Rank In Google With SEO Marketing: Google's Top Ranking Factors

Out of 1.74 billion websites, there is only space for 10 pages to appear on the first search engine result page. Just 10. All other pages get buried because nobody looks what's on the second page or even like further behind in the search results for any keyword, right? It is not random which pages appear on the first page. Google has a super complex algorithm that ranks web pages lower or higher in the thousands of search results, according to different criteria. Only the top 9.37% gets traffic from Google. A whopping 90.63% doesn't. Since you're listening to this episode, you want your content to rank as well and be found by potential customers through Google. Here is how to rank your website on Google. This is the Dragon Digital Marketing Podcast. Get ready for the digital marketing strategies and tactics that attract great customer relationships to your business. Here is your host, Monique Idemudia. Hey there, this is Monique and you're listening to episode number seven of the Dragon Digital Marketing Podcast. Today I want to talk about Google and the ranking factors for SEO and how you can make your website rank in the top 10 search results with search engine optimization or SEO. Side note: Since Google has most of the market share in the search engine market, I'll use Google as a synonym for search engine throughout this episode. However, if you follow all the tips, you'll automatically also rank in Bing, Yahoo, Duck Duck Go, and other search engines. As of January 2020, there are over 1.74 billion websites on the internet. Wow, that is a lot of websites. Imagine how long it will take to actually count all of those websites, assuming you could count one website per second. That's one second first website, two seconds second website, three seconds third website, and so on until you have reached the 1.74 billionth website. No joke. It would actually take 55.158 years. Now that's amazing, right? Out of 1.74 billion websites, there is only space for 10 pages to appear on the first search engine result page. Just 10. All other pages get buried because nobody looks what's on the second page, or even like further behind in the search results for any keyword, right? It is not random which pages appear on the first page. Google has a super complex algorithm that ranks web pages lower or higher in the thousands of search results, according to different criteria. Google evaluates each criterion differently, depending on how important a factor is. Only the most relevant, trustworthy, and authoritative web pages make it to the first page. Since you're listening to this episode, you want your content to rank as well, and be found by potential customers through Google. Only 9.37% of web pages rank on the first page. Only the top 9.37% gets traffic from Google. A whopping 90.63% doesn't. 90.63% of all pages in the index get zero traffic from Google. Not a single visitor. That means, if you get only one visitor from Google to your website per month, you're already in the top 9.37%. Now, that's amazing, right? Those numbers are from a study with over a 1,000,000,000 pages that has been conducted by Ahrefs. You can find the link to the study and more info about all the other stats that I mention throughout this episode in the show notes on dragon-digital-marketing.com. Now what are those mysterious ranking factors that make pages rank? Google isn't completely transparent with the scheme, the criteria, and the weighing factors. However, they share some insights with the world on their blog. Google has a Google Webmaster Central Blog, where the publish official news on crawling and indexing sites for the Google index. They also publish a document called the Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines. You can find the link to the up-to-date Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines, as well as the link to the Google Webmasters Blog in the show notes on dragon-digital-marketing.com. Now, let's talk about the factors for SEO. Here's a list of the most important ones. E-A-T. EAT stands for Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness. Showing that you are an expert in your field, and that you are an authority in your industry, that continuously publishes thought leadership content, and showcasing that you're trustworthy and transparent with, for example, the way you handle data, have a privacy and a cookie policy on your page, mention your real name on your site, are open about how you use your users' data, et cetera, are hugely important to Google. The number of backlinks. You can see backlinks like referrals of other pages on the internet. If someone links out to your website from their website, it means that they find your content super useful, and they want others to also benefit from it. Having many backlinks from other reputable sites, not low-quality sites obviously, tells Google that you are a valuable resource. This is why backlinks are a top ranking factor for SEO. It should be noted that Google counts mentions and citations of your name and your business too, but you need actual backlinks to do really well. Backlinks are referrals from other people. They're like a vote for you website. The overall content relevance. There are so many websites on the web, and a lot of content is duplicate or just low quality content in general. If you want to matter, you have to consistently publish thought leadership content. Or else why would Google rank you before the millions of other websites? The page title. The title of your page is what appears as the headline of a search result on Google. This is also the text that's shown in the tabs of a browser window. You need to put your most important keywords in the title tag of your page. A good page title makes people click and tells Google what your page is about. Mobile support. Mobile friendliness is super important for Google, and Google favors responsive sites. They even crawl websites predominantly with their Googlebot smartphone now instead of, as it used to be, with their Googlebot desktop. A webpage that doesn't give users on mobile devices a good user experience, simply doesn't belong to the best that rank. Load speed. Google favors pages that load fast. You can make use of load speed technologies like compression. minification, and Accelerated Mobile Pages. Having to wait for a site to load is just a bad user experience and the top pages that rank load fast. The click-through-rate. That is the number of people who click through to your site from a search result, in relation to the total number of impressions. For example, if 100 people saw your page in the search results and 60 of them click through to your site, you'd have a click through rate of 60%. Let's say that you ranked number two for a keyword, and more people would click through to your site than to the person who ranks number one. That tells Google, that yours is more relevant, and then they'd make you the number one. That's why the click through rate is an important ranking signal for Google. The time on site. If people spend more time on your site, it means they found what