Five Important SEO Ranking Factors

SEO is an ever changing landscape, and it might not always be easy to keep up with the latest changes and developments. However, if you want to generate steady traffic to your site, you must keep pace.

Well-optimised websites generate exponentially more traffic over time. Without SEO, your target customers won’t be able to find your site and all your effort would amount to nothing.

In this post, we look at the crucial SEO ranking factors that can help you rank your site on page one of the search results.

Publish Quality Content Consistently

Content isn’t just king, but it’s the queen, knight and everyone in between.

That’s how important content is for your SEO.

Well-written, engaging, valuable content that’s also optimised for keywords can make a huge difference to your website’s rankings.

However, publishing a page or a blog once in a few weeks or months won’t cut it. Be sure to publish content regularly and consistently – at least once a week. Create a content publishing calendar and stick to it.

Page Load Speed

Page load speed has been considered as a critical SEO ranking factors for many years. Google wants to provide its users with a pleasant experience. A quick-loading website is certainly a start.

In July 2018, Google made an update to its algorithm to focus on mobile page speed. If your website does not load quickly on mobile devices, it could be penalised.

Secure Your Website with SSL

This is one of Google’s official ranking factors.

Although there’s no evidence to suggest an improvement in rankings for sites that have migrated to HTTPS, not migrating to it can result in penalty.

Back in 2017, Google announced that its Chrome browser would flag websites not using HTTPS as “not secure”.

For Google, users’ security is a priority. Hence, any website that collects data (even a contact form amounts to data), must be SSL certified.

With more and more users understanding the importance of security, you may experience high bounce rates if your website isn’t SSL certified.

URL, Domain Age and Authority 

About 60% of websites that rank on Google’s first page are at least 3 years old.

In fact, an Ahrefs study finds that websites that not even a year old rarely hit first-page ranking so early.

If you have had your website for a while and have been optimising it, you are on a good start.

In some instances, the domain name plays a crucial role. An exact-match domain can prove highly valuable and can boost your rankings.

Similarly, authority is an equally important SEO factor. The higher your domain authority and page authority scores, the more likely are you to rank.

On-Page SEO 

On-page SEO deals with the technical aspects of SEO.

Merely updating your H1 tags can make a significant difference to your rankings, as found by Mockingbird.

Be sure to optimise the following aspects of all pages on your site:

• Page Title
• H1
• Meta description
• Schema markup
• Internal link structure

Wrap up

Rankings signals work together to help create the SEO juice you need to rank high up on the search engines. This calls for a well-designed SEO strategy. Contact LS25 Web Design in Leeds for a data-backed, well-defined SEO strategy to boost your rankings.