“Why am I not seeing my keyword term number 1?” is a question SEO clients find themselves asking, usually right after they’ve conducted a Google search to see the results of their SEO services.

It’s understandable that after significantly investing in SEO, they want to see the results happening right in front of them. However, the truth is that clients asking themselves these questions forget to take into account that Google’s algorithm works in a very complex way, one that may most certainly remain outside the understanding of general users.

Starting as far back as 2005 [https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/06/search-gets-personal.html], Google began working around personalized search results as a way of facilitating queries and providing a better and more efficient search experience for the user. This means that using a combination of algorithms that draw information from cookies, search history, location, data collected on a determined IP address, click history, visit data and more, rankings are continually altered after searching for the same term more than once.

For example, if you enter a certain keyword, like “book shops in Raleigh NC”, more than once, Google may assume you still haven’t found precisely what you’re looking for so it alters the rankings in their search engine results pages (SERPs) in an attempt to provide you with a satisfying answer by showing you different pages and rankings every time. This would be a picture much different from the results a new prospect searching for the same keyword for the first time would get. Let alone your repeated attempts at surveillance of competitors.

Google makes money from collecting personal information (somewhat debatable) in order to sell targeted online advertising, so it makes sense that they use these types of personalized search mechanisms in order to provide users with the most relevant results, and therefore ads. Although the company has recently admitted that their personalization strategies have been reduced to location and immediate context from a prior search, it’s important to understand that just because you’re not seeing your keyword term in the number 1 position every single time you search for it does not mean your SEO company isn’t doing its job properly.

Depersonalized search and how it works

Every time a user conducts a Google search, information about their behavior, meaning which search results they clicked on or if they clicked on nothing and adjusted their search query, is collected.

Google uses this information to personalize any subsequent search in order to cater to what they think this particular user is most likely interested in. This means that their search results and the rankings they see will change by the second and third searches, even if they continue to look for the exact same keyword term. Especially if you as a business are clicking on your competitors to see ‘what they are doing’.

This is especially important for executives, managers and internal employees to understand since their own search results can be significantly skewed from any previous competitor research they may have conducted in the recent or distant past. This would not necessarily be the case for any other regular user/prospect searching for your specific keywords for the first time.

Depersonalized search tools are necessary in order to get the actual results that a new prospect would find when looking for your company or its keyword terms. These types of tools deactivate personalization as much as possible in order to provide you with the best view of actual rankings you would get.

At C0MPLÉX1, we work hand in hand with depersonalized search tools in order to see and analyze precisely how a search term is being ranked without all of the influencing personalization provides. This allows us to provide a much more accurate view of the way SERPs look like when a new prospect searches for your business or associated keywords for the first time.

Since personalized search means there isn’t always consistent search experience across users, their locations, and devices, you need to be aware of the fact that tracking your own keywords without depersonalized search will not give you an accurate picture of what every other regular user sees, which answers your question of “Why am I not seeing my keyword term number 1?”.

Contact us today to increase your rankings! All C0MPLÉX1 clients receive actual rankings and if requested guidance on getting and using tools to do depersonalized searches themselves.

If you’re looking to create a more dynamic, web-page like experience right at your inbox, discover how Google introduces AMP for Email.

Coming soon to Gmail and other major email providers such as Yahoo Mail, Outlook and Mail.ru, this new development promises to turn email messages into an interactive experience where you can get things done without having to leave your web based email client.

Even though this freshly revealed development was announced over a year ago, it took a lot of back-end work for the public to finally view and experience its results.

Although email experience has largely stayed the same over the past decade, web has not, so with the introduction of AMP technology that turns static flat content into a more interactive one, it was about time that this translated into inboxes as well.

Taking action through your emails used to come from clicking on a link to open a new tab and entering another website, AMP for Emails promises to make messages interactive using AMP supported components, such as amp-carousel, amp-lists and more, meaning that you can now RSVP to an event, book an accommodation or browse through a store’s inventory without ever leaving your inbox.

