Here’s Why You Need to Pay Attention to SEO Rankings

There are several factors that go into the SEO rankings of your website. You need to know them to see your site at the top of the list.

You need to pay attention to all of them and know they can change several times a year or stay the same for a few years. You depend on business to come through your website to bring you leads that can be turned into sales.

Ranking is Huge for Your Business

If your website isn’t showing up on the first page of search engines, you’re going to have a hard time being found and can’t maximize your potential for sales and visibility. Think about it; when was the last time you looked for what you wanted beyond the first page on any search engine? Most of us, when we don’t see what we want on the first page, change our search term, and look at a new page of results.

Factors to Improve your SEO Rankings

SEO is much more than simply the content is written and the keywords used. In fact, the keywords have become one of the least important factors in the rankings for your website. Search engines view your website as a living organism and expect to see impactful and authoritative information presented regularly. Let’s take a look at twelve key factors that can impact and improve your SEO rankings and help your business.

Mobile Responsiveness

How Does your website look on mobile devices? Is it as easy to use on a PC as it is on a smartphone? The responsiveness of your website to look the same on both and be easy to use is one of the key factors to the SEO rankings.

Excellent Content

Are you an authority in your industry? You’re still going to pay for keywords and expect your content to show up at the top of search engine results pages, but if you can attract users organically with high-quality content, that’s a serious bonus for you and your website.

Proper Use of Structured Data

The use of structured data tells the search engines how to classify the content of your website. This is often called the Schema Markup and it’s an important aspect of the SEO rankings you’ll find on various search engines.

Age of the Domain

You can’t control how old your website is, but this is a factor in the ranking. Older domains tend to rank better than newer ones. This is good to keep in mind before launching a new domain or site. You’re better of redesigning than launching under a new name.

Security of the Website

Online users have become more aware of security than ever before and often won’t visit sites that don’t have updated SSL certificates. Search engines use this as a factor in the SEO rankings and it could be why your website isn’t showing up where it should.

Page Load Speed

This factor is fairly new but is one that makes a lot of sense. Studies have found that users won’t spend more than three seconds waiting for a page to load. If your site doesn’t have the speed needed, check out the tools available and improve the load speed of your website.

Impactful Target Keywords

While not one of the most important factors in SEO rankings, keywords are still necessary. The keywords are what users search and if you have the right ones, you’ll show up at or near the top of the page when a user chooses the keywords that you’re using in your content.

Proper Business Listing

How easy is it to find your business online? The right listing in Google My Business will make it easier for you to show up and will allow the search engine to see your website as authoritative. You’ll see an immediate improvement in the SEO rankings if you correct the missing information.

Crawlability

Search engines review information and this activity is called crawling as the search engine looks for the information to present to a user. Check your website sitemap and ensure your pages are properly indexed to allow the search engine to find your pages easily.

User Engagement

When users spend more time on your website and review several pages, this will improve your SEO rankings and user engagement scores. Three items that go into this are your click-through rate, time on site, and bounce rate, which are important to the user experience.

Content Optimization

Once you’ve created the content using your keywords it needs to be optimized for that keyword to let search engines easily see that it’s important to the subject matter. Assign one unique keyword per page to allow the search engines to easily find and rank your content.

Included Backlinks

Your content needs to offer backlinks to direct users to other pages that are related on your site and to other sites that may have supporting information. The backlinks you use can make it much easier for your SEO rankings to improve due to the authoritative nature of these links.