It’s challenging to stay on top of the ever-changing SEO standards. However, if you want to rise to the top of Google’s search results, you’ll need to know what’s happening. It’s a no-brainer that the more traffic a site receives, the more leads and sales it generates. Therefore, SEO is necessary if you want your hard work to pay off. Without it, your efforts will go in vain. To prevent this from happening to you, we asked a team of digital marketing pros for help and gathered a list of essential SEO ranking factors that make your website dominate search engine results pages (SERPs).

SEO ranking factors that will launch your website at the top of SERPs

The term SEO (search engine optimization) essentially implies increasing the likelihood that a web page will appear in a search engine’s first page results. However, let’s be honest: search engine basically means Google nowadays.

Google app on a tablet
Appearing in the top three results of a Google search is quite beneficial because the click-through rates on your website will increase dramatically.

It’s not a secret that every website owner wants their website among the first results of a relevant Google search. After all, the closer your website gets to the top of the search results, the higher your click-through rates will be. But how does one exactly get there? By focusing on the following SEO ranking factors.

High-quality content

The importance of your website and blog content quality cannot be overstated. High-quality content might be the most important of all SEO ranking factors. If you focus on creating pages that don’t contribute anything of value to the user experience, it can come back to haunt you. That is because of Google’s Panda and Fred algorithm improvements.

Posting high-quality content will help you increase the amount of time a user spends on a page. On the other hand, it will also reduce the percentage of visitors leaving your website as you give them a good reason to stay. Therefore, your blog should include posts with valuable tips and advice relevant to your industry that your readers will find helpful.

Person typing a blog post on their laptop
High-quality content will always remain among the most critical SEO ranking factors.

For the sake of SEO, high-quality content pages need to do more than be well-written and lengthy. For them to drive organic traffic to your website, you need to know your customers’ intent and what they are looking for. And, because searcher intent might change over time, you need to make sure to regularly check your Google Analytics and analyze the data you have.

Accessibility and security of your website

Another essential SEO ranking factor has everything to do with the right type of URL for your website. You need an URL that Google’s crawlers will have no problem accessing and crawling. For Google to comprehend what your page is about, it needs to be able to go to its URL and look at its content.

You’ll need the following to help the bots figure out your website:

  • Your website should be created with a well-coded website builder.
  • You may tell Google where it can and can’t find your site information by creating a robots.txt file.
  • Create a sitemap with all of your website’s pages

One of the biggest mistakes you can make is underestimating the importance of web accessibility for SEO. If you want to experience an increase in your traffic, you need to adapt to each visitor and make sure that all versions of your website are easily accessible to all potential customers. Keep in mind that web accessibility also means making your website easy to access and ready for people with certain difficulties. That’s how you’ll ensure your website is among the first on SERPs.

Page loading speed

For many years, page loading speed has been considered the key ranking factor in SEO. Google’s goal is to make the web a better place for its users, and one way to do so is to prioritize pages that load quickly. Google prioritizes page loading speed so much that in July 2018, they announced they’ll begin penalizing websites for slow mobile page loading times.

Given that Google may penalize your site if it doesn’t load quickly on mobile devices, it’s essential to use Google’s mobile testing tool to check how your site compares to the competition. If you haven’t already, you should sign up for Google Search Console, as there, you can access data and see all of your site’s performance reports.

User experience

As of late, Google has been relying on machine learning and artificial intelligence to improve the ranking of websites. That signal is known as RankBrain. Other factors that affect your search engine ranking are also included below. These are some examples:

  • A site’s click-through rate measures the proportion of visitors who visit it after seeing an entry in a search engine’s results.
  • The bounce rate is the number of people who visit your page and immediately return to the search results.
  • Dwell time is the amount of time people spend on your site after arriving.

Google will penalize your site if visitors leave because they don’t like what they see. It may be more difficult for your website to rank better in search results if many individuals do this. Even if this happens, you can take advantage of it. By knowing that your material doesn’t fit the searcher’s aim, you’ll know you need to go back and find a better keyword to focus on.

Group of people looking at a laptop and smiling
User experience is one of the most critical SEO ranking factors you should focus on.

While this may not seem like much to you, Google notes how long users stay on your page after clicking through their search results. To improve your search engine rating, you need to optimize your titles, descriptions, and content to attract visitors and give value to them.

Final thoughts on the most important SEO ranking factors

Focusing on the SEO ranking factors we’ve listed in this article will ensure that your website reaches the top of search results pages. However, to make the most of SEO, it’s always best to reach out to digital marketing experts and let them take care of this for you. You can focus on finding additional ways to increase your customer base, knowing that pros are making sure you’re making the most out of your online presence.

Author Bio:

Mark Abrams is a born and bred New Yorker working as a part of the talented digital marketing team at Movers Development. Mark is all about social media, so he loves what he’s doing and hopes to open his own digital marketing agency one day. He loves exploring NYC all over again with his best friend and their dogs in his spare time.