7 Tips To Transform Brand New Google’s Search Engine Essentials into Foolproof SEO Strategy

Creating a value-based SEO strategy using Google’s Search Engine Essentials is not just effective, rather it’s the simplest way to adopt a holistic method that will undoubtedly drive results! 

Its official, Google has renamed its Webmaster Guidelines as Search Engine Essentials- refreshed, simplified content with three easy to learn sections. 

The brand new guidelines highlight the specific things that one must focus on to ace their SEO game. 

Today, the things that matter in SEO are product reviews, E-A-T, the usefulness of content and update in the quality of customer-oriented questions. 

This is where an important question arises: what exactly can give you the ultimate opportunity to perform well and gain the highest rank with respect to Google’s search engine algorithms?

Following are the top 7 proven tips and tricks that can help you make your upcoming SEO strategy around the guidelines of Search Engine Essentials. 

1. Say Yes to Technical SEO

Many amazing things can be achieved with technical SEO. Think about it, if done right, it helps in:

• Ensuring the pages are indexable 
• Optimizing the overall structure of the site
• Making the pages crawlable and 
• Revamps the user experience (UX)

While it’s a good approach, to begin with, this alone cannot work as your SEO strategy.  

According to Google’s documentation, 

“Ranking of a page is dependent on three important factors, namely the page contains indexable content, Googlebot has not been blocked and the page is 100% functional i.e. HTTP 200 success status”. 

2. Remain Up to Date with Spam Policies by Google 

SEOs should be aware of Google’s latest spam policies. If you, for any chance, suspect a website utilizes techniques such as republishing a lot of scarped content, keyword stuffing or cloaking, then you must be able to explain the adverse consequences to the site owners. 

However, the problem occurs when the website was able to perform well earlier using those unnatural practices, as it would be difficult to convince the client that these go against policies of Google. 

Remember, a top SEO is always ready to intervene whether the website could be at risk because of issues related to spam. 

3. Make Use of the SEO Starter Guide 

Google often recommends beginners read the SEO starter guide. It contains every basic information that you need, including much-needed advice on:

• Good practices for heading use 
• Good practices for meta descriptions and meta tags
• Understanding methods to organize website hierarchy
• Good practices for using anchor texts in links 
• Good practices for promoting a website 
• Tips and suggestions on becoming mobile-friendly 
• Tips for getting a complete analysis of user behavior and search performance   

4. Have a look at the Best Practices for what Google often ranks 

The SEO “best practices” are methods that have worked for years, and these are:

• Use of keywords at appropriate places (titles & headings) 
• Making the links crawlable and 
• Using proven practices for videos, images and data  

To begin with, you can monitor keywords using Google’s search console, and notice the kind of impressions attained and whether they can be optimized for better. 

5. Listen to what Google has to say about making content reliable and helpful 

Right after Google’s Panda announcement, questions emerged in the community- whether to write content that provided detailed insight or should the focus be on algorithms that differentiate high-quality sites from their lower counterparts. Such questions are vital, which is why the new document explains the exact working of the ranking system:

• First, Google tends to understand the meaning of a query 
• Next, it looks for content that would be its ideal answer 

It is indeed a crucial step. 

When Google finds content that is helpful and adheres to E-A-T, then it means you should pay attention to the questions given by Google for self-assessing EAT. 

What’s great: you get tons of new ideas for improving the experience of your client. On the flip side, if planning to recover, this would mean a humongous content overhaul. 

6. Design Your Strategy on Quality of Questions (Content)

Google’s questions are available for interpretation, and that can be bit of a problem. 

So, when Google recommends you need clear sourcing, how to find those sources, and should they be in line with the content? Will Google even consider client-written content as expert content? 

For assessing this, you must follow three quick steps:

Step 1: Look for keywords that dropped their position after the latest update 

There are plenty of resources available to find keywords that lost their ranking after Google’s update.

Step 2: Pay attention to competitors that were able to outrank 

Just pick a competitor who managed to outrank even after the latest update. For this, you can make use of their position history. 

Step 3: Compare the pages in terms of the quality of questions 

If rankings dropped for queries after the core update, that means the new algorithm preferred the competitor’s content over the other. 

In fact, Google says:

“Consider auditing your site in the event of rank drop- what pages were impacted the most and for what searches? Have a close look, and assess them against the questions outlined by Google’s document” 

7. Never overlook the importance of the Quality Rater Guideline (QRG)

At last, the one thing that Google mentions in the guideline is to know the quality rater guideline and EAT.  

Though QRG may not come out as a step-by-step blueprint, it does have several clues that would be of immense help in knowing more about the type of content Google supports. 

At the end of the documentation, Google states:

“Reading the guidelines will be helpful in self-assessing the content from EAT perspective, thus, aligning the conceptuality with the various signals utilized by an automated system for ranking”   

SEO Will Not Be A Bumpy Road, Not Anymore! 

SEO can improve the presence of a website in many spectacular ways. Some of the key tasks such as technical enhancements, keep the site running and increase its ability to be discovered by Google’s crawler. 

The Search Engine Essentials does have many things to work on, to keep the site not only technical but overall SEO healthy, that is ready for competition. 

So, if managing SEO has been a constant struggle, then it’s highly recommended to dedicate some time to analyzing sites under the perspective of Search Engine Essentials.