You may have heard: Google changed its algorithm, again. If you’ve been in the search engine optimization (or SEO) business long enough you know that it happens all the time, it’s just a part of the system.
But what did Google change this time? And what can you do to optimize your website?
From increased diligence with AI (Artificial Intelligence) to which website signals control ranking, Google’s algorithm changes intend to improve the user’s experience. That’s right, the user, not the site owner.
Your website does many things for your business, and all of them require getting users to your site—the days when you can stuff keywords into page content or hide them at the bottom are over.
So, what’s new and what are SEO specialists doing to optimize websites after the August 2024 algorithm change?
What Google Changed in August 2024
With the growth of Artificial Intelligence large language models, or LLMs, like ChatGPT and Claude, the internet mutated. Now, businesses build entire websites from AI-generated text.
This quick, cheap option created quite a mess for Google and LLMs.
LLM AIs can’t create like the human brain can. Instead, AIs reformat and regurgitate information they’re fed and create different arrangements of that information. AI cannot match human creativity because human creativity can’t be measured, or what you’ve heard referred to as not being quantifiable.
We’ll skip a longer discussion about creativity and AI here. When AI can predict what will go viral, we can say that human creativity can be quantified. And that will be a truly terrifying day for many reasons.
Dystopian future aside, by using these AI services to create “new” content for their sites, owners have instead created large portions of the internet with the exact same content as everyone else, just worded differently.
Interestingly, Google does not punish AI content. This is where it gets confusing.
Google instead, punishes low-quality content. Called “Helpful Content Updates,” several of Google’s recent algorithm changes intended to reduce the amount of copy-pasted AI content from reaching the top of search results.
Businesses built on AI-generated pages alone have crashed, and shuttered doors after a few months of quickly gained success. Others have maintained positions with various tactics, sometimes outranking human-run businesses.
What is a small to medium-sized business, or “SMB,” owner to do?
SEO Details to Focus On In 2024 for Your SMB
- High-Quality Content
- Long-tail Keywords
- Consistent Site and Content Optimization
1. High-Quality Content
Business owners should still focus on creating high-quality content.
Whether you’re repurposing content in a scaling strategy across multiple platforms or just going back and reworking your most popular pages for increased user engagement, quality over quantity is still the safest bet.
Also, don’t end up as a case study in what not to do. If you use AI, make sure humans edit the content for tone, grammar, facts, and branding. Otherwise, you risk damaging your brand image.
Your unique professional opinion cannot be replicated by AI, and that’s what Google wants in your content. That’s what users search for.
You probably don’t hear this often enough, so listen well: your wisdom matters. Google wants you to employ a content strategy rich with your own knowledge, so don’t be afraid to share technical information that shows you’re an authority in your field.
2. Long-tail Keywords
Imagine this scenario for a moment and make your best guess: User A searches for “running shoes” and User B searches for “blue running shoes size 9.5.” Who would you assume is going to buy the shoes sooner?
Long-tail keywords are keyword-rich, 3-word or larger phrases users type to search when they are closer to making a purchase, like User B’s search above for more specific blue shoes.
Targeting these phrases for your industry does two main things:
- Directs more appropriate traffic to your site
- Increases the depth and quality of your content, and its relevance to your audience. Which goes back to your first goal: creating high-quality content.
Think of this as building the walls on your basic foundational keywords. Where do you put this content and how do you know what keywords to target? The same way we do anything else at Digital Fusion: by analyzing the data.
That’s also the next place you should focus on when working on SEO for your site: optimization based on your data.
3. Consistent Site and Content Optimization
Using data analysis, dig into your site and what pages hold users the longest.
By finding and optimizing your most popular content, you put your time where it can make the most impact. When you analyze these pages, you’ll find out what keywords users searched for when they found you. These are your top performing keywords.
This is also where you begin deeper keyword research. Using specialized SEO tools, your analysis reveals those long-tail keywords we were talking about earlier. Tools like Google’s Keyword Planner and Keywords Everywhere help you explore keywords and search traffic, including trends, average monthly searches, and the amount of competition for each keyword.
The only warning here is that these numbers are always estimates, even when Google is forecasting from its own data. You also should be careful choosing keywords, weighing competition with value.
You should be constantly optimizing your site and content. You can also determine a schedule for removing poorly performing content or repurposing it to be more useful.
Get Ready for Another Algorithm Update
Not at any specific time, just get ready. It happens several times a year and can have all sorts of unintended (and intended) effects. Fun, right?
If you’re busy, and your business is already all hands on deck, it can be treacherous waters to keep everything up to date. Do your best to make data-based decisions and spend your time where it will really pay off.
About Channel Fusion
For more than 20 years, Channel Fusion has been delivering strategy, customer experience and return on investment outcomes for brands and their channel partners with a wide variety of solutions and industry expertise.
We continue to invest in the overall ecosystem of our channel marketing offering to ensure our clients can provide their channel partners with an optimal customer experience to drive results. Our core technologies and connected platform are supported by a team of customer-centric “Fusers.”