We are seeing more and more of our clients’ websites hitting the first page since Google’s mobile update due to excellent on-page SEO. I know that “Mobile-Geddon” had nothing to do with it and I also know that Google is not penalizing sites that haven’t been recoded to be mobile-friendly. I do know that Google is treating sites that are mobile friendly better than ones that are not. We have clients who haven’t updated their sites for numerous reasons that lost rankings within a week.
However, I have been doing this for ten years and the more we tweak the metatags and content and the less we build backlinks, the better the results we’re seeing in the last few weeks. I would never have believed it, but if the site has some decent authority; nothing special, we are seeing things happen that we haven’t seen in more than five years. Is anyone else seeing this?
Tweak The On-Page Content
The other thing we’re seeing is that if we just tweak the on-page content and make sure we are not “keyword stuffing”, but using some LSI, and changing the URL to include some semblance of the term we’re hoping for, we are beating first page results of sites with 1200 to 10,000 backlinks and more Authority. Google must be discounting thin backlinks nowadays. They have been saying that there will come a day when backlinks will not affect rankings, but I never believed it. Maybe it’s starting to happen. Although, if I was a betting man, I’d still say; “Naw”.
We are seeing something that I can’t quite explain and we have over 200 sites we optimize and all of a sudden, things are changing that I’m not reading about in any of the forums I follow. I know it sounds crazy, but I can’t tell you how many of the sites we manage getting rapidly improving results with some very basic “SEO 101” changes. I’m talking simple stuff! Change the URL, include the term in part of your H1 or H2 and follow it with 200 to 300 words without stuffing and we’re seeing large jumps. As soon as the changes are indexed, we’re seeing page 1 and page 2 results from nowhere.
I have also recently seen that if the site you’re optimizing does not have some decent social signals, you can build some beautiful relevant backlinks and they won’t do squat. We have tested it and found that with relatively new websites, if we do some social sharing and build a couple; like 2 or 3 relevant backlinks, the site does much better than a higher authority site with more backlinks. I think Google has finally come to the conclusion: “how can a site be getting a lot of backlinks while not getting talked about on social media?” If that is the case, it certainly makes sense and the tests we have run seem to prove it out.
Holler if you think we drank the Kool Aid over here, but I know what is happening with the majority of our clients and would love to know if anyone else is getting these kinds of results this easily lately. Or maybe, give it a try and get back to me on what you’re seeing.