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Do you own a local business and wonder why the majority of your new customers decide to use the services of your company through word-of-mouth recommendations, but you hardly ever get any leads from your well-designed website? Do you run an e-commerce store with high-quality products, but in spite of publishing the best photos of your offers on every web page of your site, you see no visitors in your Google Search Console report? LocalTeam knows why this is the case, and we are ready to share our insights with you in today’s blog post.
What Is the Idea Behind Googlebot-Oriented Websites?
Having nice images and general information on your site is not enough in the modern age. That is the truth, and we either need to accept it and adapt to the real state of affairs or keep living in the dark. There is no other option.
However harsh it may sound, for people to visit your website, you need to make it for Googlebot in the first place. We can predict your bewilderment, indignation, and all those questions that are appearing in your head right now and are happy to address all of them without further ado. Of course, you want to provide your services to users who are people, not bots. Of course, real customers prefer attractive visuals to pages covered with endless text paragraphs. And, of course, we will explain how creating Googlebot-oriented content will help your website. However, first things first.
What Is Googlebot and How Does It Work?
In a nutshell, Googlebot is the reason why you can see any web content. The whole concept of Internet searching wouldn’t be possible without it. You might have heard some of its alternative names listed below:
- Crawler;
- Spider;
- Spiderbot;
- Robot;
- Ant.
Whichever naming is used, its idea won’t change. This software crawls all the pages on the Internet, checks their content, and adds them to the index. Then, when a user completes a search trying to find, let’s say, a balloon shop nearby, Google will look through all the indexed pages in an attempt to provide the most relevant result. As you know, such a task takes a search engine not longer than a fraction of a second. That’s because, at the stage of crawling, the bot establishes what pages can satisfy a certain user intent. And believe us, the number of balloon photos is not something that is really taken into consideration. Text is the only thing that defines whether a page is shown on the search engine result page, also referred to as SERP, or not.
We should highlight that this software is used solely by Google. All the other search engines, like Bing, Yahoo, or DuckDuckGo, utilise their own bots. However, all of them are powered by similar algorithms. So, knowing how to make your website Googlebot-friendly will automatically improve your rankings on other search engines.
What Content Should a Web Page Have for Google to Rank It High?
As it has already been established, Googlebot doesn’t understand images. It cannot admire their beauty, and they do not influence web page ranking. However, it can understand text perfectly well, which is why the importance of adding alternative text to every image you publish cannot be underestimated. Even if you have thousands of pictures, you need to add the alt attribute to each of them.
Do not think that it is excessive. Such descriptions of graphic content will tell Googlebot what exactly is depicted, and based on this information, your pages will be ranked on the SERP. Moreover, it will also be beneficial for people with vision impairment since their screenreaders will let them know what content is on the page they visit. In case the alt attribute is not used, such users won’t have a full understanding of the page content.
Since text is this important for Googlebot, you need to post only high-quality text content on your site. Filling the space with Lorem Ipsum won’t contribute to a high ranking. Even if you think that it is too much and no one needs long descriptions of your services since everything is understandable from your company name and logo, keep in mind that Googlebot will never make assumptions and guess that probably this website will be relevant for users looking for balloons for their party unless this information is explicitly stated.
How Can You Improve Your Web Page Ranking?
Company owners want all the pages of their websites to be at the top of the SERP. However, it is easier said than done. When you only start your online business, you have way too many points to consider, like user-friendly web design, branding, website security, mobile application, hosting, and so on. It is easy to get lost and overlook the necessity of SEO practices that are aimed at the optimisation of all the Internet pages to the searches of users.
SEO is directly related to high-quality text on Internet pages for Googlebot to crawl them and rank high. Text of the highest quality in terms of SEO should contain keywords that will tell the bot that this website page should be shown to every user who enters such words in the search bar. In addition to filling paragraphs with the words that your potential clients will probably use for a search, you also need to include keywords in headings, meta tags, and alternative text for images. However, you cannot overuse keywords and insert as many as possible on one page since Google will suspect search engine manipulation. You also need to use specific keywords for different pages to avoid keyword cannibalisation.
Does it sound too complicated and you do not know where you should start? How to find these keywords, how many of them should be used on the page, and how can they possibly cannibalise? Do not puzzle over this for a long time, and let professionals do the work for you! Our professionals at LocalTeam are happy to help you with all of this and even more.
High-Quality Text Is a Must for Every Web Page!
Now you know what Googlebot is, how it indexes web pages, and why text content, along with SEO practices, can improve web page ranking. Having read this article, you will never forget that while providing services to people, you should also do your best for the crawler. Remember to post meaningful information on every page of your website, use alternative texts, distribute keywords evenly throughout paragraphs, and come for help to LocalTeam if needed. We are just one phone call or email away!
