Knowing that Google is going to be getting more and more AI-like, it only makes sense to design a website in a manner that is AI-friendly. That means integrating rich snippets and markups. Search for this term for more information on how to do this, or consider using a WordPress plugin to handle it for you.
Does that steal traffic away from us? Yes, indeed. But unfortunately, we don't have much say in the matter because if we don't offer this information, Google will use another site instead, and we won't be involved at all.
This is how Google can show us useful information right on the SERPs (search engine results pages) when we search for something. When we ask, "when did Abraham Lincoln die?", Google itself will tell us without us even having to click the link.
So you need to do better. You need to get inside the mind of Google to create a future-proof SEO and internet marketing plan. Google is creating a tool that will bring up search results based on natural language queries, and to do this, it relies on several things on our end. For instance, it needs us to add "semantic markup language" to our website. This is additional HTML that will show Google where specific elements are in our content. For example, if you write a recipe for a nice meal, then your markup language will show Google where the ingredients are.
That is what great SEO means now. SEO is in a perpetual state of flux. The algorithms are always changing. In fact, the whole point of the now-fairly old "Hummingbird algorithm" is that it allows Google to update its index constantly and in real-time.
People ranted and raved at Google for not giving warning and not telling people what it wanted. But Google was doing what it always did: serving the customer. And a few clever SEOs who saw this coming were ready. They had built sites using smarter strategies, and their sites were aimed at the visitors more than simply being designed to serve Google.
And let's be honest, it was obvious this would happen. The old system meant that anyone could get to the top of Google with a low-quality site, without caring about the user. Google would not want to support that because it would ultimately result in Google losing traffic. Anyway, Google made its updates: it introduced Google Panda and Google Penguin, and suddenly, thousands, if not millions, of sites were downgraded massively. Businesses closed their doors. Entrepreneurs had to get real jobs. It was chaos!
But then Google did a U-turn. Suddenly, Google no longer wanted people to game its system. Suddenly, Google no longer wanted people to create poor quality content by "keyword stuffing."
This is a lesson that SEOs have learned the hard way in the past. The original version of Google worked purely by looking at the number of links pointing to a website and the number of times the keywords were repeated in the text. To get to the top of Google back then, all you had to do was post hundreds of articles, each with keywords stuffed into it, and buy or swap lots of links and upload your site to link directories.
Good SEO involves understanding what Google is looking for and ensuring that your websites and your clients' websites meet those criteria. However, great SEO involves anticipating what Google will look like in the future and where it is heading. This way, you can "future-proof" your SEO against changes to the algorithm or Google's overall direction.
And seeing as Google is getting really darn good at machine learning (pattern recognition), it also follows that it is going to get better at computer vision: the ability to detect what is happening inside an image. For that reason, it makes sense for us creators to add more images to our sites, as Google will one day be able to assess those images and tell us what’s in them – and use this information to better help rank our content.
Likewise, it seems pretty apparent that Google is interested in the hardware game and that Android and Google Assistant are top priorities. That tells us that it is also likely going to make even more of a push for mobile. It already did this to some extent with its mobile-friendliness update, but we can expect to see the trend continue further in this direction.
What’s more is that this will mean that keywords are likely to become less and less important. We already saw the role of keywords greatly diminish as Google moved more toward the use of synonyms and related terms – ‘Latent Semantic Indexing’ became the big buzzword. But now Google is going to be optimizing for natural language search. When you speak to an assistant, you don’t say ‘Buy hats online’. Instead, you say ‘Hey Google, where can I buy hats online?’. That means Google needs to process these terms into questions and then understand content well enough to serve up relevant results.
That, in turn, means that you need to stop repeating key phrases and instead start to answer the kinds of questions that people really have, in a natural and comprehensive way. It means that you need to look for niches – for questions that aren’t currently being answered by other sites but that are being asked nonetheless.
After all, Google is very keen for us to use its AMP initiative. AMP is ‘Accelerated Mobile Pages’, which is an open-source initiative designed to encourage more site owners to create sites that will load in a flash for mobile users. This goes beyond mere mobile-friendliness and essentially displays your entire website on a single page with minimal chrome or navigational elements and with a huge focus on the speed of loading. It is said that these pages load four times quicker than regular websites. Google actually hosts these sites, and again, there is some debate as to whether it is effective at stealing your traffic… but you can still add your ads, and there is a lot of incentive to get involved. With AMP, your site will be featured in a slider at the top of the SERPs along with an image from your page. It will also have an ‘AMP’ logo next to it and, in short, people will now be much more likely to see it and click it if they’re on mobile.
If your site uses WordPress – and it absolutely should – then you can implement this in a single click. And again… you should! At the very least, you need to check that your site is mobile-friendly using Google’s own checker tool. You need to check it for speed as well as for a responsive design. That means it should change the size and position of elements depending on the size of the screen viewing it. And of course, it’s old news by now that you should no longer use hover-over elements and the like.
Google’s Rank Brain algorithm uses machine learning to look for natural language, but it also looks for good UX in general. It’s increasingly important that you look after the user through the entire experience. Your site NEEDS to compete with the very best sites in your niche. It needs to look and feel professional, with a strong brand and a strong mission statement. And it needs to do all that while being technically sound and well-optimized for Google to find the answers it’s looking for and present them quickly.
Part of the job of a good internet marketer is to look into the crystal ball and predict possible futures. That also means you need to have contingency plans for every scenario. One of the most important scenarios to be ready for is the demise of Google or the possibility that Google might de-index you for whatever reason. You simply cannot afford to be 100% reliant on Google for your traffic.