With Google announcing there were 40 changes to their algorithms in February it can be hard to keep up if you are looking to either provide SEO to clients or do affordable SEO work internally. The main thing though is to focus on the main points for those actually performing SEO, many of the changes improve search quality but make little difference to most webmasters, other changes though have less obvious effects and to keep things affordable SEO needs to be move with the times or better still be ahead of the game with the next trends that will come out of these changes.
First up is ‘more coverage for related searches’ this change means that more options for other search terms will be delivered to people searching, these options are often longer than those used to begin with and help people define what they need more exactly, they may also come up more now though for searches with few results. If the keyword phrases you use are short or have few other results then people could end up clicking to search again before looking at your result. More importantly though you can get new high performing keywords quickly by seeing what Google are offering as alternatives: these are bound to suddenly get a lot more traffic and can help with basic affordable SEO plans where you don’t want to spend days finding keywords.
Another important change for SEO is that they have improved how accurately they detect official pages; this in itself has little consequence unless you were lucky enough to have a site misidentified as official, it may though mean that competing for keywords containing your own brand will be easier though and you should consider whether you have made sure your company name, brand names and variations of them are included on your pages to make the most of this change for your SEO.
If you have a site completely or partly in languages other than English an important change is that Google will now be serving up more results for broad searches that include synonyms of a search term. Generally an exact match will still come up first and this will work only work for highly synonymous terms, it may mean though that you get a boost when using two or three synonymous keywords on one page, this has been the case with English for a little while.
They made this change in January but now perhaps they have taken it further again: fresh results are coming up higher than before and so for Affordable SEO don’t forget regular updates to your site, including updates to existing pages as well as fresh pages.
Leaving the most important change for small businesses to last, Google have updated how their algorithm identifies local content and local queries. The result is that local themed keywords are likely to start bringing you a lot more traffic, assuming the change is effective, local traffic is of course usually more valuable and your click throughs are likely to be higher: just remember to include your location in the title and description to maximize clicks to really benefit from affordable SEO that brings results.