The SEO landscape is ever changing, with new tips and tricks given to help improve your company’s standing. The one thing that has always been constant has been links, with companies trying to accumulate as many links as possible.
However, links might not be helping your site’s ranking or visibility too much. Google’s John Mueller said, “SEOs often focus on links too much, it doesn’t always help their sites in the long run or is probably not the most efficient thing to do to promote a website.”
Here are some things you could do instead of collecting links for your company:
Create quality video content. Fifty-five percent of all Google searches bring up videos in the results. Video content is quickly becoming more and more popular, set to make more than 80% of web traffic by 2021. People aren’t just watching more videos, Google is prioritizing pages with videos embedded in them.
Spend more time on on-page optimization. Although keywords and keyword density worked well in the past, as AI becomes more widely adopted, voice search is gaining in traction. So instead of focusing on just words, focus on keywords and phrases the way that people say them. These long tail keywords were not widely accepted in the past, but now sites that are preparing to be voice search friendly are getting ahead.
Invest in technical SEO. Usually the site’s performance and usability are directly proportional with the number of links you have. Site speed is one of the most important factors of SEO. More than half of all web users abandon a site that does not load in at least three seconds. The content of the page does not matter if the page loads slowly. Google also prioritizes websites that are secure, and from next month onwards, all sites that are HTTP only will be marked as not secure. Also, keep in mind that more browsing is done than desktops, so make sure your site is optimized for mobiles with AMP pages that Google gives points to.
All in all, links still matter, but not if you’re linking to a thin site with a slow load that has shallow content and multiple errors. Instead of focusing all your time looking for links, make sure your content and website are optimized and ready for these changes.
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