8 SEO Ranking Factors You Should Know About

Author: Digital Zoop

The primary aim of any website owner is to get their site to get up-ranked on SERPs. There are many factors that help search engines determine which sites should show in search results and how they should rank. But not all ranking factors hold equal weight. Every factor is equally important from an SEO point of view. To be more organically visible on google, you should give attention to the latest and most important SEO ranking factors. These factors not only help in increasing the ranking of your website but also help in reducing the bounce rate and increasing traffic.

1. Mobile Optimisation

Mobile optimisation refers to the search engine optimisation of websites combined with flawless viewing on mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets. More than 50% of Internet users surf websites through their mobile devices daily. With the understanding that the majority of online traffic comes from mobile devices, it is easy to say mobile-optimised websites play a very important role in ranking.

If you’re using highly advanced SEO strategies to drive more traffic to your website, but your website is not mobile optimised you’ll fail to turn that traffic into conversions. In order to raise customer satisfaction, websites should be mobile-friendly, with maximum mobile optimisation.

To check if your site is mobile-friendly, submit your site to Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.

2. Site and Page Speed:

Does site speed affect your SEO ranking? Yes, site speed is the key factor in SEO and something that Google will use when determining ranking on SERPs.

In the end, slow websites will result in a poor user experience. A user is staying on a site longer if the site speed is faster and they also convert better and bounce less. User experience affects SEO, which is why site speed is very important as it plays an important role in user experience.

Use Page Speed Insights, to check your website loading time.

3. Domain Security:

Firstly, HTTPS has been a confirmed Google ranking factor science 2014. So if your website is not using HTTPS/SSL, your website credibility and ranking may be affected.

These days site security is an extremely important part of search engine optimisation. Now, site security is one of the main ranking signals that search engines use to help rank and understand websites. If you want to improve your organic traffic you shouldn’t forget about this technical part of your website set-up.

4. High Quality, Relevant Content:

Content is a very important factor for SEO. High-quality and useful content improves your visibility on SERPs, which drives traffic to your website and motivates your visitors to stay for longer. With the help of updated and relatable content, search engines have enough information to index your page correctly and help you rank.

5. Domain Authority:

Domain authority is one of the important ranking factors which plays a major role in ranking keywords on Google SERPs. Google decides how

When it comes to search engine ranking factors, domain authority matters. Domain Authority was developed by Moz and it predicts how likely a website is to rank on search engine result pages. The authority of your website shows how well you can rank in search engine results. Domain Authority scores range from 01 to 100 with higher numbers indicating a greater probability of appearing higher up in the SERPs.

6. High Quality Backlinks:

A high-quality backlink is a link that comes from a website with high authority. Sites with high authority and trustworthiness produce the highest quality backlinks. The quality of backlinks is more important than the quantity of backlinks. If links come from a website that is dedicated to the same topic as your website, the link will be more valuable. If you want to rank your site, you need a plan for generating high-quality backlinks for your site.

Backlinks continue to remain Google’s most powerful ranking factor. It can dramatically impact your search rankings. Here is why,

  • Good links from authoritative sources can help your SEO ranking and enhance your credibility
  • Represents an editorial vote of confidence for your page being relevant, quality content.
  • Backlinks to your websites are a signal to search engines that others endorse for your content.
7. UX: User Experience:

Google Algorithm Updates can be small and go unnoticed or they can be major and affect your Google rankings. At the end of May 2020, Google announced a new ranking factor to be added to the future algorithm update, the update is called Page Experience.

User experience is the analysis of how users perceive and interact with your site through the web and mobile. Effective and better user experience helps your users to find out what they are looking for and engage your users with your website content.

Let’s see How we can improve website metrics for better UX:

  • Decrease Page Loading time
  • Improve website structure using proper heading, sub-headings, User-friendly URLs, menus, attractive call-to-action buttons, better hyperlinks.
  • Catch 404 errors
  • Add updated and interactive content
  • Use white space
  • Make website Mobile-friendly
  • Focus on core web vitals (Loading, Interactivity, Visual stability.
8. Keyword Optimisation

Keyword optimisation is a three-step process, researching, analysing, and selecting the best target keyword that can help a business target qualified leads and drive them from search engine results to a website. It is a value-adding step for SEO. The aim of keyword optimisation is to ensure that selected keywords are effective for driving relevant traffic and ranking your website on SERPs.

List of some important places to optimise for your selected keywords on your website:

  • Title tags: Add your focus keyword in this field. The title has a direct impact on CTRs(Clickthrough rates) and search rankings.
  • Meta Description: Write an effective description and add your target keyword so users know what your page is about.
  • URL: It’s a good idea to include your keyword in the URL if they describe the page contents.
  • Image Alt Texts: Google cannot read images, so you can add your keywords in the Image Alt Text because it tells crawlers what an image is about.
  • Headings: Another keyword optimisation practice is to include your focus keyword in heading tags.
  • LSI Keywords: By including Latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords, you’re helping Google figure out what the content is about.
  • Avoid Keyword stuffing: When you use the same keywords over and over again in your website content, it’s called keyword stuffing. Keyword density should be 1-2%, so try to include your main keywords a few times and then mix things up with different variations.

Search engine ranking factors are constantly changing. So, it’s important to note down that these SEO ranking factors can and will change anytime. It’s important to stay up to date on the latest SEO updates and regularly use SEO audit tools.

We hope this was helpful for your SEO ranking efforts. Hence, in this digital world, you cannot ignore SEO. With this, you would also need the support of various other digital marketing services. Digitalzoop is a leading digital marketing agency providing all types of digital marketing services. Contact Digitalzoop today to speed up your business SEO.