As the digital world becomes more interlinked and complicated, algorithms have to adapt continually to index websites (and really companies as a whole) to determine which businesses they will present to their customers. SEO, in a nutshell, is optimizing your presence – not only on your website but through the use of other outlets – to represent what your company is about. And not just for people who you want to sell a product or services to.
You must also satisfy the search engines people use to find your business. Google, for example, is one such company. They have to painstakingly index thousands of websites to determine which websites will satisfy a search result entered into their search console. They are simply a company and their job (at least in the search console) is to present a user with current and pertinent search result that will satisfy the searcher. If they chose companies that searchers do not like, they will not be very successful.
With increased interconnectivity, the job becomes more and more complicated and the algorithms adapt. Google does not make it’s algorithm public so we are left with educated guesses at how the algorithm works and what parameters must be met to place high on search results.
The algorithm is not static. It is updated to account for misinterpretation of businesses. It must always try to present searchers with the best pertinent results it can. If someone is giving you bad leads then they aren’t doing a very good job and you may move on to another user such as Bing.
At Selle Design Group we are always thinking about SEO (really an outdated term) and how it applies to the websites we help build and manage.
We recently discover a compromise in our google account in an older plug in that allowed a user to affect our performance on Google search results. On all other search engines we were ranking consistently in the top three spots. Due to many variables we did not take immediate action as our company was deeply involved in an intensive project to launch a new project and we could no longer take new clients. As this was a fairly large undertaking, our full attention was on the new client and maintaining our existing clients. At the time, we were not actively seeking to improve our companies presence in the local market, which is fairly small, and most of our work is with businesses outside our local area anyway.
Recently we have turned our attention back to this problem. We discovered the source of the compromise in google search console and eliminated eliminated it. But we aren’t going to stop there.
We are going to take full advantage of this predicament to test our knowledge of the Google algorithm and our SEO protocol. As of today, our placement in local search results for SANDPOINT WEBSITE DESIGNER on Google places us on page 12. We are going to implement our SEO protocol in the next couple of months to see if:
- we can climb to the top three positions for this search in our local market on Google and
- record how long this process takes.
We are very excited to have a situation like this that will test our protocol and to – hopefully – verify it. We will adjust our protocol as we monitor our progress and will post to this blog as we make progress.
So here we go.