Ranking highly on Google is important for any business. It’s common knowledge that the websites that appear on the first page of Google get more interaction than those who appear on the following pages. In this blog, we’re telling you about Google’s SEO ranking factors.
Google ranks websites based on over 200 different factors, but they don’t all have the same prominence when deciding where websites rank on Google. Some factors are definitely more important than others and they are the ones that we are going to focus on in this blog.
Google My Business
Your Google My Business profile is a huge factor in your website’s ranking. Not only is it important to have a business profile set up, it’s also really important that all of the information included on it is always up to date and that you are interacting with people where necessary. Google My Business massively helps your business’ local SEO, which is becoming very important through people using search queries including ‘near me’.
Backlinks
Backlinks are very effective when they are used correctly. High quality backlinks can be hard to obtain, but they are much more valuable than backlinks from unreliable sites. Backlinks can also be gained through guest blogging on other sites. Guest blogging involves you contacting a business and asking if you can blog for them in return for a link back to your own website.
Mobile optimisation
Mobiles are officially used more than desktops for browsing the web now and that’s why Google has decided to make mobile optimisation a ranking factor. Mobile optimisation is all about how well your website works on a phone, for example if the website changes its layout to fit the smaller screen size. This factor has only just been rolled in September of 2020 and Google has admitted its ‘mobile first’ indexing, meaning that sites that are optimised for mobiles will appear higher than those who aren’t.
Keyword usage
Keywords are a huge part of your website’s SEO, not only is it important to include them but it’s really important to ensure that they are being used in the correct places on your site. You should try to include keywords in your meta descriptions and blogs.
Behaviour
The behaviour of your users can be tracked using tools such as Google Analytics. Google Analytics tracks behaviours such as click through rates and bounce rates, which are important for the success of your website. For your website to have a low bounce rate, you need to ensure that the information on your site is meaningful and answers the queries that users are searching for. This is another reason why keywords are important to ensure that your site is being ranked for the most relevant terms.
User experience
User experience should be high on your priority list for your website, you can’t expect users to stay on a website that doesn’t work very well. A huge part of user experience is your website’s page speed. Users don’t like to wait very long for content to load and Google will punish you for a high bounce rate.
We hope this blog has been useful on Google’s SEO ranking factors, if you’d like any more SEO advice, don’t hesitate to contact us.