What Factors Affect My SEO Ranking?

Key Takeaways

  • What is SEO ranking? Your search result position affects visibility and traffic; higher rankings mean more clicks.
  • Six factors influencing your SEO ranking (and how to improve them)
    • Keyword Selection: Use one main keyword and a few secondary ones naturally in your content.
    • Quality of Content: Google favors original, informative content.
    • EEAT: Expertise and credibility matter; content from trusted authors is prioritized.
    • Backlinks: Links from reputable sites enhance your credibility.
    • Site Structure and Design: An organized website helps search engines understand your content.
    • User Experience:  Ensure your site is easy to use, fast, and mobile-friendly to keep visitors engaged.
  • Why Are Search Rankings Important?: Higher rankings attract more visitors, boosting brand awareness, sales, and reducing costs. 
  • How Search Engines Rank Pages: They crawl, index, and rank pages to determine visibility.
  • Google Ranking Algorithms: Rankings rely on complex, frequently updated systems that assess many factors.
  • Should You Focus on Satisfying Your Audience or Google?: Effective SEO balances creating enjoyable content for users with making it easy for Google to read and rank.

Google uses 200 factors to determine how websites rank in search results. This can confuse SEO professionals, especially since Google frequently updates its algorithm. To improve your Google rankings, it is important to stay informed about the most important SEO factors.

This guide provides updated information on these key factors. While promoting your products or services is important, marketing isn’t just about ads. Many customers find businesses through organic search results, which account for over half of web traffic.

Improving your SEO ranking helps potential customers discover you when they search for relevant terms. It’s an effective and cost-efficient marketing strategy, but many people can misunderstand it because it relies on many changing factors.

What is SEO ranking?

SEO ranking indicates a website’s position on search engine results pages (SERPs) for specific keywords. The higher a site ranks, the more likely people will notice it, resulting in more clicks and visitors. Most users—95%—don’t go past the first page of results, so being in the top 10 is crucial.

SEO ranking depends on several factors, including keyword relevance, website content, and backlinks. Optimizing these factors can improve your site’s ranking and attract more visitors.

Search engines display results on results pages. Here’s how it works:

Keywords: Keywords are the terms people use to type into Google. As a business owner, you focus on specific keywords related to your products or services. These can be single words or phrases. For example, Shopify might target keywords like “e-commerce” or phrases like “start an e-commerce business.”

Ranking positions: Your ranking is your position on the search results page compared to other results. While people don’t usually number the results, they often discuss them in order. The most relevant results are displayed at the top of the page, while the less relevant ones appear further down. Ads usually show up separately from these numbered results.

Six factors influencing your SEO ranking (and how to improve them)

Major search engines like Google want businesses doing SEO to follow their guidelines. Knowing these rules can help improve your site’s SEO, which benefits your search results, visitors, and business. By concentrating on these factors, you can improve your rankings on search results pages and enhance your site’s overall experience:

1. Keyword Selection

Keyword selection is choosing the words or phrases to describe your web pages. Search engines, including Google, rely on keywords to assess a page’s relevance to a search query. To optimize your pages, focus on one main keyword and a few secondary ones. Good keyword research involves looking at search volume and competition. Tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush can help you find this data. Once you have your keywords, use them naturally in title tags, meta descriptions, and headings, but avoid overloading your content with them.

2. Quality of Content

Google prioritizes reliable, quality content that benefits users. To ensure your content achieves high standards, ask yourself these questions:

  • Is it original and informative?
  • Does it provide a thorough description of the topic?
  • Is the information interesting and unique?
  • Would someone want to share or recommend this content?
  • Is it comparable to content found in reputable magazines or books?

3. EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness)

Google emphasizes the trustworthiness of content, especially with the rise of low-quality SEO practices. They assess content based on:

  • Experience: Does the author have experience with the subject?
  • Expertise: Does the author have credentials or knowledge in the field?
  • Authoritativeness: Is the website known for providing accurate and reliable information?
  • Trustworthiness: Is the content unbiased, and does it provide secure transactions for e-commerce? Add author bios and certifications to improve your site’s credibility.

