And with over 92% of the search market owned by Google, ranking high isn’t just important—it’s essential. While Google has been intentionally unclear in which particular aspect of page speed impacts search ranking, they have been quite clear in stating that content relevancy remains king. Still, in large enough scale, we make the assumption that any discovered correlations are a « probable influence » on search ranking and thus worthy of consideration.
Analyze Keyword Metrics
He writes/tweets about Google ranking signals, SEO best practices, experiments, tactics, and industry updates. At Moz, we’ve seen sites use similar tactics only to watch their bounce rate skyrocket, and their rankings drop. In fact, there’s anecdotal evidence of sites being hit by Panda after introducing similar barriers. Imagine if you will, a site that requires registration to view any content, which is otherwise accessible to search engines. We’ve talked for years about making your site more accessible for both search robots and humans, but we rarely discuss how those usability factors affect rankings. So after you do the work of ranking, you have to work to keep it there.
Ensure Mobile-Friendliness
Now it’s time to discover the other 102 steps that will get more organic traffic flowing to your website. The Link Chest is a collection of high-quality, easy-to-win backlink opportunities. It’s the smart way to kickstart your SEO mission and improve the rank of your website in Google. For that, you need to build more high-quality backlinks to your website. If you over-optimize, then Google will consider your content spammy and if you under-optimize your rankings might get affected. While the placement of keywords at strategic locations holds a lot of weight, it is also important to maintain the right keyword density throughout the content.
Target Low-Competition Keywords
But it’s not that suddenly your page will rank number one for competitive queries just because you’re making it very easy for Google to understand your content. “So obviously there’s a little bit of overlap there with regards to… Google understanding my content better and me ranking better for the queries that I care about. Because if you write about content that you want to rank for which probably you’re doing, then being able to understand that content better does help us a little bit. The word “rote” means doing something mechanically and out of habit, without thinking about it.
This is because directories often rank on the search results for local queries. So if you’re in those directories, the people who click on them in the search results may find your business. BrightLocal’s 2021 study shows that 17% of SEOs deem reviews the most important ranking factor for map pack rankings. But only 5% see them as most important for regular organic rankings. As long as you’re delighting your customers, your online reputation will grow on autopilot and rankings should improve. Local SEO is a game of two halves because Google shows two types of search results for local searches.
Getting first-hand experience will teach you a lot about how SEO works and how to improve your skills! You can also explore our SEO FAQs to get answers to some of the most common SEO questions. So, when you practice SEO, you’ll prioritize certain factors over others.
When another site links to yours, it drives traffic and signals to search engines that the site trusts you. Effective off-page strategies help establish your site’s reputation and perceived value among users and search engines. Sites that engage users for long periods of time or visit multiple pages are ranked higher. Therefore both content quality and internal links play a big part in the pages per visit metric. I’ll explain what each of those user engagement ranking factors mean below and whether each of them can help you, or hurt you. A lot of marketers are still focused on backlinks but there is no point in building backlinks if you don’t have quality content serving your core customers.
Google Keyword Planner is a free keyword research tool from Google. On-page SEO is where you make changes to the content of a page to help it rank higher on organic search results. Links are increasing in their perceived importance for “regular” local rankings over time too. But their perceived importance for “map pack” rankings has stayed roughly the same.
- In the Content Editor you can see which keywords to include in your content and how often.
- Ensure your business is listed in local directories and that your citations are consistent across the web.
- You can also use GSC to perform bulk data exports for enhanced analysis in software like BigQuery.
“Quality content is and always will be one of the most important parts of any website. Without the base content, none of the wider SEO strategies will follow. In the content game, “good enough” is no longer, well, good enough. With Google’s AI Overviews stealing clicks and people turning to SEO Anomaly AI search engines, generic content is becoming increasingly invisible.