Currently, there are 1.9 billion sites in existence today. While the websites you’re competing with will depend on your industry, this number indicates that you may still have millions of pages to contend with on Google. To do so, you will need to take steps to optimize your website for key ranking factors.
Here are the things you need to know to improve your digital marketing and rank higher on Google:
What Are Google Ranking Factors?
These are the elements of your website that Google takes into account when ranking your page in a search query. Google simplifies its definition of ranking factors into 5 components:
● Meaning of your query
● Relevance of webpages
● Quality of content
● Usability of webpages
● Context and settings
SEO is an essential investment for any business that wants to leverage organic search to generate more traffic. According to this study, the first five search results occupy 67% of all clicks made on Google.
SEO Factors You Need To Know
Now that you know what Google ranking factors are and why you need them, let’s delve a little deeper into your website's most important SEO factors. Keep in mind that these are not the only SEO factors. There are hundreds of SEO factors to think about. Of course, it would take some time to sort through all of them. That’s why we’re looking into these 9 SEO factors that significantly impact your website.
Mobile-First Optimization
Mobile is now the most used portal of users to the Internet. With over 92.4 percent of all Internet users owning a smartphone, it’s no wonder why Google made mobile-first interfaces a critical ranking factor for websites.
If people don’t like your website’s mobile interface, then they’re likely to leave at first glance. Your website should be optimized for mobile users to improve user experience across all platforms. If you do this, Google won’t have any reason to bump you down their search result pages.
Site Speed
For a typical user, site speed is a vital factor. After all, no one wants to spend so much time on a slow website. To improve user experience and the quality of search results, Google implemented Core Web Vitals. This initiative provides a “unified guidance for quality signals” to enhance user experience on the Internet.
These vitals are subdivided into three categories:
● Largest Contentful Paint: A good website will load for less than 2.5 seconds as you click it from Google’s results page. This reduces the number of people clicking away from your website.
● First Input Delay: This category assesses how quickly your site will respond to any interaction, such as button clicks. A good website will respond to interaction for 100 milliseconds or less.
● Cumulative Layout Shift: Your website should load all of its elements simultaneously. Otherwise, it will negatively impact a user’s website experience. To do this, you have to ensure that elements such as images are constantly updated. Furthermore, animations should be configured to run at the same speeds.
Quality Content
Don’t just create blogs and other content for the sake of it. Google is known to prioritize quality and value-rich content over poorly-quality ones. But, how will you know if you’re creating content that Google deems high-quality?
One way to do it is to research what kind of questions and searches your target market is doing. You can scour forums like Quora, and social media pages, and even use keyword research tools like Ubersuggest.
Leverage this information and create content around them, so Google will rank your blogs higher on its search results pages.
Links, Links, Links
Only 9% of the world’s websites are getting traffic from Google. The reason behind this problem is simple: they don’t use backlinks.
Backlinks can include:
● Inbound links: These are links from other websites to your content.
● Outbound links: These are links that go to other websites as references.
These links are essential for your SEO ranking since it increases your authority as a resource for readers.
Age and Authority of Your Domain
Domain age still has an impact on your ranking. While this is impossible to change without the passage of time, you can still improve your authority by including resources from industry experts and providing social proof. Using links to trusted websites and improving your security are also great ways to increase your authority.
Technical SEO
Finally, you should also pay close attention to your website’s technical SEO, which includes a wide array of things such as keywords, tags, and schema markup. While the task may sound daunting, improving your technical SEO is relatively straightforward. Just use relevant keywords, headers, and proper metadata in your content.
Other SEO Factors
There are other factors you need to consider as well, such as:
● Longer Content
● Including Your Contact Details in Your Website
These factors reduce your website’s bounce rate, increase authority, and make you more trustworthy. For instance, an “About Us” page with your contact details will make you more credible and reduce the number of people running away from your website.
Improve Your Digital Marketing and SEO With liquidfish
All of these steps take some time to accomplish. It will take skills to transform a website into an SEO-optimized one. Thankfully, liquidfish offers SEO services that handle all the heavy lifting for you.
Our work has helped numerous clients optimize their websites for SEO. If you want to be one of them, please contact our team today.