If you want to know which specific on-page ranking factors will help increase your search traffic read on. In this article I am going to share with you the five most important ranking factors:
Website Design
If you didn’t know Google launched the mobile-first index – this basically means that your site needs to LOOK GOOD and LOAD QUICKLY on mobile devices. A good-looking, fast website makes navigating that website much more convenient for your potential customers and will more likely result in more time spent on a page or site which in turn results in sales. Luckily there is a Google mobile-friendly test tool to check. If you fail this test, you’ve got some serious work ahead of you…
Failing the test means that you need to
update your website’s design or theme to something that is mobile responsive
Website Speed
Pay attention to your site’s speed as this is another confirmed ranking factor from Google and it is very important for quality user experience as pages that take a while to load have higher bounce rates. You can run some tests with a Google Page Speed tool. The ideal website should load in 2 to 5 seconds, but ideally, it should be quicker than.
Also, be sure to run your pages for a web page test to see how they load in the real world and aim for a load time of fewer than 30 seconds.
Title Tags
Now your website looks good and is loading quickly, next you should look at the title tags of your pages. A title tag is the HTML element used to specify the webpage’s title, so it tells a visitor what the web page is all about.
These are displayed on search engine results pages and are really important. Make sure your title tag is accurate and provides a concise description of the page’s content preferably including the target keyword as close to the beginning of the title as possible. You must do this without sacrificing readability.
Remember this is the first thing a potential customer will see so it is important you get this right! You can use Title tags to display your business or brand name which will again lead to more traffic.
Internal Linking
A good internal linking structure will not only increase your search traffic but will also increase conversions as well. You can use internal links to control a flow of search engine Authority across your site. Google reviews websites by reviewing your website, so when Google bot arrives at your homepage, it follows the first link and so on which then assists it in working out how the pages, blogs, posts, and other content relates to each other.
So you can link a blog post that references SEO services or is about SEO services by putting a link in the content where it says SEO services and point to your SEO services page. The more links to a post mean the more value your website will be as Google deems that a page with a lot of valuable links is important.
Content
The content on your website must be
readable and relevant to your business. Consider the length of your content, when you
add words to your pages, you will start to rank for a variety of other keywords
so go through all the pages on your site that you want to increase the rankings
for and update the content now. Google
prefers updated content so it is wise to review your content on a regular basis
to keep it relevant.
If you’re wondering how many words to write or even what to write about just Google your target keyword and open the top 5 results as this will give you some ideas, then you can write a list of pros and a list of cons for each result.
To guide your writing process you also want to make sure that your content is formatted nicely with headings and bullet points and images. Finally, make it easy to read.
So there you have it the five most important SEO ranking factors are mobile responsiveness, site speed, and keywords in your title tags, internal linking, and length of content. Here at Gn digital, we use these ranking factors along with some other ranking factors.