Where you show up in Google search results is determined by an algorithm that evaluates many characteristics of your website. Those characteristics, or ranking factors — both positive and negative — affect how visible you will be in search results.
Google’s ranking algorithm is reported to contain more than 200 SEO ranking factors, each with its own weight or level of importance.
Nobody knows all of the Google ranking factors, but experience gives us a really good sense of which are the most important.
Categories of Google ranking factors
There are three groups of ranking factors that are important to understand.
Technical ranking factors tend to be mostly managed by your web designer. They have to do with your website’s level of performance and what I refer to as Google-friendliness. These are typically site-wide factors rather than factors relating to individual pages on your site.
On-page ranking factors are typically controlled by you and relate directly to the content of your web pages and keyword optimization.
Off-page ranking factors are things you have somewhat less control over because they’re not on your website. These typically relate to your authority or importance on the web, based largely on backlinks.
Here is what I considered to be the top 10 positive Google ranking factors today. This list isn’t in any kind of priority order for a couple of reasons. First, it would be pretentious to claim that I know which of these factors are more important than which others. Secondly, good SEO is a function of many small techniques that support each other. No one of them is critically essential to good rankings — it’s the sum total of all of them that matters.
Mobile phones now account for more than half of all searches done. As a result, it’s essential that your website be mobile-friendly. I typically recommend ensuring your website is “responsive” which means that its display varies depending upon the device connecting to your site. That ensures that the same information is available regardless of the platform your visitor may be using.
2) Security (SSL and HTTPS)
Whether or not your website is secure is a ranking factor at Google. Beyond that, many browsers will show a “Not Secure” warning in the address bar when someone arrives on your website. Some website plug-ins actually display a warning page instead of the page on your site, encouraging people not to visit your site. Many people mistake the “not secure” warning as meeting your website is dangerous or may load viruses on your computer. The result is a certain portion of the people trying to visit your site abandoning it, costing you business.
To be secure you need to arrange to have an SSL certificate and your URL needs to begin with HTTPS instead of the insecure HTTP.
High-quality content is essential. It has a big effect on whether people stay to read it or bounce away (which Google sees as a negative ranking factor. Readability is a critical part of quality content. Another is customer focus; it’s important to focus on what’s in it for your reader/customer. That means focusing on benefits to the customer rather than features of your product or service.
Keyword relevance is also essential here. Your page has to show search engines that it’s all about your target keywords. That means having your keywords and related words and phrases in your content enough to make sure Google easily understands what your page is all about. But avoid keyword stuffing as that detracts from the quality of your content.
5) Headings and meta tags
Having keywords in headings and sub-headings gives them some extra weight with search engines and helps readers navigate your content efficiently. For that to happen, they need to be coded within heading tags to search engines can tell they’re headings.
While meta tags are not visible on the page, two items in the HTML code of your page are very important: the page title and the description tag. The page title isn’t a heading on your page, but it acts as the headline for your listing in all search engines. So it’s a critical place to include your keywords. Google says keywords in your meta description tag don’t influence your ranking, but since this description often ends up in your search listings it has a direct impact on how likely a searcher is to click on your listing.
6) Image keyword optimization
Every image on your page provides two or three places to put your keyword phrases in front of the search engines without keyword stuffing your text content.
The image filename is most obvious. An image filename of img183572x6.jpg tells Google nothing. But one that’s got a keyword in it (like nj-real-estate-lawyer.jpg) can really help.
Alternate text is text describing the image for visually impaired visitors who have their computers read the page out loud. It’s a great place to show your keywords to Google.
And if an image acts as a clickable link to someplace else, a title attribute generates a little text box that pops up when the user hovers their mouse over the image. It’s meant to tell the user what’s at the other end of the link if they click it, and is another place you may be able to use a keyword.
7) URL structure
Your URL structure helps you in three ways.
It improves the user experience of your listings in Google:
Links can sometimes serve as their own clickable text of a link.
Here’s an example from Moz:
8) Schema code
Schema markup is a common short term for structured data, named after Schema.org, the website for structured data markup. It’s sometimes called structured data markup and it tells the search engines exactly what kind of information is on your website. It’s totally in the HTML code behind your website and doesn’t affect what visitors see on your site. If you’re a local service area business, it can be especially helpful to identify your location and service area for local searches.
You can easily check out your own schema code in this schema code validator. If it shows you don’t have schema code, it’s time to fix that.
Page and Domain Authority strongly impact your rankings. These are metrics developed by the folks at Moz that attempt to predict how well a given website will show up in search results. It’s based largely on the number and quality of other websites that link to you and is designed to correlate with Google’s internal PageRank scoring.
