3 SEO Ranking Factors that Quickly Ranks You Higher on Search Results
Assuming you’ve took care of basic SEO stuff first!
When I first started learning SEO back in 2015, I remember coming across Brian Dean’s list of 200+ SEO Ranking Factors.
After skimming through the entire list, my first thought was like -
“Man! Think about the research that must have went into writing this list.”
But soon, my excitement turned into anxiety and my next thought was like -
“I do not have enough hours to take care of each SEO ranking factor.”
And let’s be honest!
Unless you’ve got a million dollars fund set aside for online marketing, you’re not going to be able to cover all those 200 factors as well.
It’s pointless to even try.
But the good news is, you don’t have to take care of each 200 factors in order to rank under Top 10 search results on Google.
Experts at Moz already confirmed that the 200 Ranking Factors is just a myth.
But even though, I see many businesses, marketers, and bloggers getting obsessed with working on all of those 200 factors so that their website may rank a little higher.
As a result, they spend too much time working on unimportant factors, while investing too little time on the most important SEO ranking factors.
Get this — if you’ve the best content, enough quality ‘do-follow’ backlinks, and if users stays on your website for longer periods of time, then nobody can outrank you.
In fact, in a recent Q&A with Google, a Search Quality Senior Strategist at Google named Andrey Lipattsev also said that content and links are the most important SEO ranking factors.
That means, you can maximize your outcomes by focusing on content, backlinks, and user experience of your website.
Now, before you head straight to your marketing guy, it is important for you to know the details about each of these most important ranking factors.
1 — Superior & Optimized Content
In today’s online business world, nothing matters more than content.
Content gives the best ROI than any paid advertising campaign can ever give. For instance, content has proven to produce 3x leads than paid search.
Content has also proved that over 70 percent of consumers prefer to learn about a tool or a product from an article rather than an ad.
In fact, your paid ad campaigns might not even rich your target audience no matter how much money you spend, as more and more people are using ad blockers nowadays.
So, these facts leaves us with an important question:
What should be the main objective of your content?
It’s simple. — Your content needs to give the visitors what they’re looking for.
In other words, your content must be superior.
Superior content basically means detailed content. It means, your content should have everything there is to know about a specific topic that your potential customers are searching for.
Once you start putting out superior content and optimize it well (basic on-page SEO is enough), it can rank high and attract thousands of visitors in some time.
Remember, your content is the foundation of your business’s online presence and it is the only tool that can turn a visitor into a paying customer.
So, in order to make sure that Google loves your website, you’ve to make sure that your visitors are loving your content first. If they’re not impressed with your content, then Google won’t be impressed with your website too!
This is just plain simple truth.
And while we’re at it, one thing you should also know about content is that writing blog posts won’t be enough.
You need to put out content in different formats to attract broader audience, especially in 2019.
These formats includes:
1) Videos
2) Infographics
3) Case-Studies
4) Long-form guest articles
5) Optimizing content for voice search
2 — Number of Quality ‘Do-Follow’ Backlinks
The second most important SEO ranking factor to focus on for ranking under top 10 search results is increasing the number of quality ‘do-follow’ backlinks to your website.
The best way to find new opportunities to create quality backlinks to your website is to analyze the links your top-ranking competitors have built and replicate the process.
There are tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs that can help you find out from where your competitors are getting backlinks from.
Once you know their sources, you can start approaching those sources and get your backlinks from them.
3 — User Experience
User experience basically means the strategy that you use to keep visitors on your website for longer periods of time, showing Google that you’re making your visitors happy.
In SEO langauge, It means the average time users spend on your website.
Once Google recognizes that people are staying longer on your website than competitors websites, Google will start putting you above your competitors and it will send you more traffic.
Here are the best practices to make users stay on your website longer:
1) Make your content engaging.
2) Include internal links to additional resources which the visitors might want to read.
3) Write catchy headlines and calls to action to get more clicks within the website.
4) Make your website load as fast as possible. Reports revealed that even 1 second delay in website load time can lose you 11% page views & 7% conversions.
Basic SEO Stuff You Must Take Care of
Before you go, there are 3 other basic SEO ranking factors you need to know about and also take care of, in order to hit the top 10 search results list.
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO is the foundation of getting your website crawled and indexed on the top search results in Google. Get it right and you’ll be on top. Get it wrong and you’ll never make it to the top.
Though you do not need to worry about this much. Just make sure you’ve taken care of below-mentioned points:
1) Ensure that you’ve put main target keyword in the title tag.
2) Ensure to put your main target keyword in Meta Description as well.
3) Include keyword in your URL structure in a search engine friendly way.
4) Use Heading tags (H1, H2, H3) in the Sub-headlines of your content.
5) Include your main target keyword in the first 100 words of your content naturally.
Domain Age
The age of your domain plays an important role in increasing your website’s ranking.
Google usually prefers those websites which have been around for a couple of years. That means, the news one will have to wait and prove that they are valuable in order to rank under top search results.
Mobile-First Crawling
In 2016, Google shifted its focus on ranking mobile-first websites. That means, Google will now crawl the mobile version websites rather than desktop versions.
In fact, as surprising as it may seem, Google has even started penalizing websites that aren’t optimized for mobile.
So, if you want Google to consider your website to be placed on top, make sure your website is well-optimized for mobile devices.
Website’s Architecture
Website architecture affects all other SEO ranking factors.
So, if you’re launching a brand new website, make sure to pre-plan your website’s hierarchy in advance. And if your website already exists, make necessary changes to its structure to better optimize it.
A good website architecture would let visitors navigate easily and also allow spiders to crawl all pages fast.
Conclusion:
SEO is no longer about stuffing keywords in content and creating backlinks from any low-quality source available.
Instead, SEO is all about providing value to your visitors on regular basis and earning genuine, high-quality, ‘do-follow’ backlinks from authoritative sources.
That’s all it takes to rank higher on search results today!
Originally published at www.screwedupengineer.com.
