The top 8 Google Ranking Factors for SEO
1. Publish High-Quality Content
The quality of your website and blog content is still very important. Your content needs to provide valuable information. Even big names like eBay and Apple don’s deserve the content crown. Thin content has hurt both brands in the past.
High-quality content is about creating pages that increase time on page, reduce bounce rate, and provide users with useful content. Blog pages like this and guides like this are the type of high-quality content that users want from searh engines.
High-quality content pages have to do more for today’s SEO than just be well-written and long-form. This must also consider the following factors in order to increase the presence in the SERPs.
2. Make Your Site Mobile-First
Mobile-first indexing was officially finalized in March 2021. It’s been a long andslow process since its launch in 2017.
In addition, mobile-first indexing is how Google indexes in your website. If you have a separate mobile website, your mobile site’s URL will be indexed and used for ranking, not in the desktop version.
In short, there is no separate mobile-first index. Google indexes and ranks your content that comes directly from the mobile version of your website.
3. Enhance Page Experience
- Improve Your User Experience
User experience (UX) can give an impact on SEO, as we have seen with the recent updates to Page Experience. There will be 38% of people will stop engaging using your website if the content and layout are not attractive.
Getting the website attractive can bring great benefits. As a digital marketing agency, a 66% increase in page views to their profile pages through updated content and improved call-to-action buttons. A great user experience that perfectly matches your SEO if you wish to be successful in the SERPs.
- Site Architecture
Website architecture is a relevant part of the user experience and has a major impact on SEO. A great website architecture not only does site architecture help users find what they are looking for through better website navigation, and it is also help search engine crawlers find more pages on a website. This was able to increase organic sessions by 74% and pages per session by 41%.
Briefly, your websites should be very easy to use. All pages and navigation should be laid out as simply as possible.
It should take a user only three to four clicks to find any page on a website. While this isn’t always possible on large sites, there are ways to help users search and find pages internally to ensure they find what they need. These are the ways to help users search and find pages internally to ensure users find what they are looking for. As a better page experience, the site architecture will definitely increase SERPs.
- Core Web Vitals
This metric impacts many other factors related to SEO. For instance, Core Web Vitals can affect your availability. If a searcher come to your page and converts, your user experience, page speed, and content all affect the conversion rate. Core Web Vitals were created to help you provide a better user experience for your users.
- Create a Secure Website (HTTPS)
About 30% of the first page of Google search results use HTTPS. In 2017, Google announced that its Chrome browser (which 45% of us use) would start marking sites as “not secure” in the URL bar when they are not HTTPS.
Thus, after they make these announcements, you could start to view your bounce rate go up. It is all to show that Google considers HTTPS essential.
Although, switching to HTTPS (and SSL, as they work together) can also bring a lot of canonicalization issues for your site if done incorrectly. While it doesn’t show a significant impact on SEO by itself, a Chrome update might mean (by the experience) that it’s worth switching your website.
- Ad Experience
Ad Experience was launched in 2017 and targeted Chrome users. If you are violate the Better Ads Standard, Chrome might remove all ads from your website. Chrome also now influences website owners to run aggressive ads as well.
Chrome could remove all the advertisements from your website if you are in violation of Better Ads Standards. Chrome could now impact website owners by running aggressive ads. Ad Experience is linked to page experience and Core Web Vitals because it is influenced by the user experience and how the user interacts with your website.
4. Optimize Your Page Speed
After becoming a desktop-only ranking factor, page speed became a Google mobile ranking factor in 2018. The slower your website loads, the more visitors and the more revenue you might lose.
Just like Amazon, in just one second, annual sales could reach $1.6 billion. Based on British publication The Daily Telegraph found that a 4-second delay may cause reduced page views by 11.02%.
You also can use tools to test your website average page speed. The faster loading pages result in a better overall website experience, so Google uses it as a mobile ranking factor.
5. Master Your On-Page Optimization
Closely related to on-page experience is on-page optimization. These factors have been around for years and still have a significant impact on your website visibility and SERP positions for your target keyword topics.
Optimizing your website can help search engines and users find your existing high-quality content faster. These are just a few of the ways that on-page optimization will still have a major impact for years to come:
- Metadata
This information includes your title tag and page descriptions – the information users will see your website in the SERPs. Google sometimes extracts content from a page and dynamically inserts it into the SERP as a description when it better matches a user’s inquiry.
At the moment, write the best titles and descriptions for your pages. There are many more meta tags to know in SEO. Simply adding a specific met tag could lead to a 300% increase in traffic from Google Discover.
- Schema
Schema markup is another “hidden” component of a website that informs search engines more about your content.
Created in 2011, you can now include nearly 600 different types of information. Patterns make it easier for search engines to identify basic information on a website. Schema markup helps Google display rich snippets in search results, making it an essential part of SEO.
- Featured Snippets
Featured snippets, sometimes referred to as coveted Position 0, are a snippet of content extracted from the page copy and served directly in search results.
If you want to get featured snippets, you need to understand the search intent behind the query you want to rank for featured snippet.
If you are able to provide more valuable content behind the search query, search engines will serve your content in the featured snippet.
- Google Discover
Google Discover is one of the emerging content-related SEO factors. Google Discover has the potential to generate more organic traffic than stand search results.
You able to check your are currently ranking in Google Discover, and check your reports in Google Search Console.
6. Internal Link Structure
An internal link structure helps users and search engines find pages easier. The following are the priorities of the internal link structure in five different areas:
- Helping users.
- Managing link flow (e.g., where the traffic goes once it gets to your site).
- Building a roadmap around specific content topics.
- Canonicals.
- Prioritizing indexing of particular pages.
This means is that your strategy for linking to different pages on your website should be user-centered first. You also can focus on how to drive traffic to a fundamental set of pages.
7. Earn Relevant & Authoritative Links
Links will continue to be one of the leading SEO components if you want to rank well. You may ignore for those who say you can achieve successful without inbound links (backlinks).
While some websites absolutely can and have, it would be silly not to pursue any effective strong link building strategy. Since each industry is unique, each industry has a variety of link-building opportunities. While links may lose their value for decades, they are still an active ranking.
8. Local
Google divides local status into three ranking factors.
- Relevance
Relevance is related to how close a business is to the searcher’s inquiry. When it comes to local search relevancy, you might see search best inquiry, however relevance is great of Google’s native algorithm.
Your business information, such as Google My Business, Bing Places listings) is associated with your NAP (Name, Address, Phone number) and other key attributes related to your business. Going through all the detailed business information in these directories to help search engines better understand your business and its relevance to searchers is important.
- Distance
Distance refers to the physical distance between your business and the searcher. The closer your business is to searchers, the more likely that location will appear in local map results. This is where the “near me” search inquiry comes into focus.
- Prominence
Prominence is related to the popularity of your business offline. Google tells us exactly what they look for when measuring popularity. Awareness is also based on information Google obtains about businesses from around the website (links, articles, directories). Google review count and review score factors into local search rankings. A lot of reviews and positive reviews can improve your business’s local rankings. Position in website results is also a factor, that search engine optimization (SEO) is also best practices you may apply.