Top 10 Google ranking factors you should not ignore
As a business owner or someone just trying to get your website noticed, you’ll find out quickly that numerous factors come into play.
Instead of spending all of your time trying to comb through the 200+ Search Engine Ranking Factors that Google uses, we thought it would help to point out the top 10.
Your site will gain traction almost immediately using these factors. The reward of a little bit of effort upfront will go a long way when building an organic SEO, high-ranking factor website, or application.
This list does not rank the top 10 in order of importance but instead lists the top 10 factors by which your content will drive itself and lead customers or viewers straight to your product or service.
Top 10 Google’s Ranking Factors For 2021
- Accessible and Crawlability
- Links
- Site Security
- Mobile Friendliness
- On-page optimization
- Off-page optimization
- Page Speed
- Domain Age and URL
- User Experience
- Social Experience
- Accessible Website and Crawlability refers to, unsurprisingly, how well Google’s bots can get through your website and content. The simpler the bot’s (spiders) can crawl your site and find more content, the higher the ranking.
There can be no doubt about the importance of bots crawling, considering that before anyone consumes any content from you, Google and other search engines must consume the content first. Crawlability is defined as the level or ability of a search engine to scan a website and review its content to determine what is on the page and how it can be ranked.
- The more legitimate links, the higher your page is going to rank. Genuine links are that:
- Point to social media that you also own/operate
- Partners or similar products
- Point to other well-respected and trustworthy websites (i.e., HTTPS for visitors)
- Non-duplicated links
- Site security specifically helps your domain or application as it improves the site’s trustworthiness. If you have malicious content or viruses linked, your website is mostly going to get pushed away from the first page. It’s crucial to ensure that you have to maintain a secure website presence if you want to have a high volume. Adding an SSL certificate will boost your site’s traffic and ranking tremendously.
- Mobile Friendliness pertains to how a website performs and reacts to a user when viewed on a mobile device. A mobile-friendly site is one that provides an excellent user experience (UX) by using a responsive web design that adjusts the many variations of screen sizes.
They will use scaled vector graphics, appropriate sizing per device, and react according to the method in which they interact with that consumer. You can check to see how responsive your website is using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test and receive a report of any mobile version issues.
- On-page optimization can be considered quite broad but cannot be stressed enough. SEO pros keep improving a website’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP) by adjusting factors related to the content, functionality, and HTML programming. The functionality refers to crawl ability, and the programming generally points to page speed, which we are about to cover.
High-Quality Content pursues:
- Quality of writing
- Presence of relative keywords and phrases
- Freshness, Up-to-date content
- How many content formats
- Off-page optimization is a general way of stating the relevance and credibility of your domain. Your relevance is dominated by business listings, structured data, backlinks, and metadata keywords.
Having a business listing review only serve to boost your site’s presence as it is, again, another way to create links that point to the domain. Structured data using schema markup provide a way for Google’s engine to read your data within data and provide rich formats that create standout search results. Backlinks are a way to boost credibility with influencers or affiliates’ guest posting, digital PR, and other link-building practices.
- Page speed relates to how fast your site loads. A slow loading site will provide a bad user experience. Google’s Webmaster Central Blog, put out in 2018, lists some encouraging ways in which we even help our clients boost site speed.
Since this is a ranking factor that Google explicitly states, your domain’s performance on mobile and desktop is in consideration. Google’s PageSpeed Insights Tool will help you learn more about web performance tools at Google and what it takes to speed up your site.
- Domain Age and URL: It’s crazy, but really, the older the site, the higher the position in Google’s ranking position. A website that is three years old will almost always beat a website that’s less than a year old.
Even if you’re putting your site on ice, keep the domain. Whether you’re trying to get it going again or just doing an update, the site’s age and URL type (i.e., .com/.org/.net), KEEP IT!
- User Experience with Google comes down to its artificial intelligence component called RankBrain. It is a component of their algorithm (also known as Hummingbird) that includes the click-through rate (CTR), bounce rate, and dwell time. CTR is the percentage of those who click to visit your site after coming up with the result. The bounce rate is the number of people who go back to the search page after seeing your page. Dwell time is how long people stay on your site.
- Social Experience may not be a direct factor, but the signals that are sent from content generation using your name or content will only serve to boost your presence and thereby boost your ranking.
Social media presence is necessary to help build your network and create a buzz about your product or service. A strong social media presence makes your platform that much more reliable. Create fast, straightforward ways to share your content and watch your site take off.
These top 10 ranking factors are paramount to a well-optimized site that will earn more and more traffic. The higher the traffic, the higher the conversions, and sales. Digital Marketing professionals like Netconnect can save you time, effort, and energy trying to improve your social media and websites.
Enjoy working on the things that matter most to you, your customer, or your service while taking the load off and letting you enjoy higher volumes of customers and conversions.
