How would you achieve excellence in a world where there are currently over 1.8 billion websites?
Today, every website is vying for a higher Google search engine ranking. Google evaluates websites using thousands of ranking factors. Knowing where to direct your SEO strategy will have the biggest impact.
Google is constantly changing its ranking factors to better meet user needs. Because of this, you may rank high on Google with a little innovation and SEO knowledge. Even the most recent SEO trends are backed by the existing algorithm. Some of the most significant Google ranking elements are listed below:
1. Content is crucial:
In today’s digital age, content is king. Marketing objectives can be achieved by publishing relevant, high-quality content.
What do we mean when we say “high-quality content”?
A high-quality content is more than just well-written and lengthy. The kind of high-quality information that users and search engines seek must be comprehensive, useful, helpful, educational, and, most importantly, accurate in order to clearly respond to the user’s search query.
It is useless to create pages that have little to no real value because the Google Panda and Fred algorithm improvements will quickly detect them. Whereas, producing pages with high-quality content, reduces bounce rates, boosts user engagement, and provides educational informative content.
You must first understand the user’s search intent in order to write content that is appropriate for a high-quality page. By selecting primary keywords and grouping them into proper categories for your searchers, you can additionally target keyword usage.
2. Mobile-first indexing:
Google prefers to index and rank content that is published on mobile devices, a practice known as “mobile-first indexing.”
You’re probably wondering why I would use mobile indexing. In the past, the index mostly considered content from a page’s desktop version when assessing how relevant it was to a user’s query. However, now you would also agree that the majority of consumers access Google search from their mobile. Google will now exclusively crawl and index pages that are compatible with smartphones. If you have or want to have a mobile website separately, the desktop version won’t be indexed. Instead, the mobile site URL will.
Mobile-first index does not need to be done separately. Automatically, Google will take the content you published in the mobile version and use it to index and rank in Google.
3. Better UX:
User experience (UX) does have an influence on SEO. If you don’t take user experience into consideration, your website will go in vain. In fact, users will leave the website if the content and website design are not appealing.
You must create a user experience that works well with your SEO, in order to rank highly in the SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Pages). So, what exactly is providing a better UX?
A better UX is when the website is user-friendly and easy to navigate. Imagine you are exploring a website, where you have opened one of their service pages but have no idea how to visit the next service page. A site architecture helps users find what they are looking for through a smoother website navigation. In addition, it will also help the search engine crawlers find more pages on a website.
Create a secure website (HTTPS) for better user experience. It protects the integrity of your website and stops hackers from interfering with communications between your websites and the browsers of your users. This apart, Google’s Core Web Vitals is another area that needs to be looked into for better UX. Core Web Vitals are a collection of standardized metrics that show developers how people interact with a website and make changes if needed for better user experience.
4. Page speed:
In today’s time, no one waits for anything that causes delay. Similar principles apply to how quickly a webpage loads. A user will typically exit a page if it takes more than five seconds. Thus, improving page speed should be one of the main factors in order to get top ranking in Google. As a result, increasing page speed ought to be one of the key considerations in order to get top ranking in Google.
5. On-page optimization:
The term on-page optimization or on-page SEO refers to all actions that can be made within the website itself to raise its ranking in the search engine results. This includes optimizing the title tags and meta descriptions, writing in-depth and quality content, heading tags, alt tags, keywords, page topic in URL, better page speed, using images with alternate text and increasing mobile-friendliness.
Your title tag and page descriptions—the details about your website that users see in the SERPs—are examples of metadata information. When the information on the website more closely fits the user’s search, Google will occasionally dynamically insert it as the description in SERPs.
Another “hidden” element of a website that provides search engines with updated data about your content is schema markup. It helps search engines more easily identify the crucial data on a website. Featured snippet is one more factor in on-page optimization, which is basically a summary to the answer of the user’s search. It appears in a block at the top of the search results which is also called ‘Position 0’.
6. Internal links:
Internal linking improves website identification for both users and search engines. However, you must put the needs of your users first when developing your linking strategy. Then, you can concentrate on generating traffic for a basic set of pages.
From registering for your newsletter to requesting a live demo, Explore how your internal link structure can assist users in making the conversion.
7. External links:
If you want to rank well, external links will be one of the most important SEO factors. An external link or backlink in SEO describes links that are created on other websites that refer back to your website. These are evaluated for quantity, quality, and usefulness in view of how they affect your page’s ranking.
Final words:
Ranking factors are not limited to these seven. However, these seven are the top factors that help you perform better in google ranking. The more SEO factors you look and work on, the more chances are that you rank higher in Google. Be it creating a website or helping you rank higher in google searches, Cross Digital is the one-stop hub if you are looking for one of the best digital marketing agencies in Boston. Contact us online or call us today at 888-863-1150 to speak with one of our team members. You can also reach us by email at digital@crossdma.com.