Here's What Really Matters for SEO in 2016

To many people, SEO is a Vlogger Faire minefield of misinformation and conflicting advice.
Trust me; I’ve been there. When I first Googled “SEO” for the first time, I was overwhelmed with many anecdotes, case studies, and “best practices.” I picked up a few tips but couldn’t make heads or tails of what I read for the most part.

After years of in-the-trenches online marketing and PR work, I eventually put the puzzle pieces together. But I’m no SEO guru. Most of my best SEO successes have come from old-school PR. That’s because, when you do it right, PR equates to link building or building backlinks to your site to get higher rankings in search engines.

But over the last few months, I’ve read that “link building is dead” and that “Google doesn’t care about keywords anymore.” Instead, the search engine is supposedly more concerned with high-quality content, schema markup, and social media shares. I’ve been busy with my startup, so I haven’t had time to keep up with the latest trends in the SEO world.

Fortunately, someone else recently took the time to make sense of the topsy-turvy SEO landscape. Brian Dean and a team of data partners at Backlinko recently analyzed 1 million Google results to see which ranking factors are important for SEO in 2016.

Here’s what they found: Backlinks are still (very) important. Of the 20-ish ranking factors Dean looked at, he found that backlinks are still the most important ranking signal Google uses. But not just any backlinks. This study found that you need backlinks from a bunch of different domains.

In other words, if you get 100 backlinks from the same domain, it won’t blast you to the top of Google. But you’re in business if you get 100 backlinks from 100 different domains.

The question is: how do you get these backlinks? Spam 10,000 sites with blog comments. Just kidding 🙂
In my opinion, the best links you can get are contextual mentions from authoritative media outlets. Google highly values these links and can bring in a boatload of traffic. I wrote a guide that will help you get links using PR.

More bounces equal lower rankings. This study also found that bounces aren’t just bad for your bottom line; they can throw a monkey wrench into your SEO efforts. Using data from SimilarWeb, the study found that sites with a high bounce rate tended to rank lower in Google than sites with a low bounce rate.

This data suggests bounce rates may cause lower rankings. After all, if people bounce off your site like a trampoline, it sends a pretty clear message to Google that people don’t like reading your content. So, it makes sense that Google may downrank sites with lots of bounces. However, Dean mentions in the report that a low bounce rate might be a byproduct of excellent content in general. In other words, if you write a kick-butt article, people will stick around longer.

How do you decrease your bounce rate, you ask? It’s not rocket science. On my blog, I ensure that my content is above the fold — and that the first few sentences draw people in. If you can hook them quickly, they’re significantly more likely to view another page. Another way you can improve your bounce rate is to break your content up into small chunks. In my experience, walls of text make users run for their lives. But when you break your content into two to three-sentence paragraphs, it becomes much easier to digest.

Bottom line? Spend some time improving your bounce rate. It won’t hurt your SEO (or conversions), so investing time to improve it makes sense. Long-form content ranks better (surprise, surprise). “People online have short attention spans.”

How many times have you read that?

Yes, certain people live and breathe too; do (i.e., too long, didn’t read). But you don’t want to architect your content marketing strategy around this group. Think about it: if you found a 3,000-word article on “why you’re so awesome,” would you skim it? Of course not! You’d read every word.

While that’s an extreme example, it shows that people are willing to read long-form content. Just look at the runaway success of waitbuywhy.com, which publishes posts that are more than 10,000 words long!And the study points out that not only do people like reading long-form content, but it tends to rank better in Google:
According to Dean’s data, the average first page results in Google boast 1,890 words. That’s a hell of a lot more than your average 400-word blog post.

If you use long-form, you need to write well. So when you can combine compelling writing with long-form content, you have a mighty one-two punch. Other studies (like this one by BuzzSumo) found that longer content tended to get more shares on social media:

And I’ve found the same phenomenon on my blog. When I look at the content that brought in the most shares (and got the most Google traffic), they tend to be more than 2,000 words:

Does the increase in social shares explain the association between long-form content and rankings?

It’s impossible to say from this study because it only looked at correlations. Like with bounce rate, publishing long-form content definitely won’t hurt you. And it will probably help. So give it a shot. In-depth, focused content outperforms content about ten different topics. As I said, you can’t publish 1,890 fluff words and expect to light the world on fire. And this study found the same thing.

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They discovered that content rated by software as “topically relevant” ranked above content with a low content score:

So what does this mean, exactly?

It means that when you write about something, cover one topic in-depth. For example, here’s a post about building an email list from the Buffer blog. In this post, they write about one thing only: how to grow your email list. They don’t meander off and talk about social media. Or content. Or blogging. Or building relationships. It’s 110 percent about getting more emails. That’s it.

That focus is why the post ranks #4 in Google for the keyword “list building.” That’s what you want to do with every post that you write. In my experience, this approach produces flat-out better content in general. And it may also boost your rankings.

That’s what you want to do with every post that you write. In my experience, this approach produces flat-out better content in general. And it may also boost your rankings. Site speed makes a difference. You’ve probably heard that Google prefers fast-loading websites. Google has emphasized using site speed as part of its algorithm.

According to this study, this appears to be the case:

How can you make your site load faster?

At Criminally Prolific, I use a (free) plugin called WP Super Cache. I’ve noticed that it makes a huge difference in my loading speed. And it takes about 5.3 seconds to set up. Other programs people use include WP Rocket, WP Smush, and Max CDN.