No digital marketing campaign isn’t complete without on-page SEO and that’s a fact. In today’s marketing scenario, all brands want their websites to occupy the top positions. To achieve that #1 spot, it is important to understand the various SEO ranking factors leveraged by Google and other search engines in its algorithms. In fact, the search engine giant considers over 200+ ranking factors and explaining all of them isn’t feasible. This is why we have shortlisted some of the best on page SEO factors that offer better website visibility on search engines, let’s get started.
On-page SEO is the process of optimizing a business website internally to maximize its reach on the web. It involves fine-tuning various aspects of the website such as content, page loading speed, URL structures, etc. This allows search engines to crawl, understand the content and rank the web pages accordingly for relevant search queries. On-page SEO helps search engines find and display your pages to users and also helps secure better rankings. Higher rankings lead to more clicks, organic visitors, and increased trustworthiness.
Decoding The Various SEO ranking factors
Before we move on, let us first discuss the Yandex leak ranking factors. Some of you might know this but for those who don’t, On January 2023, Yandex, the most popular search engine in Russia and the 4th largest in the world suffered a massive data breach. Approximately 17,853 ranking factors were revealed to the public through this leak. Factors such as page quality, user engagement, mobile-friendliness, etc were highlighted as important ranking factors.
Why is this news relevant here? Well, one thing that the leak has revealed is significant similarities between Yandex and other major search engines worldwide in terms of ranking factors. Now with that out the way, let’s get on with the major Google ranking factors:
Page speed
What are the most important Google ranking factors? Let’s start with page speed. A slow-loading website isn’t going to rank your website anywhere. Having a slow website only results in higher bounce rates and a poor user experience. Page loading speed is one of the factors considered by Google for ranking. The search engine uses three specific metrics known as Core Web Vitals for measuring page speed. These are namely:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Used to measure loading performance
Interaction To Next Paint (INP): Used for measuring responsiveness.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures visual stability.
Therefore, Page loading speed is something you must be aware of in the first place. There are various website speed-measuring tools available on the web which you can use for your purpose. Optimizing image sizes, reducing HTTP requests, and enabling browser caching, are some of the strategies you can implement to improve site load speeds.
Content relevance
Despite the saying content is king, it only becomes valuable if it is relevant to the queries that users are looking for. When crafting content, it has to be relevant to your brand or niche. Let’s consider the following example: suppose a user is looking for UAE’s best tourist spots, your content must list out the spots to visit. Instead of that, if your content doesn’t offer what users want, it will struggle to get ranked higher.
Content freshness
In the digital world, users want accurate information for their queries and they expect the same for your website. Similar to the relevance factor, your content must be updated to the latest standards and events, making it one of the important Google ranking factors. Not updating the content from time to time makes it outdated which is something customers won’t prefer to check at all and in turn won’t be crawled by Google for ranking purposes.
E-E-A-T factors
Having quality webpage content assures you higher rankings. Regarding Google page ranking factors, the search engine considers various factors such as your experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) and assigns a score based on that. The higher this score is, the more reliable your content source is for a specific topic. If you wonder how to increase this specific factor, there are several ways to get started. Creating a trusted profile, writing content, getting backlinks from reputable sites, and avoiding using black hat SEO are some such ways.
Title tags
Title tags are one of the most important elements in an HTML code. These tags not only signify the name of the web page but it also helps search engines and users to understand what your page is about. These are usually displayed along the meta description on search engines and are often the first thing that users see upon searching for relevant information. Therefore, make sure that the title tags placed match the user’s terms.
Mobile Friendliness
The internet sector is dominated by mobile with approximately 98% of users worldwide using smartphones to access the internet. This is way above the 58.3% of laptop/desktop users. This indicates that mobile-friendliness is one of the various Google ranking factors to be considered. As a brand, your website must be optimized for mobile devices to secure higher rankings. Some of the optimization features include a responsive site, including accessible menus for easier navigation, larger fonts etc.
Visual Assets
Incorporating good visual assets helps enhance the web page aesthetics, improve search rankings, bring in more customers and make them stay longer. So when you are building your website, make it attractive by including high-quality, original, and relevant visuals for your content. It is essential to make users and search engines find the content in text searches and image-based searches. For this, you can implement schema markups for the visual assets, provide contextual information and above all, optimize the assets so that it gets displayed without issues.
Image alt text
Visual assets such as images and videos are important Google ranking factors, as are image alt-texts. These descriptions provide context to users and search engines about the image in case it fails to load. It also provides accessibility to visually impaired users who interact with your website. Now when creating alt-texts, it should have brief descriptive names consisting of relevant keywords. This helps maximize the impact of the text in the long run.
Website URL
URLs are one of the essential SEO ranking factors and is often the first thing that users and search engines alike look for for visiting and crawlability purposes. To make your webpage URLs discoverable on the web, some of the practices involve making them shorter and descriptive, using hyphens to separate words, and avoiding the use of special characters.
NAP citations
If certain things must be consistent across your all online business platforms, it should be NAP i.e. name, address and phone number. Be it your website, social media channels, or local listings, these Google page ranking factors must be present without fail. The reason behind this is to avoid inconsistencies and confusion for search engines and users. Including NAP citations shows Google that your website or business is genuine and people can get in touch with your brand.
Keyword Optimization
Writing content and getting backlinks from authoritative sites is good. Despite these SEO ranking factors, there’s one that shouldn’t be ignored by any means and that is the inclusion of keywords and its optimization. When it comes to keywords, they shouldn’t be stuffed and must be incorporated in a way such that they match the user’s search intent. This allows Google to display your webpage as relevant results to user queries. Including keywords in title tags, meta descriptions, and image alt-texts are some optimization techniques.
It doesn’t matter if your website is good if it offers a poor on-page experience. Like the other ones described above, this one too is an important SEO ranking factor as it provides search engines essential details about your visitors’ user experience. But how is this metric measured by Google? By considering multiple ranking signals such as CTR, bounce rates, dwell times, etc. As a rule of thumb, it’s wise to keep these factors at a minimum to ensure a stable website browsing experience.
Winding up
The answer to what are the most important Google ranking factors starts with learning and mastering them first. Only then you can achieve higher visibility and rankings for your site on Google. You need the help of a good search engine optimization agency in UAE. As there are many factors to choose from, it is recommended to approach them as an ongoing continual process. The point is to focus on creating high-value content, optimizing technical SEO elements, combining both on-page & off-page activities, and regularly updating content to improve your chances of ranking in SERPs.
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