If you are no longer seeing the growth you once were, it may be time to reevaluate your organic growth strategy.
Even if your site has great content and lots of incoming links, you can’t neglect technical SEO.
It’s important to learn how to use technical SEO to think like Googlebot in 2019.
Before we understands what Googlebot is and how it works, it is important to know why we need to understand it. Googlebot is a web crawler that helps Google index the web so that users can find the information they are looking for.
What Is Googlebot?
Googlebot is a web crawler that collects data from webpages.
Googlebot is just one of many web crawlers. Every search engine has their own branded spider. In SEO, we refer to branded bot names as “user agents.”
We will discuss user agents in more detail later, but for now, just understand that we are referring to user agents as a specific web crawling bot. Some of the most common user agents include:
- Googlebot – Google
- Bingbot – Bing
- Slurp Bot – Yahoo
- Alexa Crawler – Amazon Alexa
- DuckDuckBot – DuckDuckGo
How Does Googlebot Work?
We cannot begin to optimize for Googlebot until we understand how it discovers, reads, and ranks webpages.
How Google’s Crawler Discovers Webpages
Short answer: Links, sitemaps, and fetch requests.
The quickest way to get Google to index your site is to create a new property in Search Console and submit your sitemap. However, that’s not the whole picture.
Sitemaps are a great way to get Google to crawl your website, but they don’t affect your PageRank.
One recommended method for helping Google understand which pages on your site are related and therefore likely to hold value for users is through internal linking. There have been many great articles published on the web about page rank and internal linking, so I’m not going to go into detail about it now.
Your webpages can also be discovered by Google from your Google My Business listings, directories, and links from other websites.
This is a simplified version of how Googlebot works. Google has documentation on their crawler that you can read to learn more.
How Googlebot Reads Webpages
Google has improved a lot in the way their site looks. Googlebot strives to accurately identify and reproduce the content of a webpage as a user would see it.
Google provides a Fetch and Render tool in Search Console that allows users to see how Google views their page. To see your website from Google’s perspective, use the “Googlebot view” option in the “PageSpeed Insights” tool. This will show you how Googlebot sees your website, which may be different from how users see it. This allows you to see how Googlebot views your webpages.
Why Should We Think Like Googlebot?
Google insists that webmasters create high-quality websites that provide a good user experience. Google’s statement is imprecise but at the same time accurate.
If you satisfy users with an easy to use and helpful website, you may experience more organic growth.
User Experience vs. Crawler Experience
Who are you looking to satisfy when creating a website? Users or Googlebot?
Short answer : Both!
The debate over what is more important for a website, UX or SEO, is one that can cause tension between professionals in each field. Although this may be seen as a negative by some, it presents an opportunity for us to collaborate and improve our understanding of the balance between a positive user experience and what is required for efficient web crawlers.
UX designers typically try to design in a way that will be best for the users, while SEO professionals try to design in a way that will be best for Google. We have web developers in the middle who are trying to create the best of both worlds.
SEO professionals need to learn about the different areas of the web experience and how important each one is.
We should aim to give the best user experience possible. However, we should also design our websites to be compatible with Googlebot (and other search engines).
Luckily, Google is very user-focused. Most Modern SEO methods are geared towards creating a better user experience.
The following 5 Googlebot optimization tips may help improve your website’s ranking while also appealing to your UX designer and web developer.
1. Conduct a SEO Audit
In order to learn how to better your Google search results, you’ll need to do a complete SEO investigation. This enables you to see precisely where your site stands with regards to every SEO aspect.
A comprehensive SEO audit takes an in-depth look at different aspects of your website and finds ways to improve them. This includes things like crawl errors, indexing, hosting, content, keywords, and links.
Once an SEO audit has been completed, it’s important to then go through and implement the necessary changes.
If you want to improve your business’s Google search results, you need to take the SEO audit findings seriously and make a plan to implement them with your development team.
Some key points that you will have to check are:
- Make sure Google indexes one version of your website.
- Find and fix indexing problems.
- Test if your website is mobile-friendly.
- Analyze and optimize your website page speed.
- Find structured data errors and find room for improvements.
- Remove low-quality content.
- Reduce the size of your images that are too heavy.
- Check for strange peaks or drops at your organic traffic.
- Take a close look and enhance your Page Titles, Meta Descriptions, Headings structure etc.
- Analyze your backlinks.
- Optimizing your internal links.
- Find and fix broken links.
A SEO audit is a process of checking a website’s SEO performance and health. This article provides an overview of how to conduct a SEO audit.
2. Start a SEO Keyword Research
Before you begin writing new content or make any changes to existing content, do some research on keywords. This will help you determine which words to use in your content to attract more readers. This will give you an indication of which keywords to focus on in your content. You should use a combination of broad and long-tail keywords.
The purpose of SEO keyword research is to find the right keywords that your target audience uses to find products, services, and brands like yours. Once you have a list of effective keywords, you can start creating targeted content that is relevant to those keywords and phrases.