A few of the companies already supporting this new format are Booking.com, Despegar, Doodle, Freshworks, OYO Rooms, Pinterest and redBus, so expect to try out the development soon if you’re subscribed to any of these. Other partners that will support AMP for Email on their platforms include SparkPost, Litmus, Twilio Sendgrid and Amazon’s SES and Pinpoint email and marketing tools.

For developers with experience in AMP web pages working with this new format should be fairly easy, while marketers will be able to keep their content up-to-date and interactive for their users, who will enjoy a more engaging and actionable email experience.

If you’re trying to make your business stand out online, link building is a major factor to be considered.

Think of links as the road that search engines and users use to navigate between websites and webpages. Search engines use links to discover new webpages and determine how well a page should rank. Knowing this, you can easily understand why link building is an essential component for your business.

Link building can be defined as the process of creating great content and acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own in order to send users straight to it.

As far as SEO strategies go, link building is one of the most important & valuable, but also one of the most difficult to master by taking a lot of time away from SEO experts. This is why if you take on the art of link building, you will not only beat your competition when it comes to search engine rankings, but also other SEOs!

Why link building is relevant to your business

The reason behind why link building is an essential component for your business comes from links being like votes of confidence to content on your site. This is especially true in the eyes of search engines, with top quality sources links acting as an immediate boost for your business’ online presence.

Once search engines have crawled pages on the web, they can get the content from those pages and add it to their indexes. This way, they are able to decide whether or not a page is deemed good enough to be ranked high for relevant keywords. Some specific factors they look at in order to make this decision are content, number of links pointing at the website from external websites, and the quality of those referrals.

Therefore, if a website is deemed top quality and reliable, an authority of sorts recommends your site by linking to it, the search robots will deem it as points in your favor and push you higher through search rankings while indexing you faster and possibly more frequently.

Benefits of a proper link building campaign

What makes link building an essential component for your business is the fact that it provides you with higher rankings, and a well built campaign can help you in building your brand, sending referral traffic to your site, with faster site indexing, more frequent indexing and with building connections.

Link building helps you establish your brand as an authority in your field, meaning that high quality content that is linked to a site with authority helps you in marketing your business to users and transforming those referrals into potential clients/customers/patients.

Since the main point of having a successful link building campaign is getting referrals from sites of high authority, part of the job will be to create connections with businesses/sites in your niche. you.

By having your content recommended by them, the users of these sites will be referred straight to you. If you happen to consistently offer top quality content, these referrals will also trust you and continue coming back to try what you have to offer them, which boosts your online business.

Link building in the right way

As you are certainly well aware, Google is quite serious about who it’s sending to the top of search results. SEO strategy link building is meant to be used very wisely and intelligently, otherwise done incorrectly it could potentially get you banned.

When creating a link building campaign, you must start with something worth linking to in the first place and have a deep understanding of Google’s policies about quality links. They change often once Google finds they’re being abused, and even some tactics that were encouraged at some point historically might not remain relevant today.

Link building is an essential component for your business, but in order for it to work, it must be used with care and be conscience. Arming yourself with a solid strategy will not only give you higher rankings, but position your website, and therefore your business, as one to be trusted. Nothing brings in more sales and growth than that.

See Also: Competitive SEO, Technical SEO, SEO is High Tech Work.

Just because Google is the king of everything regarding search engines, doesn’t mean that the people at Google don’t deal with challenges of their own when positioning their own websites.

According to a recently published article in the Think It With Google website, they have to stay up to date on website SEO strategies in order to not be left behind. Experience has taught the Google Marketing team to apply a few certain strategies when it comes to positioning. They’ve come up with and shared 3 ways to rethink SEO in order to boost everyone’s online presence.

This cohesive website SEO strategy can be put into place by everyone who owns and manages a website by taking into account all of the algorithm and policy changes Google uses in order to ensure users are getting the most accurate results to their searches.

Strategy #1 – Think Big, Start Small:

When looking for ways to rethink your SEO strategy, it’s always good to think big but start small. Minor, incremental changes to a site’s overall optimization strategy can produce noticeable gains over time.

