According to the studies, Google is the most visited website in 2023. The data is not surprising for those passionate about digital marketing. Over 90% of internet users worldwide prefer using Google as the search engine. In such a scenario, digital marketers and online businesses must adopt strategies that fetch traffic through Google.
The only way to bring more people to your website through Google is by optimizing the website content and developing strong inbound links. But, most digital marketers work blindly in such cases, as they are not aware of the Google ranking factors. Do you know that Google has more than 200 ranking factors?
Though Google does not disclose details on them, a seasoned digital marketer understands and analyzes a few crucial ranking factors. Optimizing the website according to those ranking factors can fetch a quick and long-sustainable result for an online business. Find the top Google ranking factors below and optimize your online platform accordingly.
- Â Easy to Access and Secure Website
Google loves websites that maintain top-notch security. Therefore, the secured websites rank easily on Google. Besides security, the website should offer seamless accessibility. The search engine rates the websites poorly if they are difficult to access for the visitors and search engine crawler. The following measures are recommended to make a website easy to crawl.
- The backend coding should be simple and bug-free.
- Developing a robots.txt file to instruct Google crawlers to visit the pages to take information about your website is important.
- Your website must have a sitemap that lists all your website pages.
- Your website should enable SSL security to provide visitors with a more secure browsing experience.
2. Website Loading Speed
The loading speed is another crucial consideration in improving a website’s ranking. The ideal loading speed for a mobile website should be around 1-2 seconds. According to industry reports and surveys, more than 55% of people abandon a mobile site visit if the website takes more than 3 seconds to load.
Google crawler rates the websites highly if they load in less than half a second. Choosing a reliable and high-quality website hosting service is the best way to optimize a website’s speed. Nevertheless, avoiding using high-resolution images and other multimedia content on the website is crucial.
3. Mobile-Friendly Interface
The website interface is another crucial ranking factor for Google. Nowadays, responsive website design is a trend, and Google rates responsive sites highly. A responsive website interface features compatibility with both desktop and smartphone screens. The following factors can improve the user experience for handheld device users.
- Using large fonts for handheld device users will improve user experience.
- The interface should look clean, and ads featured on the website should not hide content.
- A well-structured menu section makes your website pages easily accessible to visitors.
4. Domain Age and Authority Score
An Ahref study conducted over two million websites found that websites lesser than one year old can hardly achieve a good ranking in Google search results. More than 60% of websites featured on the first page of Google’s search results have domains more than three years old.
Therefore, domain age increases the authority of the websites. Website owners and digital marketers should have patience and work on improving domain authority by adding more informative and relevant content.
5. Content Optimization
Content is the king, and it will continue to dominate the digital marketing space for many years to come. There is no alternative to developing quality content that fetches excellent SEO results. Google and other search engines always rate websites highly if they discover quality content. A few factors that make your content more powerful are:
- Inclusion of relevant and trending information
- Data and analytics to build trust
- Unique and non-copied content
- Simple language to improve readability
6. User Experience
User experience is another crucial factor in improving the website’s authority score and achieving a first-page rank in Google searches. A fast-loading and secure website is essential for a better user experience. However, these are fundamental requirements, and digital marketers have to analyze some advanced factors to analyze a website’s user experience.
- Click-Through Rate: Click-through rate suggests the percentage of people who visit your website pages after coming from Google. A high click-through rate suggests that your website offers a good user experience.
- Bounce Rate: The bounce rate suggests the number of people who come to your website and leave quickly. A high bounce rate suggests a poor user experience. However, it may also suggest that visitors your website receives are not relevant to your products or services.
- Dwell Time: Dwell time suggests the time a visitor, on average, spends on your website. A high dwell time suggests a good user experience on your website.
Conclusion
Google has multiple ranking factors, and website owners and digital marketers must understand the most crucial ranking factors to make changes to a website accordingly. A website that adheres to the standard practices of improving these ranking factors will fetch more traffic. Digital Mitro has a team of seasoned and creative digital marketing experts who prioritize Google ranking factors to draw long-sustainable SEO results.
Description:
Google uses more than 200 ranking factors to determine user-friendliness of a website. Know the most crucial ranking factors and improve your website’s SEO performance.