While ADA compliance isn’t mandatory for every business website, it should be. Open your business up to all your customers. If your business provides a service to customers, it should comply with ADA regulations provided your business meets the following criteria:

• You provide a service for the benefit of the public.
• You are a state or local agency.
• You have more than 15 employees. 

Even if your business’s website doesn’t meet the ADA’s compliance criteria, creating an ADA-compliant website ensures that you are serving your customers to the best of your ability.  
The ADA’s guidance on website accessibility has caused confusion because there are no explicit standards. Instead, the ADA recommends looking at existing technical standards like the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). 
You want to ensure an effective website design with feature accessibility so everyone can navigate it easily, including individuals with vision issues, hearing loss and other differences.

• Audio files: Audio files that accompany text can make your website easily accessible for viewers who are blind or have low vision.
• Alt tags for images: Alt tags are text descriptions in HTML code that help create a mental picture of the images on your website. The assistive devices vision-impaired people use can convert alt tags to Braille or read them aloud. Other images on your site – including dropdown menus, icons and buttons – also need alt tags.
• Images without text: Text-to-speech technology won’t be able to pick up on images that include text.
• Captions for videos: If you have video on your website, include captions to ensure deaf or hard of hearing visitors can understand and enjoy the content.
• Vision accommodations: For customers with vision challenges, make text-resizing options straightforward and use an optimal contrast ratio. 
• Optimized navigation systems: To better understand your site’s accessibility, use the up and down arrows, tab button, and other keyboard commands to navigate your website rather than relying on your mouse. This will help you determine where to add text-based navigation for those who use a keyboard only.
• Error alerts: If your website includes online forms customers must fill out, add error alerts so they know precisely what to correct. 

These are just a few ways to improve website accessibility. To learn more, consult the full WCAG. 

NEXT STEPS
When you’re ready to ensure that all of your customers can access and easily navigate your site, reach out to our experts. We’re standing by to help build your online presence. Learn more at GreyPartners.com

Everybody is in a panic, as they always are after a Google update. This time we’re cheering Google's massive March 2024 update that makes some long overdue changes designed to reduce unhelpful, low-quality content as part of a broader effort to combat content spam. This is great news for SMB’s that invest in SEO as it should reduce some of the competitive clutter that’s been working against them.

Effective SEO creates value for users. Googles latest update rewards organizations that publish original content based on proprietary data, fresh perspectives, and subject matter expertise. Google is open to Ai generated content when used thoughtfully to enhance quality within a people-first context. For example, when developing content for a client in the chemical manufacturing industry, we work with the client to establish subjects that they’re customers inquire about most. Gather data and insights from various departments within the organization. Prepare a brief, then use Ai to find additional information that may also be valuable to readers. We’re using Ai to enhance copywriters efficiency and ensure that we’re not missing an angle important to our audience – rather than pumping a headline into Ai and letting it generate blind content.

That’s a tall order for SMB’s and requires focused investment. It’s also why you find so much low-quality content online.

Many SEO companies ‘game the system’ by generating content solely to manipulate search rankings. Those that have relied on AI-generated content began feeling the pain. Some sites received ‘Pure Spam’ notifications via Google Search Console and found their sites had disappeared from search results. 
If you’re shopping for an SEO provider, ask them about how sites they manage weathered the March update. Ask for references. And, inquire about these three practices that Google now considers content spam:

1. Templated Content Scaling – Scaled Content AbuseThis is an SEO tactic increasingly used by SEO Agencies and Consultants to manipulate search rankings. This includes mass-produced content created to game rankings, whether human or AI-generated. Learn more about  in this article from our friends at Embryo. Thankfully, Google is taking on cringeworthy content in favor of useful information that people value. It’s all about helping you, the user, find well curated, helpful and original content.
Google spam policies list specific examples of scaled content abuse which include:

• Using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value for users
• Scraping feeds, search results, or other content to generate many pages (including through automated transformations like synonymizing, translating, or other obfuscation techniques), where little value is provided to users
• Stitching or combining content from different web pages without adding value
• Creating multiple sites with the intent of hiding the scaled nature of the content
• Creating many pages where the content makes little or no sense to a reader but contains search keywords

Google recommends that, “if you’re hosting such content on your site, exclude it from search.” We couldn’t agree more.

2. Expired Domain AbuseExpired domain abuse is a particularly nasty practice that involves repurposing expired domains to host low-quality content to manipulate search rankings. The practice has been growing over the past two years driving ethical SEO professionals crazy. Google aims to end this practice by punishing clearly irrelevant domains when comparing their old content to new content.

3. Parasite SEO – Site Reputation AbuseParasite SEO refers to a digital marketing strategy where unethical marketers leverage the authority of established platforms to rank their content quickly with less effort, typically by posting content on these platforms with backlinks to their own websites.
The practice involves piggybacking on trusted sites' authority to boost low content volume and/or poor quality content. Typically low-quality content is hosted on high-authority websites to gain ranking benefits.
The March 2024 update specifically targets this practice, aiming to remove the incentive for using reputable sites to rank low-value content. At the SERP conference last week, Gary Illyes, analyst on the Google search team, said that Google has taken steps to combat what some of us call parasite SEO in the most recent Google algorithm update.
Manual penalties have already come down from Google with many sites being removed from search results specifically for parasite SEO practices.

Moving Forward
Successful SEO content development must be fully focused on people-first, original content that delivers value from the users perspective. To accomplish this, we recommend that content developers:

• Leverage propriety data to stand-out and provide authentic value.
• Offer expert insights based on unique, real-world interactions.
• Develop your content from unique experiences that can't be easily replicated.
  

If you’re struggling to gain or rebuild your search rankings, our experts are ready to help build your online presence. Learn more at GreyPartners.com