We as a company spend a lot of time thinking about search engine optimization, or SEO. No small wonder, given that search is at the core of our business.
Of course, there are plenty of other ways to drive traffic to your website. Paid media, social posts, and display advertising are just a few. But, when done well, SEO can provide an important — and cost-effective — strategy for organic growth. In fact, the latest research from web analytics company Parse.ly shows Google Search accounted for around half of external referrals to the publishers in its network this past year.
To really get the most out of SEO, though, it’s important to stay on top of the latest Google Search updates. That’s no different for us internally. We at Google own 7,000 websites that are managed by hundreds of product and marketing teams all over the world. Over 200 changes are made to these websites every single day, all of which could potentially affect a site’s SEO. When it comes to how Google sites appear in Search, they receive the same treatment as any other site on the web, and our teams follow the same external guidelines provided to webmasters.
That’s why we’ve put in place a cohesive website SEO strategy that we can rely on no matter what fresh changes are introduced — and that anyone else with a website can learn from.
1. For big SEO results, start small
It might sound simple, but focusing on small, incremental changes to a website’s overall SEO strategy really can produce noticeable gains over time. The Google My Business marketing site, for example, saw a near 2X increase in organic traffic,1 partly because the team implemented a number of web fundamental best practices, such as showing search engines what URLs to index by implementing canonicals.
Of course, correlation does not imply causation, but a number of Google sites have noticed strong organic growth after making some of these simple SEO changes.