In the cited article, the author mentions the increase in organic traffic gained by Google My Business marketing site as an example of how once a few changes are installed, such as implementing canonicals (to show search engines what URLs to index), or improving metadata, rankings immediately see a difference.

By conducting an SEO audit to your website or simply examining and recognizing the weak points it may have regarding search engine optimization, you too can detect what little changes need to be implemented in order to boost your SEO and increase the organic traffic that comes into your site.

Strategy #2 – Embrace Changes

Search features are continuously evolving, which is why we’re always trying to catch up with them. Therefore, a surefire way to successfully rethink your SEO strategy comes from going with the flow and embracing said changes, instead of fighting or finding yourself surprised by them.

By experimenting with these changes you can come up with better SEO results over time.

Strategy #3 – Focus Your Efforts And Consolidate

While it can be tempting to create multiple websites targeting different locations or customer profiles and using very similar content in all of them, these types of strategies haven’t worked in favor of the Google Marketing Team and probably won’t work in your favor either.

Experience has taught Google that when looking for ways to rethink your SEO strategy so that results improve organically over time, it is best to focus efforts and consolidate just one good website instead of multiple microsites.

Duplicate content confused both users and search engines. While on-page performance matters, it is never more efficient than a website SEO strategy that takes into account your entire web ecosystem.

Applying The Google Point Of View To Your Website’s SEO Strategy

Just like the rest of us, Google is constantly trying to improve and get SEO right by adding whatever changes that can get better rankings. Looking at their own example, we learn that a good website SEO strategy must be solid enough to drive powerful results, but also flexible and capable of adapting to changes while flowing in the direction of optimal results.

By taking their experience into account you too can boost your site’s SEO performance and make sure you’re not left behind.

For the real insights and strategies to help your SEO Contact C0MPLÉX1 Today!

A proper SEO strategy is in charge of bringing qualified traffic to your website. This means it is abundant in quality content and tailored to the specific needs of your customers, therefore bringing a higher conversion rate than other practices.

Even though many people are still convinced SEO is more of a luxury than a necessity, neglecting the results of a properly planned SEO strategy will make you completely unaware of all of the ways in which ignoring SEO affects your bottom line.

With objections such as it being unpredictable or taking too long to offer results, many businesses disregard the potential SEO has to attract high quality traffic in every stage of the sales funnel. When your customers find content that’s meaningful to them, their needs are satisfied and your conversion rates go up.

So next time you’re arguing with a boss or colleague about implementing an SEO strategy into your business, keep in mind all of the ways in which ignoring SEO can affect your bottom line negatively.

Using PPC as replacement for SEO:

An SEO optimized website targets people at all stages of the sales funnel, but PPC may often take them straight to the sales page, meaning you end up missing out on a wide variety of potential leads that could be just starting to look into what they want from your business.

You may not really know who’s been primed by organic content before converting via PPC marketing, 44% of shoppers start their purchasing process by going through a search engine.

While PPC may come with a higher conversion rate for specific terms than SEO, it casts a more narrow net. By allowing you to reach a wide pool of customers in different stages of the sales process, SEO ends up being a major opportunity to build your brand’s authority.

Misunderstanding your niche:

A good SEO strategy is one that understands how your visitors think and what they’re looking for. In order to do so, the process of optimizing your website goes beyond a few high traffic terms and digs deep into the thought processes of your customers. As a valuable insight into how people are more likely to find you, if missed, could cause a great loss of revenue for your business this quarter and many to come.

Google Updates catching you off guard:

Last August Google’s core algorithm was updated and many websites reported great loss on traffic. Ultimately, the site’s most affected by these changes were those deemed lacking EAT – expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.

A proper SEO strategy focuses on creating quality content and building trust amongst your visitors, putting your business as an authority in front of your audience. While there’s no way to predict how Google’s algorithm updates can affect your rankings, following SEO’s best practices can help in mitigating the risk of being negatively impacted by it.

