SEO is the art of working to improve your organic search engine rankings in an effort to see an increase in both brand awareness and website traffic. SEO includes building quality backlinks, consistently posting quality content, optimizing navigation and page loading times, and improving overall website user experience.
Most companies already know the basics of SEO. However, it is a rather broad topic with plenty of new mysteries and interesting titbits to uncover. Here are just four facts about SEO that might surprise you.
All ranking factors are treated equally
It was announced that Google has three leading ranking factors, all of which make a larger difference to a website’s rankings than the other ranking factors in existence. These factors were highlighted as RankBrain, quality content, and backlinks.
Since then, however, a number of Google representatives have dismissed this statement, saying that algorithms are capable of picking up when individuals are deliberately trying to ‘beat the system.’ As such, all ranking factors play an equal role, and SEO experts should instead be focusing on maximizing user experience to match user intent and, of course, keeping up to date with algorithm updates and changes to best practice. In short, SEO is rather straightforward, but it requires time, resources, and dedication. This is why so many business owners, even those who are offering the services themselves, opt to hire a digital marketing company, such as Click Intelligence, to cover the SEO requirements.
Object detection is a new ranking factor
Speaking of ranking factors, Google is now sophisticated enough to automatically detect the different components of the images on a website. Due to this fact, object detection has become a new and important ranking factor that assists Google in reducing the amount of ‘false positive’ search results when an individual searches using a certain keyword.
Duplicate content isn’t that big a deal
Google understands that with so many companies posting about the same topics, there is no escaping a bit of repetition. However, that isn’t to say that they don’t still want to offer their users the best quality. The only way that duplicate content can hurt your rankings is if your entire site is made up of it, demonstrating that you are purposefully copying and pasting content and trying to pass it off as your own.
Social media activity does matter
You might have already heard all about how social media and SEO are two completely separate aspects of digital marketing and have no impact on one another whatsoever. According to research and statistics, that simply is not true. Based on a study carried out by Cognitive SEO in 2016, a strong social media presence went hand in hand with higher rankings. This could mean that higher ranking companies are just putting more time and effort into their online marketing as a whole, or it could mean that social signals do, in fact, have an influence on SEO. Regardless of what the right answer is, businesses are trying to maintain both.