Active businesses always look for competitive advantages. To help, some new website-based products on the market can tip the scales in your favor. One helps search engines discover new website content quickly for faster ranking. Another builds trust through the use of blockchain technology. And the third gives new insights into the customer journey through a new analytics platform from Google. In this article, you will learn how to improve ranking speed, trust, and analytics. Plus, how to implement each one for your own competitive advantage.
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
Table of contents
Improve your Ranking Speed with IndexNow
IndexNow is a new product that notifies search engines the moment you publish fresh content on your website. It is a simple ping to tell search engines about additions and updates to a URL and its content. Then search engines can quickly send bots to crawl, index, and reflect the changes.
Before IndexNow, fresh content could wait for days or weeks after publishing before search engines discovered it. IndexNow pushes fresh content into the face of search engines to eliminate the waiting period between publishing and indexing.
This is a big advantage for eCommerce sites. As soon as new products are published, those pages can be indexed and served to potential customers. When new products index ahead of competing sites not using IndexNow, a business will capture early market share. Sales can flow immediately, reducing inventory costs and getting cash into store owners’ bank accounts faster. IndexNow can also benefit news sites and anyone who publishes proprietary research-based content in competitive industries.
Index Now was created by search engines Bing and Yandex. But they are not the only ones using or testing the product. According to searchengineland.com, A Google spokesperson has confirmed that the search company will be testing it. Google said while its crawling efforts are efficient, Google will test to see if it can improve its overall sustainability efforts by leveraging the IndexNow protocol.
Getting fresh content ranked faster and increasing cash flow velocity is great. Combining that with reducing the energy needed to crawl websites to find fresh content is a win-win-win for site owners, consumers, and the planet.
Build Trust with Block Chain Technology
A lot of content on the internet seems a shade shady. From fake news to foreign government interference, from disinformation campaigns to doctored photographs, it’s hard to believe what your see, even on supposedly-reputable websites. But, several companies are working to create a more trustworthy internet.
WordProof is one such company and offers a product that time-stamps content in a blockchain, letting readers know its ownership and status. They also use badges or links to show people that the content has been protected. Plus, you can check the changes made in previously saved versions of the content. The blockchain ensures transparency, and it proves when the content first appeared, who wrote it, and if/when it was last edited
Time-stamping your policies and procedures pages can prove when they were published and changed. eCommerce stores now have the tools to stand firm on returns or exchange policies if they choose to do so. Using blockchain also has big SEO implications, as explained by the team at WordProof. Before WordProof, publishers could simply change an article’s date, making it appear to be recently published, and improve their chances of higher rankings. Additionally, larger sites with better domain authority could publish duplicate content of a smaller, lesser-known site and rank higher. But time-stamped articles using blockchain technology prove when articles were published and the original author. This ensures the highest rankings go to the deserving authors and sites.
Don’t Wait to Unbox the Next Generation of Google Analytics—GA4
A big change in Google analytics is on the horizon. Starting in July 2023, Google will discontinue the current analytics platform, known as Universal Analytics. In its place will be a new and completely different version, called GA4. The reasons for creating GA4 are the changes and complexities that come with collecting and analyzing data today. People’s online journeys are becoming more complex and spread across several platforms and devices. In addition, privacy is becoming increasingly important in how you collect data. Some countries are introducing internet privacy policies that Universal Analytics does not address. So it’s time for an upgrade.
There are several benefits of GA4, including:
The Best Things about GA4
One of the best things about GA4 is the improved customer journey tracking. This is especially helpful when you have both a website and an app. The customer journey will no longer be segmented by different platforms used or organized in different sessions. As a result, you can understand how the customer interacts with your website and app better.
Yoast SEO has written about another cool new feature using machine learning to predict visitor behavior. The first one is purchase probability, which predicts the likelihood that users who have visited your app or site will purchase something in the next seven days. The second one is churn probability. It predicts how likely it is that recently active users will not visit your app or site in the next seven days. As a result, marketers can use the insights to determine which messages will be most effective at the next touchpoint.
It may seem like you have a whole year to prepare for the switch, but you should act now. GA4 is already available and collecting data. If you wait a year to implement GA4, you will have no historical data and no way to access the current platform to see it. So, now is the time to act and start collecting a year’s worth of data before Google sticks a fork in Universal Analytics.
Conclusion on 3 Ways to Improve Ranking Speed, Trust, and Analytics Right Now
With fierce competition, active businesses must do everything they can to gain an advantage. Faster content rankings, better trust, and more insights into the customer journey are three ways to gain an advantage. If you own or manage an active business, you know how important advantages can be to your bottom line, but you are a busy executive or owner. Therefore, you don’t have the time to learn and implement IndexNow, WordProof, or GA4. That’s where Sand Key Ventures comes in. We can help set up and implement all these tools for you. That way, you can concentrate on running your business while we provide the competitive advantages you need to thrive in today’s business climate.
Sand Key Ventures is a website company that creates advantages for our clients every day. We build new websites and provide SEO services to keep websites running clean and Google happy. We can help improve ranking speed, trust, and your analytics right now. Call us at 727-249-2749 to discuss what Sand Key Ventures can do for you. Thanks for your time, but now we’ve gotta run. We have websites to build and audit, blogs to write, eCommerce to manage, and photos to edit. Until next time, take care.