How To Improve Your Google Ranking in 2019

September 2, 2019

Author: Vanshika Anand

Google Ranking is the position at which your website ranks on Google Search Engine.

I’m pretty sure, you might be knowing that Google has hundreds of (200 as far as I know) ranking factors in their algorithm.

Well, the question is What are these factors which will help us improve our Google Ranking??

If you have the same question then you’ve come to the right place.

In this article, I will be telling you ways to improve your Google Ranking in 2019.

Some are true, some are myths, some are made by the SEO experts, but however they are, they are all mentioned here.

But before we talk about best Google ranking factors we need to know exactly how this Google ranking works!!!!

How Google Ranking Works

As I told earlier, Google has a number of factors in it’s algorithm that helps it to analyze which page is the best and needs to be placed on the top.

The currently updated algorithm of Google works around RankBrain.

RankBrain improves the Google Ranking algorithm on it’s own.

It increases or decreases the importance of backlinks, content length, domain authority, etc. according to particular keywords.

Then it analyzes the reaction of the google searchers if they like the new ranking algorithm then they keep it otherwise Rankbrain removes the new ranking algorithm and the old one stays.

Google has very smart ranking algorithms which keep improving and updating itself from time to time.

The best part of these Google ranking algorithms is that they consider a number of ranking signals before displaying the results.

How Long It Takes To Rank On Google

Alright since you know how Google Ranking works, so now it’s time for you to learn about the average time your website might take to rank on Google.

People out there will give you a number of facts based on Google Ranking, and according to them, the time period varies from 6 months to 3 years.

But, let me tell you that there is no fixed time to make your website rank on google.

One of the most important ranking factors on which your Google Ranking depends are the Keywords you use.

If you try to rank your page on keywords which have a higher competition level, then it might take a year or two for you to rank whereas if you choose a keyword with the medium or lower competition it might help you rank much faster and easier (ways of identifying the same are mentioned further in this article).

Keyword research is certainly an essential Google ranking factor, but there are many more ranking factors that affect your Google ranking.

Therefore, next, I will be discussing all the ranking factors affecting your Google Ranking.

Factors Affecting Your Google Ranking

There are a number of ranking factors affecting your Google Ranking (I know 200 as of now).

Relax, no need to panic!! Not all of these factors are important to you, there are only a few points you need to take care of which will help you achieve your targeted Google Ranking.

Here, I will discuss about six ranking factors which mainly affect your Google Ranking, those are as follows:

Page Speed
Mobile Friendliness
Website Optimization
Plagiarism
SEO Audit
Keyword Research

Now, let’s look into these ranking factors more deeply and see how they affect your Google ranking exactly:

1. Page Speed

This is the first and most important ranking factor that will affect your Google Ranking.

Page speed is the measurement of the time your website takes to load on search engines.

But, does it even matters?? Like if instead of 5 seconds your website is taking 10 seconds to load, then what’s the big deal in that?? I mean it’s merely 5 seconds of delay!!!!

But still, it matters a lot, more the page speed of your website higher will be the number of users visiting or recommending your web page.

According to some facts, 47% of the users wish that the web page loads in less than 5 seconds, and you lose around 7% of the users if your website fails to load in 3-5 seconds.

Even a second’s delay may negatively impact on:

The User Experience– In today’s world where we mainly focus on the user experience, it’s necessary that our customers find it easy to work with our brand. The ease of working with your brand attracts more and more users to your website as the speed of the loading of your web page represents the functionality of your products as well.
Lead Generation- It’s very obvious that no man will invest his/her time filling a form for a website whose web page takes so much time to load.

Your SEO- Talking about Google, the page speed of a website matters a lot for Google. If your web pages take a long time to load the number of users visiting your page will decrease and we all know that Google keeps the most viewed and visited websites on top as Google loves what people love!!!!

