Well-optimized sites receive more and more traffic over time, and this means more leads and sales. Without performing SEO, your visitors will not be able to find your site, and all your hard work will be wasted. Let’s learn about the ten most crucial SEO ranking factors for Google you need to know.
What is “ranking” in SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which means that web pages are more likely to rank on search engines.
And how exactly does it work?
In SEO, ranking depicts the position of your content on search engine result pages (SERPs). Ranking # 1 means that when people search for a particular word, your web page should be on the first result (in addition to the promoted results, special snippets, and answer boxes),
Appearing on the first page is also helpful within the top 10 results. This is because 95% of people never make its presence on the first page.
Google has various deep, complex algorithms that decide which content is displayed and in what order. But we’ll get to all that fun stuff later.
Once your page lands on the SERP, you will have to rely on your page title and meta description to get visitors to click on your link and visit your site.
How does Google search ranking work?
When people want to get data, they type or speak the words related to the words they are looking for. These words are called keywords.
But maintaining your website’s ranking on Google is not just about making the most of competitive keywords but, also about maintaining the quality of information you provide.
According to Google’s own search quality rating, when it indexes the main content of each page, it examines the factors:
- Purpose of the page
- Content Quality and Link Juice
- Information about the content creator and Website information
- Content Creator Reputation and Website Reputation.
- User interaction with the page
- Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T)
What are On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO?
When you talk about SEO ranking factors, you must have heard these 2 terms a lot twice.
On-page SEO refers to the factors you can optimize on your own websites, such as the underlying code and content.
Off-page SEO refers to the action taken outside your site to influence the trustworthiness and authority of your site by building inbound links and social signals. Both types of top SEO rankings are included in the factors.
Top 10 Most Important Ranking Factors for Google SERPs
1. A secure and accessible website
The first of our SEO ranking factors is to keep the URL that Google’s bots can easily access and crawl.
In other words, Google should be able to visit the URL and view the page content to understand that page. To help the bots, you will need:
- A website created by a website builder
- A robots.txt file which tells Google where and how it can view your site’s information
- A sitemap that lists all your pages
If using WordPress site, you can easily set up a sitemap through All in One SEO. If not, you can also use an online sitemap generator for the same. Although HTTPS is not a factor in deciding whether to index a page or not, but it is a light-weight ranking factor.
3. Mobile-Friendliness
Mobile-friendliness is another major SEO ranking factor as many people use mobile devices than desktops to access the web, and one reason for this is how Google ranks search results.
Google’s mobile-first index is now a reality, meaning that Google draws its results from mobile-optimized sites, rather than standard sites, compared to desktop versions. If your site is not mobile-optimized, you have the risk of being unduly ranked.
Things to include:
- A responsive site that automatically sizes itself to fit
- Use larger fonts for easier readability on smaller screens
- Include accessible navigation menus, so your site is easy to navigate
- Ensure that advertisements do not hide the required content
- Find out more about mobile-friendly design to improve Google search rankings in our guide to improve your mobile conversion rate.
4. Domain Age, URL, and Authority
Did you know that about 60% of sites with the top ten Google search rankings are three years older? Data from a study of two million pages show that very few sites under a year achieve that ranking.
Also, in some other cases, domain names matter. Although Google has penalized exact-match domains (for those where the target keywords are in the URL), the penalty is generally for spam sites with trash content. When it comes to SERPs factors, authority matters, as you see, It’s generally a combination of great content and off-page SEO signals.
5. Customized Material
Google’s search algorithm strongly relies on keywords. Keywords are the words and phrases visitors use when they are looking for information. They are also words and phrases that describe your site.
There is a negative SEO ranking factor to be aware of duplicate content. For Search Engine Optimization, fresh and original content is always the best. And if you have such content, tell Google who should be considered the most authoritative using the canonical URL.
It is important to note that as more people search by voice, content optimization includes optimization for queries and natural language searches. This means that some LSI keywords will be longer because people speak differently than they type.
6. Technical SEO
Here are some aspects you can control even if you are not a coder:
- Add keyword phrases to the page headers that Google first sees to determine which content is relevant to which search
- Use the header tag to show the content hierarchy starting with its title in h1 and then use h2 or h3 for the subhead
- Create a meta description that captivates both readers and includes your keyword phrase
- Keep those meta descriptions short and attractive at around 160 characters
- Use keyword phrases in the image’s tag to show how relevant they are to the main content.
- Include alt tags to people who are visually impaired and use your site with certain screenreaders
- Schema markup to tell Google what type of content you are producing
7. User Experience (RankBrain)
People come to your site; if they don’t like it, they can bounce to the other one, due to which Google thinks your site won’t be relevant to fulfill the needs of your audience. If enough people do this, you may feel a little bit more difficulty for your site to be ranked in a higher position in search results.
Conversely, if people click on your web page and stick around for a while, it states to Google that your content is relevant to their search.
So when you optimize the title, description, and content to get clicks and give value to the other end, you can quickly boost your search engine rankings.
8. Linking
As we said in the beginning, the web is built on the link. So, naturally, links are an important SEO ranking signal. There are three types of links to think about:
- Inbound link
- Outbound link
- Internal link
The trio is usually tied to a descriptive anchor text.
9. Inbound link
Google uses inbound links to help determine how authoritative and relevant your content is.
Your goal is to get many highly authoritative sites to link back to you. It also means that you need very few incoming links from low-quality domains. You can find your inbound links using tools like SEMRush or any keyword research tool.
10. Outbound link
You can show that you create quality content for your visitors by including outbound links – by linking to relevant, official sites in your niche.
Does it mean that you should just give outbound links to promote your authority? No way. It means that you should only pull from reliable sources with high domain authority while researching the same. You should probably do this to ensure that you provide the most valued content in your niche for your users.
Bonus: Social Signals
When audience shares your content on social networks, it’s another sign for Google that your site is valuable. However, Google’s official words are that social shares are not a direct ranking factor. Links to Twitter or Facebook are not counted as links to other official websites.
The highest-ranking pages in Google search results usually have a lot of shares. However, this is probably due to some related factors:
- More social shares generate more traffic itself
- More shares produce more content backlinks
- Because of that, gaining more social shares helps you to increase your search engine rankings.
Therefore not only do you need a social media presence on your own, but you also need to make it convinent for your audience to share your content to grab higher rankings. If you want to optimize your SEO ranking among major search engines, call us. Our experts will give you a free consultation over call and help you to grow your business.