If you’re an SEO company Orange County, then what you’re probably trying to do is get as many unique page views as possible for your clients. The strategy for going about that must be ever evolving, because the techniques used by search engines like Google are always changing. In this article, we talk a little about some of the most modern ways to make sure you rank.

Google recently came out with the “RankBrain” algorithm. SEO companies, and marketing directors, were paying attention. Whenever Google changes up their ranking system, it pays to change your marketing strategy accordingly. What made RankBrain different from other ranking systems that had come before it is that it’s the first machine learning algorithm. It takes note of how you interact with the first page of results that come up from a search, in the following way: if you type a phrase into Google, RankBrain turns it into a concept, and it shows the results of that concept. If the first page that came up satisfied the user, Google will uprank the page. If it didn’t, it will downrank the page. It’s that simple.

So, why should that matter to you, regarding SEO? What it means is that traditional tools, like backlinks and keywords, are not quite as important as they used to be. With RankBrain being more used and valued by Google, you want to optimize your site for it. The first way that you can do that is by improving the click-through rate that you’re getting organically. One way to do this is by adding numbers to your description tag, or your title. People tend to click more on search results that contain a number. “Top 5 Cupcake Recipes” is going to get more clicks than “Top Cupcake Recipes.”

Another way you can optimize is by improving your dwell time, and your bounce rate. You should know about both of those already. Your dwell time is how long someone stays on your page, and bounce rate refers to how many visitors leave after three seconds or less. By making sure that your content is what niche searchers were looking for, you should have less of a bounce rate, and more dwell time. When RankBrain sees those numbers improving for your site, it’s going to rank you more highly accordingly.

Google is always going to keep changing its methods, and RankBrain is only the latest in a long series of prioritization tools. But it’s the one that seems to be in right now, and it behooves you as a business owner and a website operator to pay attention to it.