An all-encompassing article on Important Google SEO Ranking Factors.
When we are talking about SEO – we are talking about the most important digital marketing tool. In this article find everything you need to know about SEO ranking factors, that can help your business grow fast and organically.
SEO ranking factors are often listed in lists that are too long because they tend to cover all the potential factors that could affect ranking. While it’s important to have such comprehensive reviews, we think there should be more concise guides that focus only on the essentials. That’s why we’ve put together a list of factors that we consider the most important, and that you must know if you’re interested in SEO for any reason.
Valuable and quality content
We can freely say that content became the king of all sales. For better Google ranking content is extremely important.
Nowadays, Content quality became more important than all other SEO factors together. Google, as the top search engine, has an interest to provide its users to find results they are searching for, the ones that will satisfy their needs and answer their questions. With each algorithm change, the quality of the content becomes more and more important, and that trend will continue. Basically, if the behavior of your site visitors indicates that they found what they were looking for, your content classified as valuable and your site will be ranked better. Google made sure that you have a tool to measure your content value through Google Analytics, where you can find data such as the average time spent on the site or the number of links leading to your site. What do Google Analytics data tell you? One important thing: The more time visitors spend on your site (engagement time), it means that the content you provided them with is high quality and informative.
Depth of content
Google ranking also depends on the depth of the content.
Google wants the results offered to be highly useful, so it’s important to include in your content everything the reader might be interested in. And don’t mix the amount of text you are publishing with its value. The fact that you published a long article does not mean by default that it provides quality information to the audience. Depth of content means providing all the information to an audience on a certain topic.
To gain an advantage on the search engines you need to optimize your content. That includes SEO-optimized headlines and keywords (phrases that are repeated several times throughout the text and are directly related to the title) Optimizing your content depth, then, start by identifying what all the top-ranking results have in common. This does not mean copying others but finding out what is your uniqueness and what’s important to your prospective audience.
You can also pay attention to the “People also ask” and “Related searches” sections that you can frequently see on Google to get more useful ideas.
On-page SEO
This factor has a great impact on Google ranking.
The first thing to notice here is the title. The title, in addition to having to attract the attention of the audience, should contain the key phrase at the very beginning, since this is the part of the title that Google pays the most attention to.
Another important part of on-page SEO is the URL. It should be legible and understandable, and should also contain a key phrase. In addition to this, the general rule is that you should not include years in the URL. For example, if you write about the best games for android devices, you can name your article “Best Android Games of 2022.” The URL shouldn’t include the year, though, because next year you might want to just update, add, and rename that article to “Best Android Games 2023.” On the other hand, if you’re writing about something closely related to a particular year (“The Weirdest Events in 2021”), you’re not going to “recycle” that content, so it’s perfectly fine to include the year in the URL.
Keyword density is one of the most important aspects when it comes to on-page SEO. Keyword phrases should appear enough times in your text that it is clear to Google that the text is relevant to the given keyword phrase. However, this does not mean that the key phrase should be mentioned as many times as possible, because overdoing it (“keyphrase stuffing”) can have negative results. For a text of 2000 words, the optimal number of mentions of the key phrase would be about 10 times.
The length of the text also affects the ranking, and the optimal number of words for one text changes (read “increases”) over time. Currently, it is estimated that the optimal length of a blog article is between 1760 and 2400 words.
A well-written meta description will attract visitors who see your page as a search result to click on it, which will again signal to Google that your page is relevant for a given keyword phrase.
The internal links you place on your page increase the chance of the reader staying on the site longer and help other pieces of content reach your audience more easily. External links are very useful if used in the right way. By linking to relevant and reliable sources, you increase the credibility of your content. Based on links that lead to content relevant to your page, Google will evaluate your page as valuable and improve its ranking.
These are all SEO factors that you can optimize when creating a page, and they can significantly affect final Google ranking.
Backlinks
Backlinks form the basis of PageRank, on which Google’s ranking algorithm is based. The number of backlinks directly affects the position in the Google search results, which was confirmed by the SEO platform Backlinko in its research.
However, not all backlinks are of equal importance. There are many factors that affect how much a backlink will affect page rank, but the most important is relevance and authority.
Link relevance refers to whether the page and site from which the link comes are relevant to the given topic. The content within which there is a link to your site should be of high quality and related to what is being discussed on your page. Google’s algorithm also differentiates between a backlink on a site that is not in your niche but has some relevance to a related topic and a completely irrelevant link.
The authority of the page and site from which the link comes also directly affects the importance of the link. Similar to relevancy, a link from a high authority page will perform better. However, even a link from a low authority page will not have a negative impact on your page ranking, unlike irrelevant links.
This is also one of the factors that can rank you lower or higher on Google search.
Loading speed represents the time a website takes to load. The speed is affected by several factors, among others the server on which the site is located, the size of the page file, and the compression of images.
However, website speed is not as simple a concept as it seems, because there are several ways to measure this speed. We will list the three most common ones.
Page Fully Loaded: Measuring the time it takes for a page to fully load. This means the time after which all the information on the page is displayed, which requires loading 100% of its resources.
Time to First Byte (TTFB): Measurement of the time it takes for a page to start the loading process.
First significant view: The time it takes for a page to load enough resources for a user to start reading the content on it.
For example, let’s say you have a blog page that takes 10 seconds to fully load. You could say that it is a very long time, and that creates user dissatisfaction. So, we hope you understand why responsiveness is so important for Google ranking.
To summarize – the value of this article is in the information given to those interested in a topic, that goes for our business as well as yours. We are all the same on Google, it all depends on our invested efforts and expertise.
So, if we managed to convey to you the importance of SEO optimization for a better ranking on Google and if you realized that your business really needs it, we suggest that you contact proven experts in the field, such as Monument SEO & Design, who in addition to SEO optimization can provide you with a full digital marketing service, such as PCC, social media marketing, web development and more.
Contact us TODAY at +1 786 442 3622 and get FREE personalized assessments and consultations with our digital marketing experts.
