this is not easy but we now have sufficient real information to suggest which new key factors are playing an increasingly important role for dental website SEO and Google ranking.The usual “off-site” ranking factors are still critical e.g. good quality, “themed” links but the following factors now also appear to be much more important than before:
- “freshness” i.e. regular updates to your key site pages
- blogging – adding new content to the site domain to increase overall relevance and foot-print for the website
- social media activity – these “social signals” are starting to play a more important role as Google builds its so-called “knowledge graph”
Whilst we are not privy to the inner workings of Google, our analytics data from hundreds of dental websites show us quite simply that those clients who blog, update and maintain an active social media presence are faring better in search. It would appear that Google is now paying much greater attention to on-page content and social as well as the usual off-page factors.
In summary:
Blogging, great content, page “freshness” and social media activity are important for search engine success – neglect these and your rankings will slip.