SEO is still one of the most effective online marketing strategies for your website. If you are new to SEO, it can be difficult to understand the process and what you should be doing to optimize for ranking factors. There are so many ranking factors that it’s very difficult for one person to know them all. Hiring a top digital marketing company will be able to guide how to implement SEO tactics to rank highly for these important search terms in popular locations like San Francisco.
Search engines use various factors to rank your website on their results page. Using these factors, your website can be highly ranked if you fulfill and optimize it properly for them. After all, the goal of SEO is to get the highest rank on the search engine results page. Therefore, it is crucial to know what these factors are and how you can optimize for them.
10 Crucial SEO Ranking Factors: How to Optimize for Them
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Using Top Quality Content
Having high-quality content on your site helps you boost the engagements with the user and appeal to search engines. Ensure that you publish high-quality and recent content on your website regularly. Content is one of the essential SEO ranking factors. Search engines aim to provide top-quality content to the visitors, and to do this, they rank the websites with comprehensive, well-researched and crafted top content ranks. When you have fresh content, the crawlers are attracted to your website. It improves the search visibility of your website and enables you to share something valuable with your audience.
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The user engagement
To determine which pages they should promote on the SERP, search engines turn to users. How do the users interact with the results? This information is helping the search engine determine which pages the searchers are more interested in. Google achieves this with the help of Rank Brain, an artificial intelligence tool. The user engagement factors are click-through rate (CTR), bounce rate, and time on site. To optimize your site for user engagements, your content and search snippets need to be on point. Therefore;
- Ensure that your graphics and website design are of high quality
- Ensure that the architecture of your website is easy to follow and natural
- To helps users easily navigate, use internal links throughout your website
- Ensure you add meta tag SEO to have compelling descriptions and titles on your search results.
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The speed of the page load
This is another factor that relates to the user experience. When your website has a slow loading speed, it leaves a user with an unpleasant experience. People want to find an answer as fast as possible, and the search engines know that. Therefore, they present the ones that have a faster loading time. In mobile sites, Google introduced an additional factor that would make loading speed ranking mobile searches.
Site speed checkers can be used to ensure that your site loads quickly. This can be Amazon’s Alexa speed analysis tool or Pagespeed Insights tool from Google. You can optimize your graphics to ensure that they do not affect the loading speed of your website. You may also implement website caching, reducing the number of redirects, compressing files, and other measures to ensure faster loading of your website.
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Right target keywords
Ensure that you do not create content blindly. Create strategic content through performing keyword research. This tells you what keywords to target and topics that you can cover. Today, there are several ways you can optimize for this, as enumerated below.
Having long-tail keywords: the growth in voice search has necessitated the use of long-tail keywords. People search for long questions and phrases. Therefore, ensure that on top of shorter generic keywords, you have long-tail keywords too on your site.
Try to understand the keyword search intent: the search intent explains why a person is searching. Maybe they want to buy something, learn, or navigate to someplace. Understanding how different keywords map to additional content online is an excellent way to optimize your content.
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Backlink profile
For a search engine to gauge how credible and authoritative a website is, they turn to backlinks. How many backlinks point to your site, and what is their quality? This off-page SEO factor has a significant bearing on how the search engine ranks your website. Backlinks are only second to the content in SEO ranking factors.
For your content to rank at the top, a plan to go for top-quality link-building services is needed. You can use practices like link acquisition, guest posting, digital PR, and other strategies for building links.
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Site responsiveness
How does a website look and perform when opened using different screens? Responsive websites provide a good user experience because a user on any device can read the content. Today we conduct more searches on mobile devices than on desktops. Therefore, mobile-friendliness is crucial to both the user and the search engine.
Google’s mobile-friendly test can help you see if your site is responsive. Therefore, use a mobile-responsive theme, avoid flash, strip your content back, change button size and placement, space out your links, among other ways to optimize your site for mobile friendliness.
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Crawlability
If a search engine cannot find a site, it cannot rank it. That is why the crawlability of a website is such an essential SEO ranking factor. When a search engine crawls a website, it can scan and review its content. By this, they can understand the context of the page and how they can rank it.
To optimize for crawlability,
- Present your sitemap to various top search engines
- Examine your website’s index status in the google search console, check the number of pages that have been crawled on your site, and
- Use the robots.txt properly to tell the search engines the web pages they should crawl and the ones to ignore.
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The security of the site
Google discussed the security of a website in 2014 as a factor to be used for ranking. Today it is among the most important ranking factors used by Google. Sites having HTTPS encryption are secured with an SSL certificate. This ensures that there is secure communication between them and the users.
The search engines aim to drive users to the most secure and trustworthy sites. HTTPS encryption is an indicator of how safe a site is. Therefore, ensure that the URL of your website begins with HTTPS to show that you have an SSL certificate installed.
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Structured data
If a website uses structured data, it becomes easy for a search engine to tell what the site is about. Hence, they can rank it accordingly. Schema mark-up or structured data is the metadata added to a webpage’s backend that tells the search engine how to interpret and classify content in the website.
It is a top-ranking factor for SEO because it tells the search engine the crucial thing about a page. You can also use it for leading to the featured snippet search. This can boost the click-through rate and favorably improve the rankings.
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Consistent business listings
If a search engine believes a brand is authoritative, credible, and trustworthy, they rank them at the top. How established does a brand appear online? Search engines increase the search visibility of brands that appear more established online; thus, business listings are crucial.
Sometimes referred to as citations, business listings are the primary SEO ranking factor. To optimize for the business listings:
- Register for Google My Business page
- Set business profiles up on the directory sites that are sector related, and
- Ensure the name, address, and phone number (NAP) details are consistent across your business profile.
Conclusion
Have you optimized your website for the SEO ranking factors? Having seen the SEO ranking factors above, you must make optimizations to your website. This helps you get ranked at the top of the SERP. As a result, you will have more organic traffic, driving sales a notch higher.
