– How to future-proof your SEO against Google’s next update. You’ve put all this time and effort into your SEO strategy and all of a sudden, boom, Google wants to change things up for you. An update can have a major impact on your SEO strategy. It can cause your content to slip in the rankings and even give your competition a leg up. Unless you’re prepared. Future-proofing your SEO strategy is absolutely essential because updates happen all the time.
In fact, since 2016 there have been 16 Google core updates. Future-proofing your SEO strategy is absolutely essential because updates happen all the time. Heck, since 2018, there have been roughly three Google core updates each and every single year. And there’s an even crazier number. There are roughly 4,500 times that Google changes its algorithm each and every single year according to Search Engine Land. Now, most of these changes aren’t major ones so you’re not going to notice them. But still, that’s a lot of time that goes into adjusting and tweaking Google’s algorithm.
And some of these changes are so teeny tiny that your traffic just goes up a little bit or down a little bit and you don’t really need to worry about those. But every once in a while, you’re going to have a major update that drastically changes your traffic, and those are the ones that you need future-proof yourself from.
So how can you future-proof your SEO so that way you can stay ahead of Google‘s next update? Well, leave a comment below guessing what it might be. I’ll give you a hint. Focus on user experience. Think about it. Every Google update has essentially the same overall goal, making the algorithm more reflective of human behavior. So think about what is best for people, not what’s best for Google. That way the pages that users are actually searching for and spending time on are the ones that tend to do the best.
Google doesn’t care if you have a million backlinks versus 5 million backlinks or a hundred thousand. Think about it, whenever you do a search, are you like, hmm, this result is number one and it should be because it has a million backlinks. You don’t care about that as a user, you just care about the user experience. Are you getting what you’re looking for? So there are a few ways you can prioritize your user experience and give users what they’re looking for.
Now, when Google has an update, sometimes even if you do all this stuff, sometimes you lose and you get less traffic. That’s okay. You’re not optimizing for the short run, you’re optimizing for the long run. Cause a lot of times what happens is Google will make changes and realize, wait, this actually wasn’t the best change for the user. Let me go actually make this other change. And over time, if you do what’s best for the end user, you’ll find that you’ll continually grow your traffic over time. That’s the key to future-proofing your website for SEO.