Want Your Content Viewed? BETTER PAY ATTENTION TO GOOGLE By Neal Reynolds, President, BankMarketingCenter.com SSEO, as you know, now plays a more critical role than ever in the marketing content that you create to engage your customer. And Google, as you also know, plays a critical role in determining how and when that customer engages with it. It’s important, then, to keep an eye on Google and keep abreast of the changes they may be making to how they rank content in user searches. If you’re a content marketer — and you better be — those changes involve algorithms, which have a profound impact on the type of content you distribute and how it is viewed. Today, we’re going to talk briefly about the content trends driven by the late-last-year algorithm changes at Google: the “Helpful Content Update” and the “Spam Update.” For years, and Google would be the first to admit it, their content ranking algorithm was less than perfect and, as a result, fairly forgiving. As a result, when it came to optimizing content such as websites and web-based articles, blogs, white papers, infographics, ebooks, etc., marketing content developers could get away with things. They’ve been able, for instance, to get away with optimization tactics such as keyword stuffing and link farming (a set of web pages created with the sole aim of linking to a target page in an attempt to improve that page's search engine ranking). In short, writing to the search engines instead of the human being. As of this year, however, the ability to get away with “faking” SEO is no longer an option. This is good news for bank marketers who adapt and bad news for those who don’t. Not surprisingly, Google continues to get smarter over time; artificial intelligence can do that. It’s time for banks to become smarter about creating search engine optimized content that can truly leverage what Google is prioritizing when it comes to the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) and the recent algorithm updates. Why bother with algorithm updates, you ask? Well, Google is a business too, and the path to growing their business is to serve their users the best possible content as quickly as possible. The Helpful Content Update (HCU) and the Spam Update will both enable Google to enhance the search engine’s ability to offer users the best content quickly and, in the end, increase their revenue. Here is what Google’s HCU is intended to do: validate and rank content with a greater emphasis on author authority … and trust. And they’re doing this not only by validating the trustworthiness of sources/authors. So, moving forward as a content marketer developing content for the web, Google suggests that, in order for that content (site page, ebook, whatever) to be recognized as valued content, you should position your author as a subject matter expert, ideally linking the blog to their LinkedIn page where the reader can learn more about the author’s experience and industry credentials. Google is also concerned about the growing popularity of AIgenerated content via providers such as ChatGPT or Longshot. www.coloradobankers.org 16
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy ODQxMjUw