If you’re looking to get more traffic on your website, and you’ve gone looking for some SEO advice before, you were probably bombarded with massive posts that were mostly graphs, and full of advanced jargon you couldn’t begin to understand. We all know the importance of good online marketing, but harnessing it can often feel pretty overwhelming. To make things simpler, here are the ranking factors that really matter.
Content Relevance
Google didn’t just become everyone’s favourite search engine overnight! Part of the secret to the company’s success has been in the search engine’s ability to analyse a keyword query, find the most relevant content to the search, and plonk it right in front of the user. Content relevance is easy to overlook or assume when you’re auditing your own SEO, but it remains the most important ranking factor there is, so make sure you’re spending some time on it. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that content relevance is a binary factor; something that can either be “on” or “off”. It’s more of a fluid, sliding value, that can be hurt or improved by all kinds of seemingly minor changes to the given page.
Content Quality
Google isn’t only concerned with how relevant your content is to a user’s search, they also want to give their users results of the highest quality. Like relevance, there are a range of factors that can be used to manipulate how Google perceives the quality of your website. This makes up a lot of the work for your average web marketing company. Grammar and spelling, how accessible the content is to the average reader, how comprehensive the content is relative to the query, and the singularity of it all go into Google’s perception of a site’s quality. Aside from these things that you should be aiming for, you also need to make a point of avoiding various “negative signals”, which could cripple the ranking your page has. These include things like an excess of a certain keyword repeated over and over through the body of the content, having duplicate content, or too many outbound links. Understanding what goes into content quality is essential for effective SEO.
User Engagement
When user engagement became a part of Google’s algorithm, it really spurred the search engine into one great leap forwards. If you’re posting content that really engages your website users, then it’s possible that Google may reward you with a higher search ranking. Unfortunately, for the time being, it’s not 100% clear how Google gauges this, but rest assured it does matter! High bounce rates, on certain pages anyway, can be a good thing here. For example, if someone searches for your company’s phone number, clicks on your “contact” page and then immediately leaves, it can be chalked up as good user engagement. Usage data signals, like clickstream analysis, which records which pages your users see and in what order, can also some into account. User engagement is an undeniably important ranking factor, so don’t neglect it!
If reading up on SEO was giving you headaches, I hope this post has made things simpler!