2. Mobile Friendliness

Your website needs to be mobile friendly as the latest Google ranking algorithm update of 2019 made it compulsory for all the websites to be mobile friendly.

Google wants you to make these changes as it knows that almost everyone in the present time uses mobile and accesses the internet using their mobile phones.

Smartphones are the most trending of the world and Google believes in following the trend to maintain it’s existence in the Digital World and thus it prefers a mobile-friendly website over the normal ones.

3. Website Optimization

Website Optimization is the procedure of making changes in your website to make it visible and rank higher on Search Engines.

Since, by now we all know that more, the relevance of your website higher will it rank on the Search Engines, and so we perform Website Optimization to achieve higher Google Ranking.

Website Optimization works with strategies and plans, you must always think about certain points if you wish to increase your Website Ranking, and those points are:

You must know what your users want to do when they visit your site, i.e. you must know your "user intent".

Improve the loading time of your site.
Optimize the speed of your website.
Optimize the image file size of your website.

Now you might be thinking of ways to execute this optimization plan, You think it’s difficult??

Well, to be honest, Yes, it is!!

But still, you don’t need to worry as there are a number of Website Optimizing tools for you to use.

These tools will help you make appropriate changes in your website and optimize it to get a higher Google ranking.

4. Plagiarism

Plagiarism is also one of the most important reasons behind your low Google Ranking.

Plagiarism or copied content can sabotage your SEO. It affects your website and Google ranking badly.

Google keeps updating it’s ranking algorithm to keep the quality of it’s results up-to-date.

The Panda Update of 2011 was introduced by Google only to look for all the plagiarized content in a website which benefited a lot of people but it also left a negative impact on many famous websites, and thus if you post any plagiarized content on your website Google will detect it and might take strict actions against it.

So, ultimately I would recommend you to create your own unique content instead of copying from some other website and pasting it as in the long run you will definitely regret this action of yours!!

5. SEO Audit

SEO Audit is the process of evaluating and making all the changes required to make your website SEO friendly.

An SEO audit helps in manually reviewing the website and recommend the need for fixing and changing all the bad things of the website in order to improve the performance of the website.

SEO Audit comprises four different types of Audits which are as follows:

1. Check Your Google Penalties

At the very first place, you need to know if your website has been penalized by Google or not.

Getting penalized by Google may affect your Google Ranking negatively. You can check if your website has been penalized or not in two ways.

First by using Google Search Console, after signing in your Google account you will see a "Manual Actions" option on the left side of the screen, when you click on that option it tells you your website is penalized or not.

Secondly, you can use Google Analytics, if after any Google Algorithm Update your organic search result drops that means your website has been affected by that update and has been penalized as well.

If you find any of these tests positive that means your website has been penalized and the best option left for you is to gather as much knowledge as possible regarding all the Google updates and plan your SEO Audit according to those updates.

2. Technical SEO Audit

SEO is a very important factor to make you successful in achieving your targeted Google Ranking.

Talking about facts, 60-70% of the marketers find SEO to be the primary focus in Inbound Marketing.

So, the next step is to do a Technical SEO Audit.

Technical SEO Audit comes before all the other types of Audits because the first step you need to take is to check if the search engines can access your pages properly without any interruptions or not.

The best part about the Technical SEO Audit is that you don’t need to know any development part to execute this type of SEO Audit.

Well, there are certain things you need to do for Technical SEO Audit and those things are:

Is your website registered with Google Search Console Tools
Do you have your robots.txt file optimized?
Are your URLs SEO friendly
The Breadcrumb Menu, which is present at the top of the website that leads to the home page following the menu links, is properly activated or not
A structured data helps google to understand the meaning of your website’s content which works as an additional google ranking factor.
404 is a page that is shown to the users when they reach a page which is not present on your website. So, a completely optimized 404 page helps in smooth user experience.

Technical SEO Audit is an essential element of SEO Audit and it holds it’s relevance as an important ranking factor to achieve Google Ranking.

