Top Ranking SEO factors

Are you struggling with your website SEO and Google ranking? 

SEO refers to Search Engine Optimisation, essentially a type of marketing that helps boost a website by making an increase in visibility of SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). SEO is an organic way of hitting the top of the search page, meaning this is something that you research and can do with just the content and website rather than paying for ads or PPC.

Why would your site benefit from SEO?

SEO improves your unpaid search visibility, therefore it can increase web traffic and awareness, increase leads and will give you the ability to grow your market share. 

So how does Google rank your site?

The way it works is that the search engine will index and organise all content found when crawling for information – this in itself takes a while to process until your site can appear in the search. Once google has indexed the page, a rank will be given relating to the relevancy of a searcher’s query. 

The ranking factors can vary and there are over 200 of them including, quality of content, page speed, social accounts and freshness. We have put together our top 5 SEO ranking factors to help guide you in the right direction. 

But just a reminder, you won’t see results immediately, it takes time for google to rank your site – persevere and believe in your work. It is all about consistency and perfecting your content to reach the right audience to gain that all important awareness and conversions.

1) High Quality Content: 

Your content needs to relate to the SEO optimisation for example does it relate to the title, are you using keywords and does it provide valuable content. IF your content is of high-quality it means audiences are more likely to stay on the page.

2) Mobile usability: 

The majority of users search the web on mobile devices nowadays, searching on the go. Responsive websites are the way forward, ensuring your site can be used easily on ALL devices rather than creating separate websites for separate devices.

3) Enhance User Experience (UX): 

UX relates to how long a user will stay on the page and engage with content for, if UX is poor, users are less likely to stay on a page for a long time therefore Google will identify this when ranking your site. So is your navigation easy to use, is it visually appealing and are the titles and text clear?

4) Page Speed: 

It is important that your page speed is adequate and loads within a reasonable time, if not users will click off the site before it loads which clocks up on Google’s ranking. So look at how many pop-ups you have and add-ons that could be slowing down the site speed, but also look at your content – have you overused videos and images, these could be causing the site to take a while to load as the files are too large.

5) On-page optimisation: 

This refers to your page copy and SERPs for example using keywords to identify what users are searching for more frequently and using these within the meta description and page copy to attract more users. The best sites to search for keywords are Google Keyword search, SEMrush and DIIB. The importance of using keywords is to ensure they relate to the page copy, rather than just throwing in key words, they need to fit and make sense, this way Google will trust your site more and rank the content quality higher.

This is only our small list of ranking factors, Google actually has over 200 that they consider when ranking your site, and it’s difficult to know which ones they use and if they use all of them all the time. Which is why it is important to make sure content is real, up to date and what users want to see. 

AdvantagesDisadvantages
Drives more traffic to your siteLack of predictability
Highly targeted content, if completed correctlyIt can take a long time for you to see results from SEO, which is why you need to make sure you have thoroughly researched
Lower costs, as it focuses on organic searchIt is a slower process as developing awareness, compared to other channels such as social media 
Involved ongoing attention and updates

If you are struggling to know where to begin, order a free audit today and start feeling in control of your site.

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