There are several key factors to take into account when determining the keywords you want to target on your website:
- Search Volume: How many people are actually searching for a given keyword. The more people there are searching for a keyword, the bigger the potential audience you stand to reach. Conversely, if no one is searching for a keyword, there is no audience available to find your content through search.
- Relevance: A term may be frequently searched for, but that does not necessarily mean that it is relevant to your prospects. Keyword relevance, or the connection between content on a website and the user’s search query, is a crucial ranking signal.
- Competition: Keywords with higher search volume can drive significant amounts of traffic, but competition for premium positioning in the search engine results pages can be intense.
Don’t get too confused with these! The more you research a topic, the more you will understand which keywords are most effective, and remember to apply your own reasoning and common sense.
3. Implement On-Page SEO Improvements
Google is constantly improving its algorithms to get a better understanding of the value and meaning of every page. We still need to help Google understand our content better. How we can help? With simple improvements on our websites.
Let’s look at a few critical and basic on-page elements you’ll want to understand and improve on your website:
- Title Tags: The title tag is a user’s first experience of your website. Focus on them. The length of a title tag that Google will show will vary but in general 55–60 characters is a good rule of thumb here. Also try to insert your main keyword on the title tag, with a natural and compelling way. Last I suggest you to take advantage of your brand name and use it there.
- Meta Descriptions: The meta description is a snippet of up to about 155 characters which summarizes a page’s content. Google takes some liberties with what they display in search results, so your meta description may not always show. Use active voice, a strong call to action, definitely use your focus keyword and the most important create a unique piece of content.
- Thick & Unique Content: There is no fixed number in terms of word count, and if you have a few pages of content on your website with a couple hundred words you won’t be falling out of Google’s good graces, but in general Google loves unique content . If you have a large number of extremely short (50–200 words of content) pages or lots of duplicated content where nothing changes that could get you in trouble.
- Image Sizes: Images can have a big impact on the performance of a website and it’s loading times. Don’t forget that page speed is a ranking factor. Make sure that scaled image is compressed so it is served in the smallest file size possible and always strive to save them under 100Kb or less whenever possible.
- Alt Attributes: An alt attribute,
alt="xxx”, is an HTML element that allows you to provide alternative information for an image if a user can’t view it and also to help search engines understand what your image is about because as you may know search engines can’t see the images they read only text. Every image on your website must have an alt attribute. - URL Structure: By seeing the URL a user must have a quick understanding of what the page is about. Keep them short, simple and relevant. Use lowercase letters, when necessary use hyphens, use your targeted keyword and keep them under 75 characters.
- Internal Links: Link to 2–3 (or more, but not too much) different pages within your own website on each piece of content. Insert these links in prominent and logical places and make sure you are linking to relevant content on your website. This can help with the SEO efforts and also to increase the user experience of your website.
- Outbound Links: Each piece of content should contain 1–2 (or more, but not too much) relevant outbound links to content outside of your website. This helps Google figure out more easily what your page is about. Use well researched links of high quality websites.
4. Link Building
Link building is an important aspect of any successful SEO strategy. It can be difficult to acquire quality links, but they are essential for improving your website’s visibility and search engine ranking. If your website does not have backlinks pointing to it, it will likely not rank as high.
Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own. This is done in order to increase the ranking of your website in search engines. The number of referring domains influences how high a website ranks on Google.
Start your Link Building efforts by focusing on quality over quantity of backlinks!
There are many ways to drive backlinks to your website such as:
- Outreach: It’s where you reach out to people in your niche and introduce them to your content. After that you just wait and see if your content is published. Be patient!
- Guest blogging: Guest blogging is one of the oldest link building tactics. You write an article for another website in your niche. They publish it. You link to yourself from that article. It’s as simple as that.
- Broken link building: Broken link building involves three simple steps: Find a relevant broken link on a website. Create something similar to the broken resource. Ask anyone linking to the dead resource to instead link to your working resource.
- Unlinked mentions: Sometimes people will mention you or your business without linking to you. You must reach out the website owners and try to add a link pointing back to your website.
- Link reclamation: You’re probably losing backlinks all the time. Here are two common reasons: a. The link was removed from the linking page. b. The linking page ceased to exist. You must reclame those links by reaching out the website owner and let them know.
5. JavaScript Loading
Websites written in JavaScript are more likely to creative user experiences through dynamic rending, even though it may be more difficult to rank these types of pages. In 2018, Google put a lot of effort into making JavaScript run faster.
During a Q&A session with John Mueller, Mueller stated that Google plans to continue focusing on JavaScript rendering in 2019. This means that websites that use JavaScript to render their content may see an increase in their Google search rankings. If your website uses JavaScript to generate most of its content, make sure your developers are following Google’s guidelines for best practices.
Summary
Paying attention to many things is important when optimizing for Googlebot via technical SEO. You should ask your colleagues for their opinion on changes you want to make to your website, as a lot of changes will require research.
Although coming up with new strategies can be thrilling, it may cause a dip in traffic that comes organically. It’s a good idea to test new tactics by waiting a few weeks to see how they work.
This will give Googlebot time to learn about changes across the site and better arrange your site in the index.
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