“How Do I Show Up At The Top?”
If it were really that simple, Google wouldn’t have been able to pull in about $40B in advertising revenue in 2019. In fact, it’s the challenge of having your business show in front of valuable clients when they are shopping, or better yet at the point of purchase, that makes that advertising so valuable.
In 2021 Google is using over 200 factors to determine where to rank you in any given search. This is your overview to the most important tactics in that list of 200. And when you have an online marketing team working for you, to ensure to execute each of these items, the dream of ranking for these valuable searches can be your reality.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
This term is thrown around a lot, without any specific tasks associated with it. What we mean by SEO is a professional service that has the goal of getting your website to the top of valuable searches. Here are some of the things a reputable SEO service does for you.
Optimize Your Website
This includes such basic tasks that are taken for granted. That doesn’t mean that they are less important. Google measure’s your website based on a variety of indicators, and optimized websites rank better today, and over time they outperform other websites increasingly well. One technique that is overlooked and ill performed are meta descriptions.
Meta Descriptions
These are HTML attributes used to give search engines a summary of each page’s focus and content. This sounds basic but a study performed by Http Archive suggests that over 68 percent of desktop and mobile pages have a meta description, which means that over 30 percent of webpages don’t have one.
Another study showed that 70 percent of the time Google will rewrite the meta description to optimize for the keywords used by the searcher. If you want to control what users see about your website before they click it is best to write a well-crafted meta description. Think about it like this, the meta description acts as the marketing copy for your website, encouraging people to read more.
Make Your Website Mobile Responsive
Your website is more likely to be loaded more on mobile devices and tablets than a laptop or desktop computer. Today’s Google searchers are more likely to be on the go. Therefore, optimizing the mobile version of your website will expand your visibility, placing it directly into their hands.
But what does mobile responsive mean? Mobile responsive is also called mobile optimized or fluid. It is a variety of techniques that makes your website easy to view on any mobile device or tablet. Whether your website is viewed in portrait or landscape mode, the images, text, and functionality are sized along with it. This is not automatic. It requires a proper design and execution.
If your website is not mobile responsive, it might be easiest to start with an audit to determine current user experiences and where gaps lie, then check to make sure your current website can handle the adjustments and what that will entail. With mobile searches continuing to increase, this is one item that will likely pay you back and quickly.
Backlinks or External Links
Backlinks or external links are the original way that search engines determine what sites to rank at the top. Simply put, the more quality websites that link to your website, the higher your website will rank in search results.
Backlinks are the most important tactic for a SEO campaign. Here are some of the elements of a professional backlink campaign.
Competitive and Keyword Research
Research is the beginning of a campaign. That means researching both key terms and competitors. Key terms are the search terms that are the target of the campaigns. Competitor research looks at websites that are already ranking well and seeing exactly what they did to get there.
SEO Strategy
Sourcing Backlinks and Measuring Results
Once the targets and competitive landscape are clear, it’s time to make a strategy. This means deciding the terms and links that will be the focus of the campaigns.
Once the targets are set, the SEO campaign goes into full gear. The team uses a variety of tactics to get credible third party sites to link back to a clients’ site. As the positive links accumulate, the team measures the results and rankings.
Original Content
Now that your site is all set for success, you are ready to start creating compelling, original content to post and push out to external aggregators and media sources. The secret sauce here is a fairly straightforward, make sure you have a healthy amount of content, otherwise called long-form content. This doesn’t mean that you include text just for the benefit of ranking, as this approach seldom works. Generally speaking, the more abundant and well-written your content, the more likely it is to be shared and linked to.
Site Load Speed
When it comes to patience, people have none. It follows that people will not wait for your website to load. This is especially true on mobile devices. Over the years website speed has become a factor for ranking in search engines.
This makes sense because speed is a key part of the users’ experience of using a website. When website latency increases, the user experience gets worse. Additionally, a search engine can crawl, or index, fewer pages when the site is slow.
How do we increase the speed of a website? Large images should be reduced as much as possible, and even instituting a lazy load can help to decrease site load time. Most often, it’s simply the servers that websites are hosted on that are the biggest factor in load speed.
That brings us to website security.
Website Security
Google Chrome’s requirement for SSLs (Site Security Licenses) were just another factor in website ranking.
Keywords
You couldn’t possibly have a list about how to rank better on Google without discussing keywords. Often, people repeat the same keywords on every page of the website, even when those pages are about different topics. It shows that people understand the importance of keywords, but don’t entirely understand how to properly use them.
The most important thing to consider is the user experience. What are users looking for that makes this page relevant for their search? Focus on those keywords more so than the overall website keywords and you are on the right track. Accurate keywords result in users that stay longer on the page. Inaccurate keywords will cause bounces, reduce the quality of your site and cause your rank to plummet.
After all, Google wants all their users to find the information, products, services and goods they’re looking for in as few clicks as possible.
Map Listings
Map listings, like Google Maps, contain your local business details, and are great ways to be found on the web. Website resources and search engines like Google utilize this information to determine the accuracy and relevance of your business information. In short, when the information matches and the more relevant it is, the more map searches you will show up in regarding local services. There are many schools of thought and tools that can help you to achieve more accurate and relevant map listings.
Directory Listings
Along the same vein as the map listings are directory listings. There are hundreds of business directories on the Internet, but they generally pull their data from a small number of data aggregators. Ideally, each one offers the same information about your business. However, as they may take snapshots of businesses and not real-time information, they may be outdated or outright wrong. Ensuring that they are accurate and consistent will help you to improve your rankings quickly. It might be the last one on this list, but it’s not any less important. Again, there are any number of low cost tools to ensure that your listings remain accurate and are increasing the quality of your website ranking score. Keep in mind that having any of them being wrong can greatly diminish your score all together, and after all the work you put into the first nine steps, it would be a shame to have something so simple drag you down.
Some of these steps are simple and require minimal work to keep them at their best, but note that they are only 5 percent of the total ways that Google determines where you rank. They are the foundation of a solid Search Engine Optimization strategy, and by incorporating them you will be well established to ensure that you are considered relevant for the searches most related to the content of your website, driving more targeted traffic to your website. Some steps are incredibly straightforward, and with some professional guidance you are sure to be well on your way to optimizing your presence online.
Of course, this is where having an experienced professional can pay dividends in the long run. Getting these 10 things right can help to ensure that everything else falls into place that much easier.
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See Full List – https://backlinko.com/google-ranking-factors
