No website can survive without a powerful online presence that takes it up and above in Google’s search engine results page (SERP) rankings. With the online space getting bigger and competitive with time, it is important to have an upper hand among your competitors. In order to have a better ranking, there are some elements and attributes that you should ensure in your website. We will have a look at some of those.
Quality Content
No matter whatever changes happen, content is always the king in the digital era. Your website needs quality content that contains in-depth information about common user queries in that specific niche. The content should satisfy Google’s EAT ( Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) principle. For this, your website content should be supported with trustable statistics and references. You should also ensure that the content is purely factual by having it analyzed by experts in your niche. Also, remember to use long-format content that is perfectly divided into sub-headings so that the users are provided with a comfortable reading experience. Google is more biased towards fresh content and also encourages more up-to-date content in the SERP.
Effective Backlinks
Backlinks are always an important aspect of Google ranking. When you have more links from reputed websites, your ranking will be high for the relevant keywords. The relevance and popularity of the website you choose to generate backlinks are very important. Advanced algorithms like Penguin 4.0 filtered and removed the ranked websites that had low-quality backlink profiles. You may connect with a reliable SEO agency in Dubai to know how to create effective backlinks.
Mobile Friendliness
According to Google, about 60 percent of the searches happen from mobile phones and other small-screen devices. It also introduced mobile-first indexing in 2016, which declared the importance of a website’s mobile compatibility in determining its Google search rankings. Thus, websites should develop a dedicated mobile version or responsive website designs to make sure that the site provides the best user experience on all types of screens. Especially with easy location identification on mobiles, you also benefit from Google’s local search results if you have a mobile-friendly website.
Page Loading Speed
SEO experts say that almost 50 percent of internet users bounce back from a website if it takes more than 4-5 seconds to load. That is, you will lose about half of your potential consumers if you have a slow-loading page. When bounce rates are high for a website, Google will sense that the website is delivering a poor user experience, and will decrease its ranking. You cant have a high SERP ranking with a slow-loading website. Google wants to provide the users with specific websites in the SERP that delivers a quality user experience. Thus, you should definitely optimize your web page and its elements to load quickly to have a positive effect on Google’s search rankings.
Easy Navigation
The problem with most websites is that they are designed with high-quality content, but poor navigation. This navigation includes the user experience and also the ability of search engines to crawl and index your web pages. When it comes to user experience, your navigation should be easy and smooth enough to engage the user to learn more about your service. When the user engages with your website for a long time, Google will sense that you are providing a positive user experience and will reward you with a higher SERP ranking for relevant keywords. You may check the level of your website navigation with the assistance of a reliable and reputed SEO agency in Dubai.
RankBrain
Google’s RankBrain feature measures the click-through rates and the total time a user engages within a page to analyze the relevancy and trustability of a website. Click through rates refers to the number of users that click through to your website from your page result in the results page. Even though click-through rate cannot determine the quality or user experience of your website, it can generate more traffic to your website. The relevancy and attractiveness of the headline and meta description on the link are what trigger the user’s interest to go through your content. Even if you have the best quality content on your website, there is no use if your target audience never gets to it. Thus, make sure that the metadata of your link is efficient enough to attract a click-through.
Domain Security
The security and trustworthiness of your domain are major factors of Google’s EAT principle. Google is always looking forward to providing its users with reliable results from secure websites. Presenting the users with websites having unsecured or harmful domains can affect the credibility of the search engine. Thus, Google always presents better rankings to secured websites. An SSL certificate for your website is a must if you are collecting any kind of user data. If you are yet to shift from HTTP to HTTPS, do it immediately. Having a secured domain will make sure that all your content and SEO efforts are paid off.
As we have seen, there are many technical and content-related factors that determine how Google ranks a specific website in the SERP for relevant searches. Thus, make sure you consider all these factors while developing and optimizing your website.