3. On-Page SEO Audit

You might be wondering "What On-Page SEO is in the first place??"

Well, On-Page SEO is the most important part of the SEO Audit, the main motive behind doing the On-Page SEO Audit is to make the search engines know about your content deeply.

To do your On-Page SEO Audit properly and successfully you need to follow these points:

Optimize your titles and description of your articles according to your content.
Make sure that you create your content with proper text formatting
Do proper content and image SEO
Make sure you make a strong internal linking structure
Check if your content is user-friendly or not and do not forget to create content according to your "Users intent".

So, these are your On-Page SEO Audit checklist (I will talk about these in detail as well in my next articles). If you follow these points thoroughly then the main part of your SEO Audit will be executed successfully.

4. Off-Page SEO Audit

Off-Page SEO is referred to the process of promoting your website by external methods or link building so to say. Google considers these backlinks as "vote of trust".

The quality of backlinks you make decides the quality of your website i.e. higher the quality the website giving you backlinks higher will be the rank of your website on Google.

You must be aware of your actions and must know the difference between what you are doing and what you are allowed to do so as to keep a track of all the wrong things you are doing, since even a single wrong step may result in a decreased Google Ranking of your website.

For example, if you make low-quality backlinks then It is very likely that Google might penalize your website and lower it’s Google Ranking.

No, you don’t need to panic!! Just like all the other factors, I have a checklist for your off-page SEO Audit also, but this checklist is a bit different than the others.

In this checklist, you need to evaluate if your incoming links are toxic or not, and for this purpose, you can use Google Search Console.

But, you also need to ask yourself certain questions regarding the Audit in order to analyze properly, and those questions are:

What is the number of unique domains that are linking to you??
Are all those domains trusted? If not all then how many of them are trusted and how many of them are not??
The number of domains linking to your homepage and number of links you are getting for your internal pages!!
Which page of your website is receiving the most number of links??
What is the toxic score of the links you are getting??

So, these are the questions you must have an answer to before conducting your off-page SEO Audit.

You must always remember one thing that off-page SEO is not at all similar to the on-page one, it is not a straightforward task and so you must take care of your actions.

You must know what you are doing and must also be aware of it’s consequences.

Please don’t make links like a crazy human instead focus on your website’s quality as a good quality website will automatically get good backlinks without putting so many efforts.

Keyword Research-

While Google keeps updating it’s ranking algorithms on a regular basis still there is one thing that has always been constant during all these processes and that one thing is the Keyword Research.

Keyword Research is the process of searching all the relevant and demanded keywords of your industry and using them to create useful content for your users.

Although, "user intent" is the most important trend of Google nowadays but one must never forget that without proper Keyword Research nothing works.

But, the toughest question of all is how to conduct a Keyword Research isn’t it?

Well, it’s not that tough, Keyword Research is an easy task if you do it properly.

You must follow the following steps to conduct a successful Keyword Research:

Make a list of all the important and relevant topics of your industry which can help you in attracting users.
After selecting the most relevant topic from all the topics you need to check the monthly search volume of the topic you selected.
Now you need to work on finding the most relevant keywords for your topic. You may different apps and software available on the Internet to do relevant Keyword Research.

Find some terms similar to the main keyword to add along with the main keyword in the content.
Do not forget to use "Long Tail Keywords", Long Tail Keywords are the long keywords you use to specify the topic of your content.
You can also use Google Keyword Planner to search appropriate terms for your content according to your niche.

So, this was all about Keyword Research and if you use these tips properly then it won’t be difficult for you to beat any competition.

Conclusion

So, this was all about ways to improve your Google Rankings in 2019.

As you know Google is continuously working on improving and updating it’s algorithm to prevent itself from spammy websites and thus, to make your website rank better on Google you need to put a little extra effort.

These steps are not new but if executed properly, they will help you put that extra effort in the right direction helping you succeed in achieving your targeted Google Ranking.