No One Reads - But Google Does

UPDATED – January, 2023 with information on AI-generated content.

The average human attention span is 8.25 seconds, meanwhile the goldfish ranks higher at 9 seconds. Interesting right? The average attention span is declining and no one is reading online anymore—but Google is! While providing relevant content online is still very important, more is needed to be done. Google is analyzing everything you put on the Internet. Do you know where your Google ranking stands?

If Google is reading everything, why isn’t your business getting bombarded with business inquiries? There are several important rules to follow when dealing with your digital marketing and SEO practices. As you may know, Google is the world’s most primary search engine. Google actually pays “raters” to read your content and report the information back to them. Here are four topics to take into consideration for your ranking on Google:

• SEO: Internal and external links are important to show your credibility. How are your Meta tags? Here is an article we published previously on the subject of Meta tags and how to use them to benefit your ranking. Picking a good key word is important; take some time to see what people are typing in on Google.

• Content: If Google is reading your content, it needs to be great! It’s a good idea to check out what your competition is doing, before you start to work on improving your content.. Use your chosen key word throughout your content, especially in the first paragraph. Checking out your competition does NOT mean copying and pasting their work. A helpful tool is to use copyscape, which shows if you are duplicating other firm’s content.
  
  
• UPDATE: Content generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the associated challenges, conflicts and controversies related to AI in general, are growing exponentially each day. Tools like ChatGPT appear to be the next best thing to sliced bread, when it comes to writing content with apparent ease – but USER BEWARE. Whether you’re producing content for your own site – or for others – Google has re-confirmed their position that AI-generated content (text in this case) is against their guidelines and is classifying the content as SPAM. What to do? There are new tools, such as ORIGINALITY.AI, designed to not only check for plagiarism, but AI-generated content as well. You want your content to be ORIGINAL, and that not only means, “not copied” but “not created by an AI”.

• Images: Not only will this keep your reader interested during those 8.25 seconds, but Google looks at your alt text for those images. Make sure your file name and alt text matches your keyword. This shows Google that your page is relevant to the searcher.

• Update: Was there a new study on the content you previously posted? Updating your content to stay relevant also has its place on the search engine. And check to see if your page is running efficiently—that has its own ranking too.

There are a lot of helpful rating tools such as Google Search Console, you can even check out Google’s rating guidelines here. While there may not be an exact secret antidote to unlock Google’s ranking system—We encourage you to consider these tips to optimize your content strategy. As always, we’re here to help if your website needs a boost!