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Google is the most widely used search engine and, as such, is the basis of nearly every digital marketing strategy. However, the frequency at which Google updates tend to break things complicates things. After all, if you build your strategy around current requirements and then they change tomorrow, a good chunk of your work will be rendered useless. So, let’s take a closer look at the impact of Google updates on your digital marketing strategy as well as what you can do to keep your strategy relevant.
The need to pay attention
The first way the impact of Google updates on your digital marketing strategy shows is by forcing you to pay attention. You must always keep yourself updated on things if you want your digital marketing strategy to succeed. After all, even a slight change in the algorithm can suddenly make your strategy much less effective. This, in turn, would mean that you are potentially losing tons of lead generation in digital marketing and, in turn, profit. Which naturally means that you are paying far more than what the worth of what you’re getting in return. A good example is a change in the way keywords are handled. As a result, your site can suddenly lose its high ranking in a particular keyword, ruining your organic lead generation and forcing you to rework a ton of your content just to fix things.
How to keep yourself updates
Unfortunately, in spite of how significant the impact of Google updates on your digital marketing strategy is, there is not much effort made by Google to help people understand their updates. Or even alert people to them! In other words, you need to put in the effort by yourself to keep track of changes. One of the options you have is using Google Alerts to notice ranking shifts. And, through them, the nature and effects of any particular update. However, the experts from Movers Development advise, instead, finding an SEO expert with a blog or similar and following their posts. They typically cover all the major Google updates and how they affect digital marketing strategies. Of course, you could also hire a professional to handle the task for you. Still, this is very expensive in the long term.
The right way to approach SEO
Because of the way Google updates work, your SEO approach might lose its effectiveness. This is especially noticeable if you lean towards Black Hat or Gray Hat SEO approaches. They rely on pandering to the requirements of the algorithm. And when Google updates it, your entire digital marketing might come crashing down. The best way to combat this, of course, is to prioritize White Hat SEO. While White Hat SEO still hits all the standard algorithm requirements, it focuses much more on the content and its appeal to an audience. This means that even if you do lose out on some optimization, you can still count on people genuinely valuing and enjoying your content to draw them in. This also makes your ranking more robust. Since instead of fine-tuning your SEO every time, it can weather some algorithm changes relatively unaffected.
The visibility challenges
We already touched on it, but the primary way the impact of Google updates on your digital marketing strategy is expressed is by eliminating some of your outreach due to post-update, ‘bad’ optimization. Unfortunately, this is not always obvious and not always aimed at keywords that are relatively easily fixed. Another example of the impact updates can have is when, in the past, Google altered how people get Ad suggestions. This immediately made a lot of optimization pointless since people were suddenly getting ads they were not as interested in or were drawn to because of mismatching information. In turn, this made the cost-effectiveness of pay-per-click a mess for a time. So, while it is important to have some Google rankings quick improvement solutions, sometimes you need a thorough audit to even find the problem.
The necessity of having a good fallback strategy
As we hinted already, to quickly rebound from a Google update, you need to have a system in place. Typically, the process requires at least three steps:
- Identifying the problem
- Planning
- Recovery
And out of the three, the step of identifying the issue is the most troubling and time-consuming. After that, it’s just a matter of quickly charting your recovery process and then editing your site’s SEO to match. During this step, it is also essential to look into content and site pages that no longer have value. If your site has any of those, it might be better to delete them. Rather than waste time on ‘fixing’ them after a Google update.
Short vs. long-term goals
As a consequence of the impact of Google updates on your digital marketing strategy, making detailed short-term plans is often tricky. This is why, while it is always important to make detailed adjustments in the short term, it is always better to aim your digital marketing at long-term goals. For example, instead of just wanting to hit a number of sales every month, try to enhance your brand recognition and loyalty, too. This way, even if things do go wrong and your outreach potential plummets due to a sudden Google update, at least you’ll always be able to count on loyal customers. And many people are likely to visit your site for the first time based on your brand’s reputation alone! So, while looking into digital marketing strategies you should consider trying, evaluate their long-term potential first.
The importance of flexibility
If there is a single way to collate the entirety of our text so far, it would be this: because of Google updates, you must keep your digital marketing strategy flexible. You will absolutely run into issues with your strategy due to Google shenanigans. Of course, you can always find a digital marketing and business consultant to help you weather all the problems, too.
Final comment
Now that you are more familiar with the impact of Google updates on your digital marketing strategy, we hope you have a better grasp of what’s necessary to do in order to keep your strategy viable. It is not always easy, but with proper planning, we are sure you will be successful!
