As more businesses shift their focus to digital marketing, staying on top of the ever-evolving Google ranking system can feel like a challenge. To ensure that your business earns the attention it deserves and drives more traffic, it’s essential to stay on top of the 11 critical Google ranking factors.
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Quality of Content: Quality and relevant content not only helps to establish your website as an authority but it also influences visitors to stay on your website longer, reducing bounce rate and improving user experience. Ensure the content is fresh, interesting and engaging enough to keep visitors coming back for more.
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Relevance: Relevance is essential in optimizing your website for Google search. Ensure both your content and overall website are pertinent to the keywords, topics and searches you are trying to rank for.
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Mobile Optimization: Having a website that looks and functions just as well on a mobile device as it does on a desktop or laptop is becoming increasingly important, especially with Google’s Mobile-first Index. Ensuring your website is properly optimized for users on mobile devices will help you to rank higher and earn more organic search traffic.
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User Experience and Page Speed: User experience is another major factor. Ensure your website looks professional, offers an enjoyable user experience and is easily digestible for both human and automated users. Page load speed is also important and can have a huge impact on search rankings.
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Structure: A properly structured website both in terms of content and links helps to create a logical flow and improve the user experience. This can help improve your macro and micro conversions, significantly increasing your organic search traffic.
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Domain Authority: The age, size and quality of your domain have a huge impact on your Google rankings. If you own several websites with a variety of content, you should ensure each site is linked and they all have the same contact information.
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Keywords: Researching the appropriate keywords to use throughout your website is essential in earning organic search traffic. Make sure that your content includes the most pertinent keywords related to the topics that you are covering.
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Image Optimization: Images can often be overlooked, but actually performing proper image optimization can help to bring in organic search traffic and lead to higher rankings. Be sure to include alt tags and descriptive filenames for all the images you are using on your website.
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Internal and External Links: Linking to authority sources and other related websites can help boost your credibility and improve overall SEO ranking. Similarly, adding internal hyperlinks helps visitors navigate your website easily, thus improving the user experience.
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Social Signals: Google also takes into consideration the amount of shares and likes your website or content has on social media. Leveraging social accounts can help to boost traffic as well as bring in new users.
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SERP Features: Google’s SERP features are becoming increasingly important when optimizing for SEO. Ensure that your content is optimized for features like Answer Boxes, Featured Snippets and Knowledge Graphs in order to stand out from the competition and increase organic search traffic.
By understanding and staying on top of these 11 critical Google ranking factors, you will be better equipped to drive more organic search traffic to your website and capitalize on the ever-evolving digital marketing landscape.