Google are making it harder for companies to rank websites on the first page now due to their latest algorithm changes. Having high quality links pointing to your site is just not enough anymore; Google wants to see high quality, relevant, unique content within a website which is also expanding with new, fresh content. Most local companies such as plumbers, electricians etc probably have just a 3-4 page website with very little content. You may have seen a decrease in your rankings over the last few weeks, this is because Google sees content being just as important as quality inbound links.

Google wants to give users the best set of results for their searches, so a website which has 200-300 words per page with a blog which is updated regularly about the latest news within that industry will start ranking higher than a site that just has a few pages with very little content, no matter how many quality links they have. Content and Link Building need to go hand in hand with SEO today, you cannot have one without the other.

The Experiment

Google never really tells you in depth when they are going to release a new algorithm change and do not explain entirely what they are looking for so most of it is guess work to start with, so we thought we would run a test. As you may know, Google ranks every website with a Page Rank of 0-10, this is called a PR. The higher the PR, the higher Google sees your website as being important, eg, Facebook and Twitter have a PR9. The higher the PR the more chance you have to get ranked higher for your keywords.

We have used our own site as an example, r2media.co has a lot of high quality links pointing towards it for various keywords within our industry and we purposely placed average rate content on the site with certain parts of it duplicated. Our site has only a PR2 and has been live for over 6 months. We then introduced a Blog to our website, r2media.co/blog which has only been live for around 2 months. There are NO links pointing to our blog at all, it is just content. Our Blog contains high quality content all focused towards our keywords. All the content is 100% unique and has been checked on Copyscape. So, we have a Blog with high quality, unique, relevant content which is all focussed on our keywords and within 2 months Google gave r2media.co/blog a PR3. Why? just because of the quality and relevance of the content, even some of our blog posts have a PR2.

We do not really want these pages ranking highly for our industries keywords, we want our homepage or service pages ranking highly for users to find on Google.

So How Do We Do This?

Having quality, unique content on the pages you want to be ranked AND quality inbound links, you cannot have one without the other. Also a strong blog within your website which is focused on your keywords which makes your site relevant and of quality, also having a blog expands your website which Google wants to see grow regularly, they will not rank a website anymore which is static and never grows. They want to see a website which is active and growing.