Google Dave visits The Juice Academy

Our last session at The Juice Academy was one we had all been looking forward to having heard a lot about PH Creative’s Google Dave.

Dave somehow managed to make the distinction between organic and paid search traffic clear and interesting, something that we have yet to come across in the jargon loving world of SEO.

He explained to us the importance of grasping the intent behind a keyword search before utilising it; those with the greatest intent to buy are the ones worth chasing after.

As social media apprentices we understood the concept of paid advertising in search engines but it was the grittier details behind these processes that Dave taught us.

For example, a paid ad should never lead to your homepage because the customer isn’t there to think - as aspiring digital professionals we need to do the thinking for them.

A key point from Google Dave’s talk delved into content, differentiating between ‘Old/Black Hat SEO’ and ‘White Hat SEO’.

As content creators we need to think holistically, after all Google is the most valuable high street, and unnatural content won’t get a brand anywhere in the modern digital landscape.

Think of your site and digital presence as a real business - if 80 people walked in to your shop but 60 walked straight back out, would you write it off as nothing? We shouldn’t ignore these occurrences in our analytics and reporting either, a poor bounce rate and low visit duration is something to work on.

So, how can we get more people to our site?

SEO is about encouraging Google to trust your domain as a quality source by increasing your site authority; this means encouraging the index frequency (how often Google checks over your website).

Once again Dave explained this is crystal clear terms: think of your website as a book - it needs to have qualities that make Google want to re-index it in the same way that a book needs to be of real quality to make someone return to it again and again.

The key to this? Fresh, quality content.

However, perhaps the most important lesson we took from Google Dave’s talk was to take charge of our own learning and development. Books, blogs, web resources - absorb any information that is it at our disposal in order to grow and progress.