Optimized sites get more traffic which means more leads and sales. Without SEO services, the potential audience won’t find your place as you won’t be ranking at the top of SERP. And, 57% of organic goes to the top three sites.
In this blog, we will be sharing the ten most important ranking factors that help to dominate Google search. By the end of this post, you would know what to optimize in your site to boost your ranking.
Which are the most Important SEO Ranking Factors in Google?
1. Secure and optimized website.
2. Page speed.
3. Mobile friendliness.
4. Domain age, URL, and authority
5. Well-optimized content
6. Technical SEO
7. User experience (RankBrain)
8. Quality links
9. Good social signals
10. Real Business Information (NAP)
Before going on to discuss the detail of the main factors, let us see -how Google ranks a site?
Google wants to gather and organize information to make it useful and accessible to anyone. Delivering relevant search result is a crucial part of it. How do they do it?
Google search bots come to your website and crawl the pages. The correctly optimized and accessible pages are indexed and stored in their system. It is where the importance of meta description and the title becomes vital to help Google and users understand your pages better.
When anyone searches a relevant on Google, it shows the most appropriate result out of the indexed pages. To rank a site, Google checks the following quality factors -
l The purpose of the page.
l Expertise, authority, and credibility.
l Content quality and length.
l Site information and author.
l Site’s reputation and author identity.
These quality factors go to the algorithm before giving the SEO ranking. So, it is essential for any website to have excellent on-page and off-page SEO activities to get the top ranking in the search result. But, the sad truth is no one can guarantee the high ranking despite optimizing everything.
Without delay, let us delve deep into the main Google ranking factors in 2019.
1. Secure and optimized website
Having a well-optimized site is the first step towards ranking high. It should start with having an optimized URL so that Google’s bot can come and crawl quickly. To help Google algorithm understand your page use a robot.txt file to allow and disallow crawling of your information.
A sitemap of your site gives information of pages to be indexed. HTTPS, which marks a site as secure, isn’t a ranking factor but gives a little weigh to your site’s ranking.
2. Page Speed
Page speed is one of the major ranking SEO ranking factors for years in Google. It is an integral part of Google’s effort to offer a good user experience on the web, and fast loading pages helping to improve that. There is hardly anyone who loves to wait for a page to load longer than 4 seconds. Optimizing the website pages is an integral process of SEO services in India and other locations for fast load time in both desktop and mobile devices.
3. Mobile Friendliness
Mobile friendliness is another crucial ranking factor as Google started giving separate search ranking for mobile versions. With the rising use of mobile devices in search, Google has brought many changes to how a site ranks. Mobile-first index is a reality now as it ranks mobile-optimized sites higher.
Here are the top things to look into your site -
l Check responsiveness of your site.
l Use mobile-optimized fonts for more readability.
l Accessibility and navigability on small devices.
l Mobile friendly design with visibility of contents.
4. Domain Age, URL, and Authority
AHREFS studied two million pages and found that domains with less than a year old rank less than 3-year-old ones. If you had been for a while, there is more chance of ranking high.
5. Optimized Content
Contents optimized for SEO rank faster than others. Certain things need to be kept in mind while writing SEO optimized contents with keywords, synonyms, and describe the topic nicely. Use the Latent semantic indexing properly using closely related terms in the content to help Google understand your post better. Keyword stuffing is outlawed now and would draw a penalty from Google.
Apart from that, you must understand the persona of the targeted audience. It will help you write and optimize your contents better. Use the search intent of the audience to create more engagement and conversion. You can frame content around questions and answers to deliver the right information seeking by the audience.
Several studies have found the length of the contents influence the ranking in search result. The contents over 1700 get more top 10 ranking than others.
6. Technical SEO
Technical SEO activities form a significant part of the optimization process of the site. Here are some of the optimization done in this part -
Use keyword phrases in page titles to increase content relevancy.
Use header tags to show content hierarchy with H1, H2, H3, and subheadings.
Write optimized meta description to attract readers with keywords. Keep it short and eye-catchy, not more than 160 characters.
Use Alt tags to describe images to rank in Google image search.
Use schema markup to tell more about your contents to Google.
7. User Experience
Google has been using artificial intelligence (RankBrain) to rank web pages better. The top RankBrain signals are -
l Clickthrough rate
l Bounce rate
l Dwell time.
If your site faces low CTR, high bounce rate, and low dwell time, your website will be difficult to rank higher in the top. People are going away from the site because they are not getting what they came looking for.
8. Links
Links are one of the top three ranking factors in Google search result. But, the links need to be natural, not paid, to get a good ranking signal. You can create three types of links -
l Inbound links
l Outbound links
l Internal links
But, inbound links are more important as they determine your authority and relevancy of contents. Use SEO tools like SEMRush to find out link profile and where to build to rank your site better.
9. Social Signals
Social shares and likes are important social signals. The contents which get more shares and likes are most likely to rank in the top of SERP. Though social signals are not a direct ranking factor, yet they influence your ranking and engagement. If your contents get shared, it is more likely to get likes from genuine users which amplify your social signals. Further, it helps in determining your social media presence.
10. Real Business Information
Mentioning of real business information is essential especially for the local stores. Submitting the exaction business information to Google is a necessary part of SEO services in Delhi to dominate local search ranking. It should contain the following -
l Exact name, address, and phone number.
l Business listing on Google My Business and Facebook.
l And others.
Conclusion
Google uses more than 200 ranking factors to determine the position of a website in search result. But, these are the most critical factors that may help in increasing your ranking quickly. Use them in your site to optimize and get better results.