In digital marketing, brands have to be sensitive to the algorithm of their platforms. In one update, a single rule change can cripple how effective a brand’s efforts are. To avoid this, they can diversify the way they distribute their content.  That way algorithm changes do not hurt their efforts as badly.

To do this, brands should invest in owned media assets such as desktop websites, mobile websites and mobile apps. The easiest among these would be to launch a website. However, here are some questions to consider: What will make my website stand out? What tactics should I use to make my website show up when my customer is searching for my product/service? How can I improve my website’s organic ranking?

To help with that, we listed down 5 essential components of a high performing website.

Element 1: Be Mobile-Ready

Mobile is the way of today. So much so that Google prioritizes websites that provide a mobile-friendly experience to searchers on mobile devices. Also, Google will deprioritize websites that are not mobile friendly. 

Now, there are 2 ways to go about developing a mobile website – a mobile responsive or a dedicated mobile website. Obviously, each would have its own advantage and disadvantages. It will really depend on the role of the website that you are creating. A general guideline we use in Xiklab is if the intent is to give information, then a mobile responsive website is enough. If the objective of the website is to convert the customer (i.e. purchase, submit an application, etc.) then it might be best to develop a dedicated mobile website.

What’s important is for Google to recognize that your website is mobile ready. You can easily do this by submitting the URL of your website to Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool.

Element 2: Page Speed + Performance matters

Speed is incredibly important. No matter the kind of website, the slower it is, the more likely a visitor will just leave. A large group of people leaving your site because of speed can greatly affect your organic search ranking down the road.

More importantly, Google has long indicated that website performance is included in their ranking algorithm. So it is a must that your website performs well in the eyes of Google. In this tool, you will be given optimization suggestions (i.e. browser caching, compressing images, etc.) that will help you quickly improve your website’s performance.

All you need to do is submit your website’s URL and it will give you the necessary fixes you need to apply. You may also use our FREE website audit tool to quickly check the performance of your website.

Element 3: Long form content with the right keywords will do the trick

This is the bulk of what people will see, so it needs more of your attention. There are different tactics when it comes to populating your website with the right keywords. This involves technical setup (having the right URL, title tags and meta descriptions and keywords you want to own) and the non-technical ones (your content). In this section, let’s first focus on how you should write your content.

First, it is proven that Google prioritizes long form content. In fact, the average word count of a Google first page result is 1,890 keywords. There are several theories why long form content usually performs better in Google – longer content generates more social shares, longer content shows that the site owner cares about publishing good content, among others.

Second, it is recommended that you incorporate LSI (latent semantic indexing) keywords in your content. As a background, LSI keywords are words that are commonly found alongside your target keyword. For example, if you were writing about “best car brands”, then you’d probably mention words like “top selling cars”, “highly recommended car brands”, etc. These are LSI keywords. When Google sees these words in your content, it gives them confidence that you’re writing quality content.

Fortunately, it’s easy to know the right LSI keywords for any keyword. All you need to do is search for that keyword in Google and scroll down to the bottom of the page where it says “searches related to”. Once you get your LSI keywords, try including them in your content.

Element 4: Enable social sharing buttons

Like mentioned above, brands will have to use different ways of distributing their content and social is one of them. Social signals may not play a direct role in your site ranking but it can generate more eyeballs on your content, which may lead to someone linking to you (Note: The more external links your site gets, the faster it will rank organically). 

In fact, several studies mentioned that social sharing buttons may increase social sharing by 7x. So make sure you display your social sharing buttons prominently in your blog posts and articles.

Element 5: Add Multimedia in your articles

Several sources show that content with at least one multimedia (i.e. image, screenshots, videos, etc.) ranks higher versus content that does not have a single multimedia. Moreover, image rich pages tend to get more views and social shares. 

As we said in Element 4, more social shares will increase the probability of someone linking to your website. So try to populate your content with several multimedia materials. Also engaging multimedia materials may reduce bounce rate and increase dwell time in your website which are two critical user interaction ranking factors in Google – low bounce rate + long dwell time = higher search ranking.

Conclusion

Reliance on one platform is dangerous for brands and a slight change in system rules will surely disrupt everything – cost, reach, engagement, among others. It is important to revisit your channel strategy and evaluate if you have owned assets that will shield you from potential risks brought about by these third party platform changes.

Should you need more information on how to build your owned digital assets, feel free drop us an email.