Developing Your Online Presence with Modern SEO: Three Key Changes at Google You Should Know About

Collaborative post

The digital landscape is constantly changing, and as a business, that means you need to be ready to adapt at a moment's notice.

Naturally, one of the biggest influencers is the tech giant Google. Their search engine forms the backbone of the internet, and if you’re trying to drive organic traffic to your website and socials, you need to make sure you’re aware of any changes they make.

In this article, you’ll learn about three of the biggest recent alterations to how Google operates, and how you can use new features to your advantage in growing your online presence.

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Image Credit: Pexels

AI-Generated Search Results

One of the largest changes at Google has been to do with the implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) technology.

Google’s new Gemini tools have been integrated into each facet of the company from their Pixel line of phones to the search engine itself. You’ll now notice that when you search for something, you receive an AI overview at the top of the page through which Gemini attempts to provide a direct answer to your query.

The system uses data from websites all over the internet to generate its response, and so as a business with a site yourself, you have an opportunity to be included as a source for those summaries and boost your overall SERP ranking.

Of course, this technology can also have a negative effect and steal clicks from your site; AI overview tracking will become increasingly important as time goes on so that you can better understand which terms trigger these types of responses, and how to change your content accordingly.

Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T)

E-E-A-T is more important than ever these days. Essentially, it represents Google’s shift towards prioritizing content that showcases those four key attributes, and a propensity to rank these pages higher than others that do not.

For this reason, it’s key to try and include real personal experiences, strong referencing, and verified credentials within your content. Most of this stuff simply pertains to making content that people actually want to read, so given that you should endeavor to do so anyway, you should have E-E-A-T principles covered.

Google’s Helpful Content Update (HCU)

The recent HCU update is similar to E-E-A-T but distinct in several ways. Google is now directly prioritizing content that falls under the umbrella of ‘helpful’, pushing results to the top that it thinks provide the most value to the human user.

The update comes as an attempt to negate the amount of junk content that’s proliferating across the web due to AI, and so the main thing to keep in mind is the people you’re writing your content for. Again, write passionately and strive to help people, and this should naturally put you in good stead so far as the HCU.

Wrapping Up

This article has provided you with a quick update as to how SEO is changing and how you can adapt your content to fall in line with the latest practices. Some elements may take a while to get to grips with, but your effort will pay off in the end. Good luck!

— End of collaborative post —

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