Google Algorithm March 2019 Update

Google just rolled out a new update in March and you may have seen your client’s rankings and search traffic take a drop. If you are looking for answers, then you have come to the right place. This is an opportunity for Digital Agency Kansas City to benefit. We will take you through the Florida 2 update and the steps you can take to rebuild your client’s traffic.
This update really touches on a few key things, authority, relevancy, and user experience. As a digital agency, there is room for you to improve your customer’s traffic and ranking on Google by taking note of these things.

This new update utilizes a link distance ranking algorithm that determines the activity between websites. Depending on this ranking, a website can be considered more ‘trustworthy’.
The purpose of this is so Google can determine whether a website is spammy. How do they determine this? By checking to see if the website has links to other spam websites or if a website links to a normal, useful website that users want to see.
That being said, links aren’t the final, determining factor in your business ranking. The more important reason to care about links is to build your relevancy and authority in a certain niche. If your link is surrounded by relevant keywords, then your website will be more relevant in the eyes of Google for those keywords.

What does this mean for your digital agency? 

Build the right links from the right people. Links are all about quality and you should avoid artificial link building where you can and avoid linking to spammy websites. If you help your clients create content that is authoritative and solves a question or helps with further reading, then you will get organic backlinks from other useful websites.

Build your authority

Speaking of authority, you must balance authority with relevancy and your user’s expectations. Just because you have an expert write your blog post, doesn’t automatically mean you will rank well. Google will rank your pages based on users getting the answers that they expect! Your website may not have the best answer, but if it is the answer that users expect to see, or want to see, then your website will rank better than your competitions.
Make sure that all your posts have an author listed. Why? Because if you don’t have an author, it is impossible for Google to know if it was written by an IT expert or a high schooler. Google looking for authors with expertise in the subject you are writing on.

What does this mean for you?

Make sure that you are listening to your target audience and answering the questions that they have in your industry. For example, when people google ‘digital agency Kansas City’, make sure that you are answering the questions that people expect to be answered. This may mean you are writing about what to look for in an agency or a listing on the top trends that agencies are looking for in 2020.

As long as you answer the questions along the buyer’s journey, you will be rewarded for it. Most of your clients don’t know where to start, so this is a golden opportunity for you to delve deeper into your target markets mind by answering their ‘how-to’ questions through your content.

Focus on User Experience

The user experience encompasses many things like mobile first, removal of aggressive or misleading ads, and, like we motioned earlier, giving them what they expect to see.

Expectations

Make sure your clients are ANSWERING the questions that their users came to their website to see. Create content that doesn’t stray too far from the topic at hand. If there is additional information that supports the answer, make a different blog post about it and link to it.
You really must focus on the user experience and look at content as a public service and not a way to make money right away. Which brings us to the next subject: advertisements.

Advertisements

Google is taking a hard stance on aggressive, misleading advertising that ruins the under experience. If your client has low-quality ads all over their site, they will be penalized, and this is your opportunity to get them big traffic gains by addressing this issue.

Mobile First

With mobile-first indexing, make sure you are paying attention to your mobile site having the same content and links as your desktop site. Google is looking to see the mobile and desktop sites are congruent.

What About Click Through Rates?

You may be wondering why we aren’t talking about click through rates in regard to this update. Again, Google is here to please the end user and give them the information that they want, but click rates are not the metric to be looking for. A bounce back to the google search page is more about the algorithm not providing the right search result than the content on your page. That being said, if your content answers the search query you want to rank for, then you will be rewarded if the user stays in your site and the bounce rate is lower.

Bottom line

Digital Agencies in Kansas City can take advantage of this update by encouraging their clients to focus on quality content, superior user experience, fair advertising, attention to technical SEO. Make sure you encourage your clients to improve 100% of their issues instead of focusing on just links or ads.

To achieve 100% improvement, make sure you are helping them to meet the Google user’s expectations, avoiding spammy ads and links, and using credible sources that answer questions along the buying journey. Never frustrate your user even if that means removing low-quality advertisements from the website.

Always ask: Is my client meeting their users’ expectations? Are we answering the right questions? If you answer yes to these questions when the next update comes, you’ll be ready.