The world of SEO is a fast moving ever-changing rocket ship that never seems to land on a stable solid ground. I know because I live in this world every day of my life is based on the powers to be located in Mountain View California. How fitting the name of the city Google is based in is called "Mountain View". Working in SEO our business is controlled by Google. That's both scary and cool, scary because you think they can make or break your business and cool because Google loves SEO companies. They love us because we do things right, Google wants to deliver the best search result for the query a person is using. Because SEO companies follow the guidelines, they can often do things the way Google wants them done.
What exactly does Google want?
That's the golden question, right? Understand that no one knows what the exact Google Algorithm is. A good SEO company knows what guidelines to follow and more importantly what to avoid to get a website penalized.
The title of this article should give you a hint on what Google does not want you to worry about. Keywords! Don't hang your hat on a single keyword, the success or failure of an SEO campaign should not be hung on a single keyword. In other words, if you find that your website is not ranking for City+Plumber don't think that this is a failure or your SEO company is not doing their job. The goal of a profitable SEO campaign is not that you show up on page 1 for "ego keywords". The goal is to keep your trucks on the road and then to add more trucks in the future.
Today consumers search differently than they did in years past. Today searchers are using what's called "long tail keywords." Multiple words strung together to form questions, phrases or terms. The reason this is important to Google is because they want to deliver the best information available in their search results. Long tail keywords g come from sites with great content and mobile search results.
You have to have a great content strategy to be even a factor in showing up in the search results, gone are the days of filling a website with keywords and getting a site ranked right away. Rightfully so, because these types of tactics were filling the search results with spam and creating a bad user experience for searchers.
The second and important cause of long tail keywords is mobile search. People search much different than they do on a desktop computer. On a mobile device, searchers are more inclined to type long tail keywords in search of what they need, and many are using voice search to find what they are looking for.
This is not all theory on my part this information is based on real analytical data from our customers results in the United States, Canada, Australia and the UK.
Yesterday ComScore came out with some interesting numbers. Google is down 1 BILLION PC searches from 2014. Let that sink in for a second, DOWN 1 BILLION SEARCHES. Where did they go? Mobile!
Long tail search is the greatest amount of search your website will receive. Simply take a look at your Google Analytics outside of the Not Provided that Google blocks a majority of the search is phrases, questions and terms, all long tail search. I like to call these searches the money keywords because they are specifically looking for an individual service or solution.
Playing the keyword game is a mistake and will only result in poor results and wasted time and money.
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