Guest Commentary By Neal Reynolds,
BankMarketingCenter.com
Want Your Content Viewed? Better Pay Attention to Google.
Search engine optimization, as you know, now plays a more critical role than ever in the marketing content that you create to engage your customer. And Google, as you also know, plays a critical role in determining how and when that customer engages with it. It’s important, then, to keep an eye on Google and keep abreast of the changes it may be making to how it ranks content in user searches.
If you’re a content marketer — and you better be — those changes involve algorithms, which have a profound impact on the type of content you distribute and how it is viewed. Tis article talks briefly about the content trends driven by the late- last-year algorithm changes at Google — the “Helpful Content Update” and the “Spam Update.”
For years, and Google would be the first to admit it, its content ranking algorithm was less than perfect and, as a result, fairly forgiving. As a result, when it came to optimizing content such as websites and web-based articles, blogs, white papers, infographics, e-books, etcetera, marketing content developers could get away with things. For instance, they’ve been able to
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get away with optimization tactics such as keyword stuffing and link farming (a set of web pages created with the sole aim of linking to a target page in an attempt to improve that page’s search engine ranking). In short, marketing content developers would write to the search engines instead of human beings. As of this year, however, the ability to get away with “faking” SEO is no longer an option. Tis is good news for bank marketers who adapt and bad news for those who don’t.
Not surprisingly, Google continues to get smarter over time; artificial intelligence can do that.
It’s time for banks to become smarter about creating search engine optimized content that can truly leverage what Google is prioritizing when it comes to the SERP (search engine results page) and the recent algorithm updates.
Why bother with algorithm updates, you ask? Well, Google is a business, too, and the path to growing its business is to serve their users the best possible content as quickly as possible. Te Helpful Content Update and the Spam Update will both
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