Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

According to the recently-released annual Ranking Factors Study from Searchmetrics, Google has made some big changes in how its algorithm evaluates content and assign search rank.   

Content quality is the recurring theme of the study, which offers  important lessons and opportunities for content marketers, public relations pros, bloggers and anyone else publishing digital content on the web....

“High quality, relevant content is increasingly the focus of search. This type of content ranks better on average, and is identifiable by properties such as a higher word-count and semantically comprehensive wording, as well as often being enriched by other media, such as images or video.” – Searchmetrics 2014 Ranking Factors Study.

Human signals

Before we dig into tactics, first we need to look the signals that indicate content quality to Google.  Topping the list is a metric that is new to the top ten factors — the click through rate.  This is an important change and it emphasizes the importance of user actions as indicators of quality.  The majority of search rank factors are derived from social signals, and like the click through rate, these also indicate content quality.  User actions and social signals are derived from human interactions with content, and Google is assuming that people won’t like, share, post or click on content they don’t consider useful or interesting....