Is your insurance or financial services website 'Panda' friendly?

You may know that Google regularly changes the way that it sorts and delivers search results to the millions of users looking for products, services and information each day. Well Google has just made a change to the algorithm that decides where websites come in its search listings and is called the ‘Panda’ update.

Google has always had the same stated aim: to rank highest those sites that provide the best content for a term that a user keys into the search box. So is your insurance or financial website ‘Panda’ friendly? In other words does it provide Google with the best content and most relevancy possible? To answer this question here are the main things that you should be looking out for in your website with the ‘Panda’ update.

1. Does your website provide useful and accurate information?

You have to ask yourself an objective question when reading the content on your website: “is it accurate, is it helpful and is it well written in the same way that a magazine or journal is well written?” If you’re not the best at writing content it may well be worth considering using professional copywriters who are used to scripting the kind of information you need on your website.

2. Is the content on your site unique?

There is a plethora of websites that grow their content massively by simply stealing or (to use an internet term) scraping content from other websites. So to the user this means that the site is providing information that is already out there on the web and has already been published by someone else. Google’s response is to rank the site that published the content first higher than the one that has simply piggy-backed that site – indeed if your content is a straightforward copy of someone else’s your site may even get banned from the search listings. There’s no easy way to say this but you HAVE to write your own unique content!

3. Is your content high quality?

Google is also playing classroom teacher with this new update and it deems poor quality pages to be those that include:

• poor spelling (sometimes deliberate spelling errors!)
• errors in data
• navigation errors

Google is looking for websites that are consistently high quality, accurate and reliable throughout to give the best experience to users who are searching for information on the web.

4. Is your site for Google or is it for users?

Most SEO specialists would traditionally say that to rank well in Google and indeed other search engines your site needs to optimised to court their attention and rank well. Well actually the opposite is quite true as well. If your site is easy to access, interesting and engaging, relevant, free of errors and inconsistencies, then users will enjoy a better experience and get the information they want quickly and without fuss. So avoid things like masses of adverts, inaccurate information, misleading elements and tricks to get your site ranking higher in Google and actually you will be on the way towards better search rankings.

It’s almost a case of ceasing to play the ‘search engine ranking game’ and start playing the ‘appealing to real users game’ and then better results will come.