Softwired Blog

Google is cracking down again on websites that aren't secure. What's coming in October of 2017 is more warnings and alerts when visiting a website that is not supporting HTTPS and is using HTTP. Converting to HTTPS can be difficult but there are some ways that are easier than others to get it done.

We have been working in the commercial real estate industry with one of our clients who wanted to upgrade their website. The process started out simple but became much bigger due to the lack of new technology that has been adopted in the industry.

Every year Google introduces new rules and feautures for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). While it was officially introduced at a developer conference in 2010, Google's PageSpeed tool really took off in 2016 along with a number of other changes and adjustments to basic SEO strategy.

The rules of on-page SEO and optimization keep evolving. Long gone are the days when we could manipulate Search Engine Result pages (SERPS) with link-building. In 2017 we are saying goodbye to optimizing blog posts and web content around one keyword and moving toward answering searchers questions with relevant, related sentences and keywords.

The world of search engine optimization (SEO) has changed drastically in just the last few years. Keeping up with the changes is a challenge even for an agency like ours. For the average business owner it is almost impossible.

OLD SEO vs NEW SEO

Consumer search behavior has changed dramatically over the years. This is partly due to increasing familiarity with how to get the search results we want and partly due to the changes in the way that search engines are designed to produce and rank search results.

In the early days of the internet, companies would often use an exact match domain (EMD) to drive traffic - and potential customers - to their website. They could successfully manipulate search results to get the website placed at the top of a search engine results page (SERP). As Google became a dominant search engine, they began to make decisions about which practices would be deemed “white hat” and acceptable or “black hat” and unacceptable. Websites using “black hat” tactics could then risk being penalized by Google. A Google penalty is meant to penalize a website for using “black hat” SEO techniques. It results in a negative impact on a website's search rankings caused by updates to Google's search algorithms and/or manual review.

Search engines have changed how they list websites in search results dramatically in the last few years. Most recently I've been struggling with how to create the kind of content that buyers are searching for and optimizing it to fit with the new search world. In assessing the value of content, there has been a fundamental shift in how we should optimize our blog posts using topic clusters instead if keywords.

Local businesses need help keeping their Name, Address, and Phone number (NAP) accurate across online directories. This give a better result when searchers are looking online to find local stores. Managing all those directories by hand takes hundreds of hours. So how do local businesses deal with that burden? We use a service like Yext Powerlistings which automatically sync's your NAP to online directories.

Over the last year we've noticed a decrease in correlation to website optimization and ranking results. This really isn't surprising if you take into consideration how Google has been operating since 2012.