For your business to succeed online, it needs to be findable when people search using terms related to your products or services on Google.
How do you make sure your business is findable on search?
You need to make sure you observe all the Google ranking factors you're about to read in this article.
To rank better in search engines, you can use paid search. But this is sometimes challenging if you are on a tight budget.
All hope is not lost though.
You can still take advantage of organic rankings to increase your visibility online. That's why you need to know what factors Google uses to rank websites.
Generally, Google ranking factors can be classified into three groups namely:
On-page ranking factors: These are ranking factors that are measured within your pages.
Off-page ranking factors: These are the opposite of the first group above. They are measured outside your website- They include quality backlinks, etc.
Technical ranking factors: These are ranking factors measured within your site and involve the overall performance of your website on the internet. Before you check website ranking, you need to make sure you implement a combination of the three groups above.
That said, here are the Google ranking factors you need to know.
Without keywords, your SEO strategy is as good as dead. Typically, keywords are the terms people enter into their browsers when looking for information on the web.
To target search effectively, you need to conduct keyword research. This enables you to understand the exact terms people are using when searching for products or services in your industry.
Once you find valuable keywords to target people with, write high-quality content then add these keywords naturally.
Remember that no matter how many times you use your target keywords, Google will never rank poor quality content.
According to Google, your web pages should open content in under 1.3 seconds for mobile users. If your website takes forever to load then you need to fix that before it's too late.
A website that takes too long will attract a higher bounce rate which ultimately affects your Google rankings.
As a rule, you should always test and improve your website speed. There are free tools you can use out there such as GTmetrix, PageSpeed Insights, and many others.
65% of all searches on the internet are done on mobile. That's why Google introduced mobile-first-indexing. So, generally, your website needs to be accessible on mobile and desktop users with ease.
The good thing is that with the most popular content management systems, you can see whether your content is mobile-friendly even before you publish it.
You can also test your website for free using Google's Mobile-Friendly Test tool and make the suggested improvements to optimize your site for mobile and desktop users.
Google wants users to have a positive experience while browsing the web. That's why in 2016, the search giant warned that pages with too many intrusive ads would not rank better as those without them.
This means that when building your website/creating your content, you should make sure it is beneficial to the users and can be accessed with ease.
To provide a positive user experience to searchers, follow the rules below:
• Make your content easy to read.
• Organize your website structure.
• Keep your design as responsive as possible.
• Avoid using intrusive ads.
• Make your content as useful as possible.
Backlinks are also powerful Google ranking factors. When websites link to yours, it shows that your website doesn't only produce high-quality content but is also trustworthy.
This sends a good signal to Google that your website is useful and authoritative as well. However, you need to make sure you're getting backlinks from relevant authoritative websites.
Remember that Google ranking factors are many. These are just a few of the most well-known that are still effective today.