Ill advised website redesigns:

Ignoring SEO can affect your bottom line by leading you to a bad website redesign. If you happen to disregard SEO during this process and hire a website developer who doesn’t take SEO into consideration, your developer(s) will surely inadvertently make mistakes and cause other serious technical SEO errors and complications. These mistakes result in a Google demotion, therefore not only getting your rankings lowered/removed, but also your online income streams.

Lack of credibility and customer trust:

Organic listings come with debatably much more credibility to consumers than paid listings do. Being at the top of the first page of Google results in your industry comes as a great reference, which reinforces the perception that your company is one with enough authority and expertise to be trustworthy.

SEO doesn’t just benefit sales, but positions you as a trustworthy service provider to your customers. By ignoring SEO and having your site at the bottom of organic listings, visitors will certainly suspect your credentials, which could even end up affecting your PPC ads’ conversion rates.

With so much content floating around the internet, credibility is one of your main allies.

Ignoring SEO can affect your bottom line by leading you away from prospects, stealing your businesses credibility and holding you back from greater sales opportunities, which will in turn be taken by those amongst your competitors who are paying attention and using SEO practices to their advantage. Don’t let this happen to your website and hire an SEO expert to guide you through the process and help your business reach the top of its industry.

Search Engine Marketing is constantly changing and evolving. This means that even if you have invested time and money to bring your page to the top of search engines, said strategies could end up being outdated in just a few month’s time. So how can you stay up to date in SEO?

Google’s algorithm changes drastically every 6 months approximately, while experiencing certain tweaks in between so that the ranking factors that feed into them provide a better user experience and the most accurate results possible. While this is great for the user audience, it can be time consuming and energy spending for those handling the SEO for their own websites.

Professional SEO marketers make it part of their job to keep up to date with SEO. Although you may have other important things to take care of as well, it’s important that you set aside some time during your week to follow a few of these simple steps and stay up to date in SEO, so that you won’t find yourself wasting all the work you’ve done so far.

Keep Up To Date In SEO Trends:

It isn’t enough to only read a few blogs every 6 months. You need to actually study SEO trends regularly in order to stay up to date. Set aside a couple of hours in your work week to check up on SEO. Start by following these tips and consulting a variety of trusted sources on the subject.   

Subscribe to SEO blogs

The web is filled with great SEO blogs specialized in offering informational content. They will serve you to stay up to date in SEO and educate you about certain other topics involving digital marketing. Make yourself a list of trusted, authoritative blogs, such as C0MPLÉX1’s own, where you’ll find a myriad of news and tips in the subject.

Use Social Media to your favor

Social media is a great way to stay informed because many of the thought leaders in SEO share their knowledge and various industry content on their feeds and profiles.

By following us on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, you have the chance to know first hand what’s going on in the SEO community. Since some of the thought leaders may work alongside industry insiders, you’ll get an advance on general changes along the industry.

As a social media tool, Twitter is one where many SEO professionals and agencies discuss what’s happening in the SEO industry. With this in mind, you can create a stream based on specific keywords such as “google updates”, “google algorithm changes”, etc .

Subscribe to the Google Webmaster Central blog

When looking to keep up to date in SEO, there’s no better way than to go straight to the source and consult the Google Webmaster Central blog frequently. Here, Google shares news on general algorithm updates, search engine developments and changes to policies, so it should be a must on your reading list.

Browse SEO forums

Google Webmaster Central forums is one of the most popular forums in the web to share a conversation with experts in the subject. In them, SEO professionals share information about algorithm updates or changes to search engines policies.

Set up Google Alerts on SEO news

Google Alerts save you time by sending a notification straight to your eMail every time pages with relevant search terms you’ve provided show up on the search engine. By setting up a few alerts on “SEO news” or “SEO algorithm searches”, you’ll be receiving information straight to your inbox.

As you can see, SEO isn’t a “set it and forget it” business strategy but rather one that requires you to stay up to date by informing yourself constantly, especially if you’re the only one handling the SEO for your business. These tips will be a good starting point for you to keep up to date in SEO and not allowing any changes to take you by surprise.

Otherwise, if you prefer to have the Pro’s handle it all for you, contact us today!