4. Backlinks

Backlinks are connections from other websites that lead to your site, boosting your site’s credibility. The more reputable sites link to you, the better. While some backlinks have little impact, links from respected sources are valuable. Although sites can earn backlinks naturally, many businesses need a strategy to build them.

5. Site Structure and Design

A well-structured website helps search engines see what your content is about. A thorough site audit is essential to ensure your site is structured effectively. Think of it like a restaurant menu, where the staff groups items logically.

6. User Experience

Search engines monitor how long users stay on your site and if they quickly return to search results. To enhance user experience, ensure your site is simple to manage, loads fast, and works well on mobile devices. Avoid cluttered layouts that make it hard for visitors to find what they need, as this can lead to higher bounce rates.

Understanding and implementing these factors can be complicated and time-consuming. The best SEO specialists in the Philippines can provide expertise and insights designed to your specific market, helping you manage these challenges more effectively.

Why Are Search Rankings Important?

Improving your page rankings is a key goal of SEO because it usually leads to more organic traffic to your website. 

In simple terms: Better rankings = more visitors.

This helps with your marketing and business goals, such as:

  • Increased brand awareness: Higher rankings make your website more visible, helping more people discover and learn about your business, which builds brand recognition and trust over time.
  • More sales: More visitors often means more sales, as some of those visitors will likely buy your products or services.
  • Lower customer acquisition costs: Organic traffic is primarily free, especially compared to paid ads. More organic traffic reduces your overall costs for acquiring customers. This raises an important question for many business owners: “How much does an SEO campaign cost?” Investing in SEO can result in significant savings over time as you attract more customers without the ongoing expense of paid advertising.
  • Long-term growth: Investing in professional SEO services helps you rank better now and builds a foundation for sustainable traffic growth in the future.

Because of these benefits, achieving higher search rankings is very important today. If figuring all this out feels too hard, you should hire an SEO specialist in the Philippines. They can help you get better rankings quickly, so you can focus on your main business while they improve your online presence.

How Search Engines Rank Pages

Knowing how search engines rank pages is essential to understanding how SEO works. The process involves several steps:

  1. Crawling: First, Googlebot (a web crawler) visits your site. It goes from one page to another and “scans” the content.
  2. Indexing: Next, Google stores information about your pages in a large database called the Google index.
  3. Ranking: If your page meets Google’s criteria, it will appear as a search result for related queries.

Google Ranking Algorithms

Your Google SEO rankings depend entirely on the search engine’s algorithms.

Google’s algorithms are complex processes that determine how pages are ranked.

Here are some basic facts about Google’s algorithms:

  • Google refers to these as “ranking systems.”
  • Many of these ranking systems apply to all types of search queries.
  • Some systems focus on specific queries, like the product reviews system, which only ranks pages that review products.
  • The algorithms consider a large number of ranking factors and signals.
  • The algorithms are updated regularly. Smaller updates happen daily, while larger updates (called “core” algorithm updates) occur several times yearly.

Should You Focus on Satisfying Your Audience or Google?

The core of SEO is this: should you create content that Google can easily read and rank or that your users will enjoy? The answer is both. Choosing between these two is like asking which side of the scissors cuts better—both sides are necessary for good SEO. You should never sacrifice your users’ experience just to please Google, as this can frustrate your audience and potentially lead to penalties from the search engine. Remember, while good rankings can boost your business, Google isn’t your customer—your readers are.

So, here’s the best SEO advice: create great content that your users will love, and then optimize it to help Google understand why your audience enjoys it. But always start with your users in mind.

Final Thoughts

Understanding the key factors that affect your SEO rankings is crucial for boosting your website’s visibility and attracting more visitors. Google uses over 200 ranking factors, including keyword relevance, quality content, and backlinks, to determine where your site appears in search results. By paying attention to these points and regularly updating your content, you can make the user experience better and follow Google’s rules. Remember, better rankings lead to increased brand awareness, more sales, and lower customer 

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