they were looking for on your site and your content matches their search intent. If people bounce right back to the search results page after clicking on your page in the search results, it tells Google that you're content wasn't relevant for them, and it didn't match their search intent. You need amazing content marketing to keep people on your site longer, and engage with the content too, to rank higher. The bounce rate. If a person bounces right back to the search results page or just exits without even interacting with your sight whatsoever, that's a bad signal for the Google algorithm. It means that your content didn't give them what they were looking for. In other words, it didn't match the search intent. A https security certificate. Google wants the best user experience for their users, and even directly warns users who use the Google Chrome browser, if a website is not secure and doesn't have a security certificate. Sites that don't have an https security certificate and still use the old http standard won't rank as well. Readability. Your content should be easy to understand and use simple language. Nobody should be excluded from understanding your content. If a 15-year-old can understand what your page is about, you're good. But if you're using a lot of jargon or complex sentence structures, you might want to simplify it and give you a visitors a better user experience. Google likes and rewards that as well. Hemingway is a great free tool that you can use, and it helps you with improving your writing and language. Let's say that you have an awesome and well written article on your site, but it's in font size six. Well, guess what? That's a bad user experience as well. So a large font size is more readable, and it also leads to higher user engagement. Google considers that as well, so pay attention to your reading comprehension and visual comprehension. Usability. Do you have a well-structured site? Do you have a navigation at the top or left hand side of your site? Does your main site navigation consist of actual text links and not image links? Those are not only industry standards, but they also make it significantly easier for users to use and understand your site, and for search engines to crawl and understand and rank your site in their index as well. The number of images. Images make content vivid and nicer to read for users. You can show Google that your images are relevant and support your content by illustrating concepts. You can use three attributes in particular to do that. The image file name, the image title tag, and the image alt tag. Put relevant keywords in there and let Google know what's shown in your images, and that they support the topic and make your content better. Google can also index images by the way. The number of internal links. When you link to relevant content, like other posts on your site throughout a piece of content, it shows Google that you are an authority on the topic, and that you have multiple pieces of content on similar topics. Google likes content clusters, where there is a pillar page and then several sub pages you link out to and back from, and people can get further information and dive deeper into a topic on your website. It shows Googel that you know what you're talking about and you have expertise. User engagement. Obviously, Google favors engaging content. It means that it's inspiring, and users are having a good experience. Social media activity. People share what they like and recommend on social media. When your content gets a lot of social shares, it's a positive signal for Google as well. Now I want to say something about the contentious factor, the age of the page. Older pages tend to rank better on Google. Ahrefs did a study where they took two million random keywords and pulled data on the top 10 ranking pages for each of them. It turns out that the average top 10 ranking page is two plus years old, and those that rank at number one, are almost three years old on average. However, I want to note that this is most likely only because older sites have had a better chance to establish themselves as a trustworthy expert with authority. And it doesn't make any sense for Google to favor a web page simply because it's older and has existed for a longer than another page. Additional ranking factors for local businesses when you're doing local SEO are the proximity of your address to the area where person searches for a local business. Obviously it makes sense that your local business is more relevant to a person, if you're located close to where they're searching from. Another local ranking factor for local SEO is the proper Google My Business category association. Choose the most accurate category for your business on Google My Business, that describes what you do in the most specific way. Another local ranking factor is to have high-quality and authoritative, well-structured citations and mentions for your local business on the internet, especially from business directories. You can find the list of the most important ranking factors that I just mentioned in the show notes of this episode on dragon-digital-marketing.com. Summing up. Here's what I want you to take away from this episode. There are a lot of different variables to consider when you want to rank in Google. The Google Search algorithm is very complex and 90.63% of web pages get no organic traffic from Google Search. In order for your pages to be among the 9.37% that rank, it takes everything but luck. You need to build backlinks, choose your content topics wisely, optimize for the right keywords, match search intent, and of course make sure that your pages are actually indexed, among other things. It takes hard work and excellent SEO knowledge to rank on the first page in Google, especially if your business and your website are new. You can put in the time and learn how to do SEO yourself with our SEO Checklist. You can download our super actionable and comprehensive SEO Checklist for free, yes I said free, on dragon-digital-marketing.com in the show notes of episode seven. This checklist is all you need when you want to do your own SEO, and no longer have to gather up tons of bits of information on the internet. We got all you need, including links to the best SEO tools that help you with everything in our checklist. So don't forget to check out the further resources and the show notes of this episode on dragon-digital-marketing.com. And of course, if you feel like you need help with implementing all of this, check out our agency, Dragon Digital Marketing. We're more than happy to help you out with your SEO and make your website rank so you can feel reassured, and get tons of visitors to your website that are potential customers, and you no longer have to pay for all of your website traffic anymore. That's what I got for you today. Until next time, Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Dragon Digital Marketing Podcast. You can visit us at dragon-digital-marketing.com for more resources and for more episodes. Let us know how you like the show and write us a review. We are grateful when you like, share, and subscribe. We appreciate you.