Almost 1 in 3 business owners say they’re not familiar with Google rankings and SEO, while searches relating to local SEO have increased 25% in the past 6 months. This is a crucial piece of content strategy, in order to stand up against competitors, businesses need to have at least a general understanding of how Google impacts your leads.
SEO stands for search engine optimization. It helps search engines, such as Google and Bing, understand your content and helps users find your website. Although this sounds simple enough, the reality can be wildly different.
When it comes to the SEO world, myths and misconceptions are everywhere, making it hard for business owners to understand how to improve their position online.
Google relies on various indicators to decide a webpage’s position in organic search, and some SEOs speculate that content compression might influence rankings.
The theory suggests that search engines use content compression to identify low-quality pages, with the idea that if a page can be compressed significantly - removing unnecessary words and phrases - it must contain a lot of redundant content.
But what does this mean and is it a cause for concern?
What is content compression?
Content compression refers to how much a web page’s content can be reduced in file size without losing its meaning.
If a page or blog contains lots of redundant or repetitive words, it can be compressed more. Some SEO experts have suggested that highly compressible content might be seen as low-quality by search engines, which could potentially harm a business's search rankings.
It’s commonly thought that web pages with a larger compression ratio would rank less strongly than those with a smaller one.
The latest SEO compression study results
To help businesses understand whether they should consider compression ratios, SEO company Reboot Online conducted a study comparing the compression ratios of top ranking websites versus lower ranking ones. The hypothesis was that if search engines used compression as a quality indicator, higher ranking pages would be less compressible.
Interestingly, they found no evidence that compression correlates with a page’s position in search results. Pages in the top 10 search results had a higher compression ratio than those in the bottom.
If you want to read more about the methodology and results, please see this page.
What does this mean for your business?
In light of the recent study, it’s suggested that rather than worrying about whether your content can be compressed, businesses should priorities the quality. They should focus on crafting valuable, engaging, and relevant content for their audience. It’s shown that Google and other search engines favor useful content over its file size.
How can you improve your business's SEO?
There are multiple ways businesses can improve their search rankings - from focusing on authoritative content, to optimizing keywords. And in light of the new compression ratio findings, these can be implemented confidently.
1. High-quality and relevant content
High-quality and relevant content is among the most important factors in determining your rankings. Focus on producing user-friendly content written specifically for your intended audience, increasing traffic to your web pages and improving the authority and relevance of your site.
Google will see this as an indicator that you are the ‘go-to’ website for your chosen niche, and will rank you higher when people search for similar content.
2. E-E-A-T
A web page that includes expert content, and is written by an authoritative and trustworthy author, is a page that search engines will consider to be high in E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authority, and trust), this determines how relevant a page is in answering a user’s query.
Alongside making sure your content is factual, keeping your content updated is crucial for demonstrating E-E-A-T. Any positive reviews or brand coverage you can get for your website can also enhance your E-E-A-T, especially if they’re coming from trusted websites linking to your site.
Show Google and your readers why you are an expert in your field. Whether it is your academic background, relevant awards you have won, conferences you have spoken at or publications you have been featured in, all of this contributes to your credibility.
3. Optimize your metadata
Your titles, keywords, descriptions, and alt-tags play an important role in helping web crawlers match your content to users' search queries. By fully optimizing your metadata, you make it easier for search engines to identify and rank your content for the right keywords, improving your chances of appearing higher on the search engine results page (SERP).
Additionally, Google and other search engines may indirectly consider click-through rate (CTR) as an indicator of how well your site matches users' search intent. A higher CTR could suggest that your content is relevant and valuable (though this remains a debated topic in the SEO community). To maximize clicks, it’s worth crafting compelling metadata that entices users to engage with your content.
4. Optimize content for featured snippets
Featured snippets, also known as answer boxes, are selections of content displayed on the search engine results page. Interestingly, the user never has to visit the page where the content is based.
It’s important to have your content included in these snippets. To encourage your brand to be positioned within these boxes, you should have in mind questions that people might want the answers to, and formulate your answers to those questions into clear, concise and succinct paragraphs. Content between 54-58 words tends to work the best.
Alternatively, step-by-step instructions or bullet and numbered lists that answer the searcher’s query are very useful to help you show up for more featured snippets. So be sure to include these in your content, when relevant and useful to do so.
*Reboot SEO company utilized Ahrefs to find the most commonly asked question about SEO. ‘How to do local SEO’ is among the most asked questions and received 2,256 searches in Jan 2025, compared to 1,812 in July 2024 - marking a 24.5% increase.
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