A great deal has been made about certain updates in the world of internet marketing, including changes wrought by Google Penguin. Changes always take their toll in this field, but the important thing is to roll with the punches and adapt. The chances are that the changes that come with updates like Penguin represent genuine progress and it is better to modify your own approach in line with this forward momentum than fall by the wayside.
Google makes changes in order to find a way to serve its customers better. This is something that all organisations with an online presence should welcome because they ought to have the same thing in mind. However, even now there are a few fundamentals that haven’t really changed and that still prove useful in terms of internet marketing and in terms of delivering the right service to your customers.
Take content as an example. It is no longer worth shoehorning keywords into the content on your site because Google has developed a more subtle approach that rewards usefulness and quality, rather than a superficial smattering of phrases that appear to have genuine relevance.
Relevance is a funny thing. The fact is that a site that is full of good quality content that is useful for readers cannot really fail to be relevant. The key nowadays is not to push your luck. Google does not want your organisation to try and convince it that you are an authority on certain matters – it wants you to convince your customers of that fact and it wants you to do so in the most useful and natural way possible.
This means doing away with all the unnatural practices used in the field of content. It means trusting your instincts and focussing on quality. What do our customers need to know? What questions are our customers likely to ask? How can we demonstrate more readily to our customers what you do as an organisation? These are the questions you should be answering in your content, instead of questions like: How can we convince Google that we are the best?
If you already have quality content on your site then nothing much is likely to change for you. You will go on updating that quality content in a natural and relevant manner and you will reap the benefits. If your existing content is poor, contrived, unnatural, overdone or even underhand then you may run into difficulties because of it and few can doubt that this represents progress.
So assess your content and revise it if necessary. Get experts on board to this for you if you wish, but if what you find remains useful, natural and relevant there is little for you to worry about.
