When it comes to search rankings, the more things change, the more they don’t.
I wrote about this topic not too awfully long ago, but I’ve found a bit more evidence to support my thesis.
Lately, I’ve been using Google’s PageSpeed Insights to check on what Google thinks of pages I’ve built for my clients.
Despite the name, the tool doesn’t just check for speed, but also for performance including accessibility, best practices, and SEO, on both mobile and desktop devices.
Happily, my clients’ sites are performing very well in the areas I can control: content and SEO. They tend to do well in accessibility, too, where I have partial control.
The scores are mostly 95 to 100.
Is this because I am diligent about keeping up with the latest and greatest with respect to SEO and web content? Well, yes and no. Yes, in that I do try to read as much as I can on the topics and, no, in the sense that not much has changed.
Surprising, huh? After all these years!
Maybe I am wrong with respect to bigger players. A minor algorithm change on a huge website can make a big difference.
But for the average local-to-regional business (5 to 20 million dollars in revenue), those minor changes don’t count so much and the basic best practices remain the same: Research keywords. Draft good content. Use keywords in title tags, meta descriptions, and alt tags. Use them in your headlines, subheads, and text. Write detailed footers with your keywords, products, services, and the cities you serve.
But what about voice and AI searches? If you’re like me, you get urgent solicitations to optimize your business for these types of searches.
So I checked some of my clients’ rankings using voice search and they performed just fine.
Then I checked those same sites on ChatGPT. Again, my clients’ sites performed well there, too.
My conclusion? Whatever is working for Google is also working for voice and AI searches.
It kind of makes sense. Keyword phrases reflect how people think, speak, and search. If they are embedded in your content — naturally — the various methods of searching are going to work.
Easy Web Tip 361: Google’s best practices are still working and that includes voice and AI searches.
