11 Most Important Factors You Need To Optimize To Increase Your Google Ranking

Every website wants to rank higher in Google search results. After all, the higher the ranking the more traffic the site will get, and thus the higher the revenues. However, only Google can decide whether your site should rank or not. Not to worry though because there are things you can do to improve your rankings and achieve your goals.

There are more than 200 ranking elements that can affect your rank in Google search results. Thankfully, you don’t need to optimize all of them. There are 11 factors that you need to focus on to increase your Google ranking and get more people to buy from you.

11 most important ranking factors

There are three primary types of SEO:

• Technical SEO – technical aspects of a website, i.e., speed, security, crawlability, etc.
• On-page SEO – elements in your content that need to be optimized, such as keywords, H1 tags, outbound links, images, alt texts, URLs, meta descriptions, and more.
• Off-page SEO – activities that are done outside your site, including backlinks, 404 errors, site structure, social media, and local SEO, to name a few.

You need to perform all three SEO techniques accordingly to ensure that you improve your ranking in Google.

Technical SEO factors

1. Website speed

Web users have shorter attention spans. They want instantaneous answers and solutions. This is why it’s important that your site loads fast enough to give them the answers they are looking for. If your site takes longer than three seconds to load, you can expect your bounce rate to be higher and your sales to be lower. Amazon, for example, can lose at least one billion dollars every year for just a one-second delay.

To optimize your website speed, first, you need to Google PageSpeed Insights, where you will need to enter your website’s URL and hit analyze.  The result will tell you the things you need to improve on, including images, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, CDN, caching plugins, and even your web hosting platform.

2. Security

Google announced HTTPS as a ranking signal in 2014. In 2017, they announced that sites that do not use HTTPS encryption will be flagged as “not secure” on all web browsers. The search engine giant puts a lot of emphasis on a website’s security because sensitive data, including passwords, credit card information, and the like, are vulnerable to phishers and hackers. This is why you should encrypt your site and enable HTTPS to make sure any information that your visitors enter in your site can’t be read by unauthorized persons.

To secure your site, you need to perform the following:

• Keep software and plug-ins up-to-date
• Add SSL Certificate
• Encrypt with HTTPS
• Use a secure password
• Use a high-quality web hosting platform
• Record user access and administrative privileges
• Revert to CMS default settings
• Make sure to back up your site
• Familiarize yourself with your web server configuration files
• Use a web application firewall (WAF)
• Reinforce network security

3. Responsiveness

Google announced in 2015 that responsiveness or mobile-friendliness is another crucial ranking factor, which means that websites should be optimized for desktops as well as smartphones. Check your site’s content for mobile-friendliness by logging on to Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. The results will also tell you about page loading issues that you need to improve on.

Ask your web developer to make your site mobile-friendly, which should have a fluid layout, Flexbox layout, responsive images, media queries, and CSS and HTML, which are the foundation of a responsive site.

4. Crawlability

If your website has been optimized and it’s not ranking in search results pages, then this could mean crawlability issues. Google and other search engines have crawlers, also known as spiders or bots, that “crawl” the entire web to discover content. Every time these bots land on a website, they scan, review, and store data to understand what the site is all about and to determine how it should rank.

To improve your website’s crawlability, submit your site to Google Search Console, as well as set up your robots.txt file to let search engine crawlers know which pages they should crawl and index.

5. Image alt texts

Alt texts are HTML attributes used to describe images. They are an underrated SEO practice that most beginners tend to neglect because they are unfamiliar with it. Aside from that, alt texts help search engines understand what the image is all about. It’s also an innovative solution for non-visual readers. Plus, it brings additional traffic to your site when a user searches for keywords that match your alt texts.

To optimize the images on your site, you should use the proper keywords as alt texts. Be sure to use fewer than 125 characters and not to cram your keywords into every image’s alt text.

On-page SEO factors

6. Keywords

Using the wrong keywords in your content won’t drive traffic to your site. No matter how awesome your content is. No matter how competitive the keywords you use are. This is why it’s important to run thorough keyword research to determine which keywords suit your content best.

Use keyword research tools, like Google Keyword Planner, Google Search Console, Moz Keyword Explorer, KeywordTool.io, Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, and SEMrush to get insights on which searched words are more fitting for your content.

7. Content

Once you gather all the best keywords to use, the next thing you need to do is to write high-quality content. Google wants to make sure that all web users will have the best experiences. This is why they want all websites to provide fresh, high-quality, relevant, well-researched, and optimized content, which will help boost your SEO rankings and increase your conversions and sales.

To ensure high-quality and optimized content, you first need to conduct keyword research and analyze your site data. Next, optimize for on-page and off-page SEO. Then, make sure to look into its loading speed and backlinks.

8. URL structure

Your site’s URL structure should be optimized the same way your content titles and headings are optimized. Properly structure URLs can also help improve your SEO because it helps bots crawl your site and its pages better.

To optimize your URL, make sure that it is short, just between 35-72 characters, readable, and has your keywords in it.

9. Internal links

Internal links, or hyperlinks that connect one page to another on the same domain, help boost your organic ranking and drive more traffic to your site. They also help Google crawl all of the content on your site and spread link juice evenly. But for successful link building, it’s best to optimize both external and internal links.

To optimize internal links, you should create lots of content to have various internal pages. You should also use anchor text to link different pages on your site. Be sure to use links that look natural to your readers.

Off-page SEO factors

10. Social media signals

These refer to the shares or likes your social media profile gets, as well as your brand’s social media presence. This is a crucial off-page strategy to boost your online visibility, especially in social media platforms, which can help you gain more popularity and grow your network. Having a strong social media presence can also get you more backlinks, giving your content more authority in Google’s eyes.

To get more followers and be an authority in your niche through social media, you should choose the best platforms to promote your brand. These can be Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, or TikTok, to name a few. Be sure to research the best platforms for your business.

11. Backlinks

Also known as inbound links, backlinks are links that come from other websites to yours. Search engines put a lot of importance on backlinks because they treat them as votes for a specific page. This means that the more backlinks you have pointing to your site, the higher you will rank in relevant search queries.

To ensure success with your backlinks strategy, make it a point to be careful when choosing the sites to link to because not all backlinks have the same value. Some can even harm your own ranking. One way to get great backlinks is to guest post or to write content for another site. Just make sure to choose a site that has the same ranking or higher than you.

Final words

Google updates its ranking algorithms every year. It’s important that you optimize your website to ensure your ranking in search engines.

In this article, we’ve listed down 11 of the most important elements that you need to focus on to improve your Google rankings and remain relevant online.