Google is constantly improving their search algorithm to provide the best search experience to the users. The search engine giant takes a lot of factors into consideration when ranking a webpage. Businesses should optimise their websites in compliance with Google’s guidelines to ensure the success of their online venture. Here are the most important Google ranking factors.
Page Loading Speed:
Google understandably gives preference to websites that load more quickly. Page Loading Speed should be 3.5 seconds or less than that. If it takes more than the specified time, your site will lose its Google ranking credibility. According to a survey, 40% of the visitors will abandon a site that takes more than three seconds to load. If your website does not load quickly, you are going to miss out on potential customers and Google Ranking as well.
Local Results:
Local Results have become a more prominent ranking factor this year. With more and more people using search engines on their mobile to find businesses around them, it is important to have Google My Business set up. This will help you ensure that your business appears on local searches and get found by your target audience. Obviously, the information in your Google My Business matches with Name, Address and Phone Number on your website and other local citations. This helps your website to rank better for geo-targeted keywords.
Featured snippets:
Google is displaying featured snippets for search queries, so an increased number of marketers are learning to get their websites featured. Also called as Quick Answer Box, the featured snippets appear above the organic results with a link to the source website. The queries that fetch featured snippets are usually questions, so your webpage must have the question along with an in-depth answer to be displayed in Google’s Quick Answer Box.
Mobile First Index:
Google will soon implement mobile first index, meaning that you must have a mobile optimised version of your website to rank predominantly in Google. The search engine giant uses a handy mobile-friendly test to determine whether your website is optimised for mobile or not. So, you must make it a priority to set up a better mobile-optimised website to rank higher in search engines and gain organic traffic as well.
No pop-ups:
Google has already started to penalise mobile websites that display mobile-friendly label in the search results. These pop-ups block the content and hinder people from reading the text. To facilitate user-friendliness, Google counts down on annoying pop-ups by lowering the ranks of websites displaying them.
Quality Content:
Having quality contents on your website is important to rank well and get organic traffic from Google. According to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, all the pages should provide high quality, informative contents to entice search engine spiders and visitors. The content should be precise, relevant and accurately describe your topic. Google ranks website that provide in-depth information on the topic in question.
Links:
Links and content are the top two ranking signals of a website. The quality of links is more important than its quantity. So, webmasters should aim at getting quality links from magazines, newspapers, high quality blogs and authorised websites.
If you want to optimise your website to be in compliance with all these ranking factors, you must rely on an SEO specialist. Verve Innovation is a leading SEO company in Melbourne that can optimise your website to rank higher in search engines. Call us today for a no-obligation quote!