What Are The Most Important Ranking Factors You Should Consider When Writing Your Content?
Ranking high on a search engine is the goal of every digital marketer, or it at least should be. But perhaps you’re wondering why ranking high is so important? Well, think about it when you type something in a search engine like Google, you are most likely only looking at the results on Page One. If it’s not found, you might retype in the search bar for new results. Everyone’s guilty of it, don’t worry. But, because of this, it’s why you need to strive to be on that first page of results. Google should be your target search engine. It is undoubtedly the most popular search engine globally, with over 70 percent of the search market share. A downside to its popularity is that nearly every person with a website or specific web page is competing for the same traffic. So, how do you stay ahead of the curve and be in that number one spot? We are here to give you the eight most important ranking factors you need to consider when creating your content.
1. Crawlability
What we are going to tell you may be obvious, but it needs to be said; search engines can’t rank a site if they can’t find it! This is why a site’s crawlability is vital. It allows a search engine to scan the website, review its content, and then determine its rank. Examples of lousy crawlability include dead links and 404 errors. Issues like this can limit your crawler budget and ultimately negatively impact your ranking results. Here are the steps you need to take to allow search engines to crawl your site correctly.
Make it Robo-friendly
Submit a sitemap to search engines
Go to Google Search Console to check your index status and review the number of pages Google has crawled on your site
Use robots.txt, it will tell search engines which pages they should have access to
2. High-Quality Content
Another important factor in ranking, all of the content you create needs to be high-quality. If you want to rank high, it’s vital to boost user engagement on your website. There’s no better way to do that than making it user-friendly and making the content matter. It’s arguably one of the essential SEO ranking factors. A search engine wants to provide the best results possible. If you provide an in-depth and well-researched type of content, you are going to be ranked high. Updating your content is also essential. You need fresh content constantly to attract search crawlers and boost search visibility.
So, what is considered “high-quality content”? If you are writing a blog or guide you want to hit a high word count, it’s recommended to be over 1,500 words. You also want to research and make a keyword list. Keywords are super important in search engine rankings. It’s the process of identifying popular words that will drive traffic to your site. There are plenty of keyword tools out there to help you out. Just remember, Google’s search algorithm relies on keywords. So take your time researching and finding which ones line up best.
Content goes beyond just blogs and web pages nowadays. According to HubSpot, video is now the most commonly used format in all of content marketing, giving blogs and infographics a run for their money. 86 percent of video marketers say that using video for content has increased. So, content can indeed be what you make it, as long as it has a reason and purpose to serve internet users.
3. Optimized Content
Website optimization is the process of using tools and different strategies to improve the performance of your website to increase organic traffic from a search engine. Some of the factors in high ranking also go hand in hand with optimization. Let’s get a look at the different steps you can take to optimize your webpage:
Analyze website data
Conduct keyword research
Produce long and value-rich content
Optimize for on-page and off-page SEO
Optimize the website for mobile
Speed up the pages
Get quality backlinks
4. Mobile-Friendly
Making your website and web pages mobile-friendly is also a super vital factor in ranking high on a search engine. Why? Because of how common it is to use cell phones! Mobile web traffic has accounted for about half of all global web traffic since 2017, while Google captures 85 percent of mobile traffic. Ensuring your site is mobile-friendly is a necessity. If your site is not mobile-optimized, Google will rank you lower. This is because Google knows the popularity of searching on your phone, so they’re not going to rank a website that is only suited for a desktop.
5. Site Security
Google has said site security has been a significant factor in what a web page is ranked since 2014. When we say ‘site security,’ we are talking about the use of HTTPS encryption. Sites with this encryption will have SSL certificates, creating a secure connection between the website and its users. That extra layer of security can protect the information, which is essential in today’s day and age. Search engines, especially Google, want users to be on trustworthy sites, so HTTPS encryption proves to that search engine that the site is secure, thus ranking it higher.
6. Domain Age, Authority, and URL
How old your website is also a considered ranking factor. Google doesn’t outright say it is. However, it’s been proven that more aged domains do tend to rank better. So, keep that in mind when launching a site. It could take some time for SEO efforts to get going.
The URL also could have a potential impact on ranking. Google doesn’t tend to like keywords in a URL. When choosing a domain, choose one that reflects your business or product and optimize.
Authority also matters. It means the measures of predictive ranking strength of an entire domain and its subdomains. Google never reveals precisely how a website is ranked, so domain authority is as close as you’ll get to understand why a particular website ranks. A higher DA site performs better than a lower DA site. A tip to improve your domain authority, get backlinks from other high DA websites.
7. Links
We will now discuss the three most important links contributing to a higher ranked website; inbound, outbound, and internal.
Inbound Links- Google uses these types of links to determine how authoritative or relevant your content is. What you would want is another authoritative site to include a relevant link to yours in their content. Inbound links are also known as “backlinks.” Your goal should be getting as many highly authoritative sites to link to yours.
Outbound Links- What you want another website to link for you also need to do for other websites. That’s outbound links. Do research to find high-quality and reliable websites to link your content to, don’t worry though no need to go overboard with this.
Internal Links- Self-explanatory, but this means linking to your content. You can help bring pages together for Google and your website’s visitors making the pages more valuable. If you have an authoritative page that links to another, you’re helping that other page pass authority as well. This allows that other page to rank higher in Google.
These three types of links need to be tied to descriptive anchor text. Meaning adds a link to a piece of text within your content, making sure it also gives some description of where it’s headed.
8. Real Business Information
For our last recommendation on ranking higher in a search engine, we come to real business information. So, what does this mean exactly? A search engine looks for a lot when ranking, but above all, they want to make sure the website is credible, trustworthy, and authoritative. When a brand is more established online, there will increase their search visibility, so business listings are critical. It’s also referred to as ‘citations,’ a local SEO ranking factor. Websites should perform basic citation setup and management. Here’s how you do it.
Create a Google My Business page
Set up business profiles on industry-related directory websites
Ensure that your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) is consistent
The correct local search terms are being used
You’re Ready to Create!
Finally! You have now received 8 of the best tips and tricks to keep in mind when creating content on your website. These factors are crucial in their ways. If you stick to our advice, you’re bound to rank high on any search engine, hopefully even the top result! We could give one final piece of advice that we mentioned is to make sure your content matters. Don’t let it be fluff or a halfway job. Go all the way, be an expert, give your visitors a reason to click your website over others. Once you do that, you’ll be sure to gain more organic traffic thanks to that high ranking.