Google uses a variety of factors to calculate where search results appear on its website, including the popularity of a particular website or search term. Google constantly updates its ranking algorithm to ensure that the most important factors are considered.
SEO can be confusing because there are many different things you need to focus on to make your website rank higher in search engines. SEO is ameliorating the visibility of a website or web page by improving its content and on-page elements. These include ensuring your website’s title, Meta data (description of your website), and keywords are accurate and appropriate and creating valuable and appealing content.
Factors Influencing SERP Rankings
Consistent Publication of Great Content
Great content can come in various formats (video, blogs, graphics) as long as it is tailored to the consumer’s needs. Focus on your users when creating great content for your website. You’ll be on the right track if you make answering their questions your primary goal.
Then, you have to make the content easy to engage with. Make sure your content is easy to read and properly formatted. Include visuals to understand your content better and make it simpler to navigate.
On-page SEO
The more technical aspects of SEO optimization are involved in on-page SEO. Attempting to ensure your website is SEO-friendly is one of the good fundamental building blocks of SEO. A site with numerous “minor” SEO issues raises a major red flag for search engines. If you intend to increase your site traffic and rankings, make sure you cover the fundamentals.
To improve your website’s on-page SEO, do the following:
- Optimize your title tags
- Enhance your Meta descriptions
- Improve your URL Structure
- Optimize page load speeds
- Add image Alt text
- Add structured data markup
- Eliminate 404s
- Check that your website can be crawled.
- Enhance the structure of your website.
Optimization for Mobile Devices
In 2015, Google made mobile-friendliness a ranking factor, and in 2018, it began using mobile-first indexing. Because of these two algorithm updates, your website’s mobile version significantly impacts its search performance. Your website must be mobile-friendly to get the most out of your SEO efforts.
A mobile-friendly website includes the following features:
- Responsive design changes the appearance to fit any screen size dynamically.
- Takes priority website load speeds so that pages load quickly regardless of connection type (cellular data, wifi etc.)
- To maintain visual clarity on a small screen, keep design elements simple.
- Requires large font sizes to ensure that the text is legible on any screen size.
- Includes details clearly and concisely.
Excellent User Experience
Customer experience is divided into several categories, ranging from page load times to site navigation to content organization. However, the primary objective of user experience is to ensure that visitors to your site can find and access the content they need as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Website loading times, poorly formatted content, perplexing navigation bars, and intrusive pop-ups make your website more difficult to use and create a negative user experience. If users consistently have a negative experience on your site, they will stop returning, preventing you from building a loyal user base.
Backlinks from High-quality Websites
Whenever a site has links from other websites that search engines already consider credible, the linked site’s credibility increases; backlinks are essential for increasing your website’s authority.
Final Words
If you engage in these above core SEO elements, you will be well on increasing the authority and traffic to your website.