Search engine optimization (SEO) is constantly changing, and it’s vital to keep up with it if you want to rank high enough on search engine results pages (SERPs). Without considering important SEO ranking factors, you’re more likely to go down the ranks, making it harder for searchers to come across your website.
Since consumers use the internet to search for products, services, and almost anything they need, you have to rank high on SERPs so your hard work won’t go to waste. On the other hand, ranking high on SERPs will allow you to generate more traffic to your site. That’s why it’s important to optimize your site with the following SEO ranking factors in mind:
Relevance And Depth Of Content:-
Content is an important aspect of your website; it allows you to communicate with your target market and show your quality and usefulness. But content is also too abundant on the internet, making it hard to rank high on SERPs.
One way to remedy this is to make your content relevant and high-quality. Whether your content is long or short, what’s important is its depth. It must be useful and relevant to the searcher’s query. For instance, if the searcher looks for ‘the benefits of coffee,’ your content may appear if it’s talking about how drinking coffee can be beneficial. However, if your content doesn’t provide useful information, search engine crawlers are not likely to tag it as relevant.
Thus, before writing your content, it’s best to know what your target market is searching for. By typing in ‘benefits of coffee’ in the search query, a list of top-ranking articles will appear. You can use this list to formulate your content. It’s not about copying their content, but it’s a way to find the common denominators among these top-ranking contents and using them to your advantage.
And to make it SEO-friendly, you must not forget to use keywords that’ll help your content rank high. It may be best to use an SEO tool that assists with creating SEO friendly content so you can easily tell whether what you’re writing is keyword-optimized or not.
Mobile Friendliness:-
Most people who go to the internet to look for information use mobile phones because they’re the easiest to use and carry around. With a swipe here and there, people can easily get answers to their queries. Thus, your website should be mobile-friendly as it’s one major SEO ranking factor that can make or break your rank.
To make your site mobile-friendly, you must include the following mobile optimization tips:
- Ads should not hide your content since mobile phones have smaller screen sizes compared to desktops.
- Make it easy to navigate by having accessible menus so mobile users won’t get lost while browsing your site.
- Use fonts that’ll adapt to the size of the user’s screen. Font sizes that are too small will make it hard for mobile phone users to read your content.
- Most importantly, your site should be responsive, which means it can automatically adjust depending on the size of the user’s device.
When your website isn’t optimized for mobile use, it won’t work well for mobile phone users. They’ll likely just leave your website if it’s too difficult to navigate through it from their phone. That means higher bounce rates and fewer visitors.
Page Speed:-
Aside from being mobile-optimized, your site should also load fast enough. One critical SEO ranking factor that may easily affect your ranking is page speed. Gone are the days where people can patiently wait for a site to load for five minutes. Today, consumers are likely to bounce off or exit from your website if it doesn’t load in at least three seconds.
When you have a higher bounce rate, then it’ll drastically affect your rank. That’s because a slow speed affects the user experience. It frustrates users, which increases your chances of losing potential paying customers.
You can prevent this by removing unimportant elements on your site that may cause it to slow down. For instance, too many plugins may affect your page speed; remove the ones you don’t use. It may also be best to only use essential widgets on your sidebar after decluttering it.
Crawlability:-
Not only should you focus on search engine users, but your website should also cater to search engine crawlers. This means that crawlability is an essential factor so search engine crawlers can find you. Crawling helps search engines to determine, review, and scan or ‘crawl’ your site to see what your site is all about and how they should rank you.
If you want your site to be ranked properly, consider these tips:
- Use robots.txt to guide search engine crawlers on what pages are prohibited and accessible to them.
- Submit a sitemap to high-ranking search engines to help them crawl your site faster.
- Review your site pages that have been crawled by search engines by checking your index status.
Backlinks:-
Another important SEO ranking factor you must not forget is backlinks. Search engines use backlinks to rank your Expertise-Authority-Trust factor. You can get these backlinks from other websites linking to your site.
When you lack backlinks, even if you have great content, you’re more likely to rank lower than the ones with better backlinks. Some even have more than 2,000+ backlinks, making them rank well on SERPs.
You may think that getting backlinks is easy because there are many websites nowadays. However, search engines penalize building links to and from spammy and low-quality sites. This means you should have a proper SEO strategy to make backlinks work in your favor.
One way is to link to authority and relevant websites. If your industry is technology, your backlinks should also come from other technology-related sites. With this, search engines recognize the backlink as valuable because your target audience is more likely to accept such a site.
As for authority, it’s also best to have backlinks from sites that have authority in the industry. This means that the site has expertise in the industry, and users trust them. They’ve gained such authority because of providing high-quality content and being established for years. You can use an authoritative checker to verify a site’s authority.
Building backlinks from these two types of websites can help you rank higher on SERPs.
Conclusion
Having a successful website means getting traffic that you can convert to paying customers. Thus, ranking high on SERPs is valuable, which you can only achieve by implementing efficient SEO strategies especially on your website’s contents.
