Google and SEO Ranking Factors
There are hundreds of factors Google uses to evaluate websites and where they should rank in the search engine. With over a billion websites, reaching a certain rank may seem impossible with everyone fighting for the top.
On top of that, these factors are always changing. There’s always a new factor to add to your list of SEO techniques, and a new direction to point to when adjusting your website.
Thankfully, once you get your mind wrapped around SEO and are consistently adding content to your site, these factors become more user-friendly.
What you already have integrated into your website will work as an SEO base for what comes next with Google and SEO rankings. Making adjustments accordingly feels less impossible when you have these ranking signals under your website’s belt.Publishing high-quality content will always be a significant Google and SEO ranking factor.
Continue to add value to the pages you create and the blog posts you write- thin content on your site will be a burden on your Google rank.
Quality content is about writing website pages that increase the time spent on your page by users, lower bounce rate, and are generally helpful towards what the user is on your site for.
User experience has an impact on SEO rankings, and if users aren’t gaining anything from your website then they will stop engaging. Search engines look at dwell time as a factor to see the number of time users spend on your site before going back to search engine results. Site architecture, essentially the layout of your site and how the internal pages are coded, has a large impact on user experience, and therefore, Google and SEO Rankings.
Along with being well-written and long-form, content pages have several areas they need to cover to increase their presence for SEO rankings.
Search intent, keyword research, voice search, and snippets are additions to the well-written page as they are searchable by Google bots in accordance with Google rankings.
Steering towards the users’ needs for your website keeps them coming back for more. Research your Google Analytics to see what is getting clicks to better understand what your website is used for.
Keywords support quality content creation by correlating the search volume of certain words and phrases and the click-through rate for your users, working as a content roadmap for your pages.
Rich snippets for your posts and pages work as a front door to your site, take advantage of this and use keywords and high-quality summarization skills to draw users in.
Technology today has led us to artificial intelligence assistants who can run a search based on a question that is asked of them. From the sound of the user’s voice, this newer technology will interpret the words and synchronize them into a search engine, and hopefully, provide the answer they wanted. This proves the need for optimizing for voice search on your website, with the ability to understand how people ask things out loud and their intent on the technology provided.
On-page optimization, like internal link structure and authoritative backlinks, enhance SEO ranking signals.
Internal link structure helps users and search engines find pages. The strategy is linking to different pages on your site, driving traffic to a fundamental set of pages. Link structure can help guide users toward the call-to-action, signing up for a newsletter, or purchasing a product.
Backlinks form credibility to your website by providing Google with lots of relevant information to your site. This credibility is formed because you are linking to another website within yours (while internal links are just links within your website), which virtually says to Google that you provide the information of both websites. Link-building strategies like client case studies, infographics, industry surveys, and free tools are an active signal for Google and SEO rankings.
Google and SEO ranking factors all flow together and build one huge index for your website optimization.
While the SEO game continuously changes, building this foundation will make it easier to stay with or ahead of your competitors.
