Google keeps upping the ante with its search technology and now relies on more than 200 unique signals to determine the ranking of your website.

Google stays silent on everything that goes into their ranking methodology but their goal is to return only the most relevant results at the top of any search page preventing searchers from combing through less relevant results.

At liftDEMAND we have identified more than 20 critical elements influencing and interacting with these signals that we use on a daily basis to help our customers optimize their content for search engines.  Our analysis touches on what google itself claims to be some of the most important parts of search optimization including how often search terms appear on a webpage, whether they appear in the title, whether synonyms are used, etc.

But Google’s most recent update to its architecture, called Panda, was designed primarily to catch and demote sites that did not provide “useful, original content” and that did not “add much value” to the web.  That’s a hugely important statement.

While Google may not tell us all of their 200+ secret search ingredients, they’ve told us that their primary ingredient is useful, original content.

• If you are running a website that is an identical or nearly identical word-for-word template copy of someone else’s website, Google has said your site will be demoted.

• If you buy content from content providers and just place it in your site without making it your own, your site will be demoted.

• If you simply never update your website, using instead as a static “billboard” on the information super-highway, your site will be demoted.

Google (and by proxy Bing / Yahoo) are all saying the same thing – quality of website content must improve and if it doesn’t, you can expect your site will become BURIED under the other sites that include timely, interesting, relevant, fresh, and unique content.

A small investment of time each week to add something new to your website that is content rich will pay huge long-term dividends and will help protect your website from being viewed as irrelevant.  Providing what we call “expanded coverage” on topics in our Newsletters is a great way to quickly add unique content to your site.

(All nine of our newsletter titles are available to our Full Service Digital Marketing customers.  We’ve hired new staff writers and we’re now developing 100% exclusive content that will not be found in other newsletters by other publishers.)

If it feels like a burden to keep your website updated, definitely talk to us about our Full Service Digital Marketing solution and how we can help you save time while you focus on growing your business.

John Larsen

CEO & Chief Marketing Officer, liftDEMAND

John A. Larsen brings a rare perspective to financial services marketing, built through a 30-year career that spans from the operational front lines to the boardroom. He began as a bank teller, moved through accounting, and went on to manage the bank’s overnight investments with the Federal Reserve. That experience gives him a practical understanding of how financial institutions manage risk, capital, accountability, and growth. That foundation, supported by his former Series 7, 63, Real Estate, and Insurance licenses, shaped his early work helping firms design growth strategies that work inside real regulatory and operational constraints. During this time, he helped Union Bank of San Diego launch the nation’s first self-directed 401(k), worked with MFS Financial to bring mutual funds to market, and helped The Geneva Companies (then the leading mid-market M&A firm) attract high-value business owners. He also built a proprietary natural-language query marketing database that a major regional Northern California bank relied on for nearly a decade.

In 2001, John turned to the digital frontier, later founding liftDEMAND to bring institutional-grade strategy to local independent financial firms. Today, he delivers that experience through a suite of proprietary solutions, including comply.press, AuthorityOxygen, and his Perfect-10 multi-year framework. Since 2001, he has helped clients generate more than $550 million in new revenue opportunities. Now serving as a Fractional CMO, John combines deep marketing expertise, advanced data systems, and applied AI research to help financial services owners grow safely, stay compliant, and compete effectively against much larger organizations with disciplined, precision-engineered growth systems.