So you think your website looks great, but you’re not ranking well in Google, why is that? To understand this, you need to dig a little deeper than what initially meets the eye.
You and Google have very different ways of judging your website, so let’s take a moment to change perspectives from what you see, to what Google sees.
For a typical search query, there are thousands, even millions, of webpages with potentially helpful information. However, most people don’t look beyond the first results page. In order to give you the most relevant results first, Google uses a special algorithm.
Today, Google’s algorithm uses more than 200 unique signals in order to take your questions and turn them into answers. Google doesn’t release exactly what these signals are, but they include things like the terms used on your website, the freshness of the content and your region.
These word clouds are certainly an oversimplification of such a complex algorithm, but they do give you a bit of an idea of what your website looks like to Google. They represent how Google interprets the content of your website.
Both word clouds were created from the real websites of two different dental clinics. The bigger the word, the more frequently this word appears on the website, and the more frequently Google’s algorithm detects it.
The first cloud you could probably guess straight away is a dentist in Melbourne, as it is full of relevant words such as ‘dental’, ‘dentistry’ and ‘Melbourne’. From just a quick glance you can get a good idea of the services they offer.
However, the second word cloud is full of mostly website code, making it far more difficult for Google to gauge the search queries to which your website is relevant.
Your website is the core of your online marketing machine, your content and coding is important, make sure get that right before you invest in your marketing strategies.
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