To capture this audience, integrate natural language phrases and question-based keywords (who, what, where, when, why, and how) into your content. This approach makes it more likely for your content to match voice search queries. As the popularity of voice-activated devices continues to rise, optimizing your website for voice search has become a crucial part of SEO strategy. High-quality content establishes your website as a credible source of information, building trust with your audience and authority within your industry. This credibility not only encourages visitors to return to your site but also makes other websites more likely to link to your content, further boosting your SEO efforts.
Google’s quality raters are instructed to look at a site’s off-site reputation. Make it easy for Google to know WHO wrote a particular piece of content. In fact, Google employs thousands of “Quality Raters” to measure how well the search results satisfy search intent. If you want to rank for a keyword, you need to use that keyword on your page. But if it regurgitates information that’s already out there, it’s probably not going to rank well.
For example, examine your site’s architecture, eliminate or reduce redirects, enable caching, and optimize images. You can employ several tools, including Google PageSpeed Insights to SEO Anomaly test page speed. It shows them which pages are related to one another and helps crawlers discover new pages. They can also pass on link juice to underperforming pages, helping them rank higher in SERPs.
How Google determines local ranking
Optimizing your local business website for search engines remains an important practice, as this maximizes performance both organically and locally. On-page SEO will never become unimportant for rankings, so it’s vitally important to upskill in this area. Within the top 15 local pack ranking factors, we can see ‘keywords in Google reviews’, ‘high Google ratings’, and ‘quantity of Google reviews with text’ all being important. Reviews have grown a little in importance over the last few years – taking up 16% of ranking factors in 2020, compared to 12% back in 2018.
- Having lots of links from IP addresses in the same C class is not natural.
- While web addresses don’t play as large a role in determining page rankings as they once did, they’re still an important part of on-page SEO.
- Rony Mattar, Partner and SEO Manager at BlueEdge SEO, says “we give high importance to Core Web Vitals and website performance.
- Search engines, especially Google, use complex algorithms to determine these rankings based on numerous criteria.
Understand Google’s Ranking Factors for SEO
And, of course, getting your site in the top rankings to begin with. Getting backlinks to your site can be a difficult task, but links improve the authority of a website in the eyes of search engines, so they’re worth the effort. Review management software such as BrightLocal’s Reputation Manager can automate review monitoring to ensure you never miss important feedback, and help you grow the quantity of reviews. But in this case, the benefit from spam fighting doesn’t come from Google rewarding you for playing sheriff, but from you seeing competing, spammy listings removed from the results.
#15 – Homepage Links
Google ranking factors refer to the elements that influence a website’s position in search engine results pages (SERPs). These are signals Google evaluates to determine the most relevant, high-quality content for a given query. While Google uses hundreds of ranking signals, not all carry the same weight.