The top search results on Google tend to receive nearly 40% of all organic clicks, which means whenever a potential consumer is looking up something on search engines using a company’s targeted keywords or phrases, they’re most likely to click on the first result that they see and then ignore every other underneath it.
Most companies work hard and are always striving for that coveted first spot in search engine results pages (SERPs), as it can lead to many positive results for companies.
Ranking Factors
The ranking factors of Google are all of the different website elements that the search engine algorithm from Google takes into consideration when it’s trying to decide which websites it should be showing to users in the search results for various search queries.
Whenever a person searches for a phrase that’s relevant to a company, that business should be showing up in the search results. However, to fully understand how a company can get its website ranked in Google’s search results, it’s first important to better understand Google ranking SEO, as there are hundreds of different factors that contribute to ranking.
Importance
Although the return on investment (ROI) of a company’s SEO efforts isn’t always apparent or obvious, it’s still important for companies to invest in best SEO practices and constantly improve their efforts. That’s because according to research, the first five organic search results that Google shows its users tend to amount to nearly 70% of all clicks.
When a company has the first spot for a keyword that has 1000 searches per month, for example, it has a 30% click-through rate.
That means the company is driving 300 new visitors to its business website every month, and even if only 1% of those website visitors end up getting converted, that would mean that the company is getting three new customers every month.
In fact, those numbers show that even if a company has the first rank in Google’s results pages for a single keyword, it can generate 36 new consumers each year.
Future Ranking Factors
Based on how Google’s search engine has been changing and developing throughout the years, there are several factors that are going to become increasingly important for website ranking according to many experts.
Those factors include relevant and high-quality website content, as well as honest and relevant keyword use and placement throughout that content.
There’s also the user experience and overall website functionality which are two factors that are already quite important, as well as mobile and voice optimization, as well as the website’s backlink profile.
Top Search Engine Ranking Factors for SEO
There are several factors that search engines along the likes of Google tend to view in high regard when it comes to ranking a website in results pages.
Knowing those factors and how they can be implemented and improved can help companies rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs) and generate a lot more traffic, which results in more conversions.
Mobile-First
Last year alone, mobile traffic started accounting for over 50% of all global traffic, with most people choosing to use their smartphones when surfing the web.
That means consumers expect that a company’s website is going to work perfectly on their smartphone, and if it doesn’t they’re likely to leave that website.
This has made mobile-friendliness one of the most important factors when ranking websites on search engine results pages.
If a company’s website isn’t fully functional on mobile devices, Google isn’t going to rank its website too high.
To navigate that, companies should ensure their websites are properly loading on every device by reducing the number of changing video URLs, limiting the amount of slow-loading content, making sure all images are clearly displayed, and there aren’t any big walls of text or unreadable words.
Content
Most companies have reported better SEO results when they’ve started improving the quality of the content on their websites. The internet and its users no longer tolerate content that’s of poor quality, and this is why it’s an important ranking factor for search engines.
This factor is also relatively easy for companies to solve because it doesn’t require businesses to do anything too complicated. All they have to do is create high-quality content that’s going to be valuable to the target audience, and then Google can work out the rest.
That means companies should be creating content that’s going to be catered to the interests of the target audience – content that consumers want to read, is helpful, and provides a lot more value than the content that’s being created by market competitors.
A great way to start solving this issue is by researching all of the questions that the target audience might have when researching a company, its solutions, or ways it can solve a pain point that the company caters to.
Links
According to research, over 90% of all websites don’t receive any traffic, and most of the time, it’s simply because they have no backlinks. Just as they’ve always been, links are important to website ranking on search engine results pages.
Those links range from internal, outbound, and inbound links, as each type of link helps a website to increase its overall domain authority and prove that it’s a valuable resource to consumers.
The internal links are inside the waste itself that are used to tie different content ideas together. The outbound links provide search engines and consumers with more authority because they provide them with additional resources and information that’s relevant to the audience.
Lastly, the inbound links, also known as backlinks, are any links that are coming from another website to the company’s own and show search engines the domain’s authority and credibility.
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