10) Local prominence
Prominence refers to how widely across the web you’re listed with a correct and consistent NAP (name, address, phone). It’s particularly important for small businesses to show up in local search results and in the Google Local 3-Pack. These listings are often called citations and citation management deserves ongoing attention from small local businesses. But don’t be misled by many of the common misconceptions about citations that are floating around.
Feel free to use our free tool to check on several dozen top citation sources to see how your own prominence looks.
Bottom Line
None of these are absolutely essential. But none of them can be ignored either. Where you rank is the result of all of these things (and more). Just do your best with as many of these as you can.
How’s your experience been with these issues? What other factors do you think deserve to be included? Start a discussion below.
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Visiting a website with slow loading times is frustrating. Sure, a page with flashy graphics, slick animations, and artsy design features might look nice, but if it’s functionally limited then what’s the point?
One of the hallmarks of a great web developer is the ability to hit that sweet spot between attractive layout design and adequate load speed optimization. After all, it’s a crucial component if you’re to keep potential customers on your webpage.
That said, being a web developer requires skills that most of us don’t possess, so it’s understandable for a website owner to struggle. If you’re happy with how your website looks, it may well be falling short of performance expectations — and that’s troubling given that nearly half of us won’t wait longer than 3 seconds for a shopping site to load up.
That’s just one of the big reasons why it’s vital for your site to load quickly. Below, we’ll delve more deeply into why having a speedy site can’t be anything less than a priority. Here we go.
First Impressions Are Crucial
As noted, our attention spans are minuscule when it comes to how long we’re willing to wait for a page to load. This fact becomes even more pertinent when you consider that your business has only 7 seconds to make a positive first impression. What are you going to do with that time? What does your website look like within the first few seconds?
When you’re setting up your first website, it’s tempting to load it up with high-res images and stack the UI with special effects and animations. After all, you want it to look slick and professional — but those additions come at a cost, holding back the performance and potentially turning your site into a sluggish mess. The foundation needs to be usability achieved through a combination of fast load speed and functional UI design.
Regardless of your site’s primary purpose (be it to sell, inform, or entertain), your audience will lose interest fast if your load times don’t match their expectations. And when that interest fades, it won’t come back. It’ll be replaced by interest in rival sites that meet or exceed those expectations. Can you really afford to let that happen?
You must focus on making good first impressions, then — and to do this, you need to think about all platforms through which your visitors may view your site. Being mobile-responsive hasn’t been optional for a long time. Use Google’s free mobile-friendly test to ensure you’re catering to mobile visitors, and generally make an effort to provide strong functionality regardless of how people choose to interact with your site.
If you can do this, your hard-earned traffic won’t go to waste. Leads will be impressed by your website and act upon that by sticking around and becoming positively inclined towards your brand. Start as you mean to go on.
Speed Affects Your Search Rankings
Whether you’re an SEO whizz-kid or you’re less familiar with how search engines dictate rankings (you can learn more here, so take a look), upping your page speed is a simple and effective way to get your website seen more frequently. Improving performance will help your page appear higher up in Google’s results pages (other search engines are available, though perhaps not consequential).
Why? For starters, Google actively penalizes any sites with slow load times because they provide a terrible page experience for users. Visitors simply don’t want to wait around, so you can expect your page to appear further down the results page if your website is a little sluggish. And if someone does stick around, they’ll be less likely to convert (more on this soon).
How can you fix this, then? One of the best ways to give your site a quick boost is to take a look at your hosting provider. If it’s been a while since you set up your page, it may be worth investing in an upgrade.
Many hosts have blisteringly fast response times, but we’d recommend choosing a host based on their individual features, as many providers specialize in different areas, making them more suited to different niches. For instance, if you’re running on WordPress, Cloudways can pair a free migration with a baked-in Cloudflare integration to deliver strong and secure performance throughout the world.
If you’re not looking for the fastest WordPress hosting, or even the most secure, you can find something less complicated. It’s important to do the research to find something that suits your exact needs. PC Magazine has a good roundup of 2022 options that can give you an idea of the pros and cons of each provider, helping you make the right choice for your eCommerce site. However, it’s important to do your research! Use a comparison site to weigh-up the pros and cons of each provider to ensure you make the right choice.
Faster Load Speed Means Higher Conversion Rates
Run an eCommerce store? Ensuring your website loads quickly should be one of your highest priorities. A study from Google found that a speed increase of just 0.1 seconds can boost the number of shoppers adding items to their baskets by more than 9%. Staggeringly, a 100-millisecond delay can result in a 7% decrease in conversions. Take a look at these conversion rates based on load times sourced from recent research:
Page Load Time (in seconds)
Conversion Rate
2.4
1.9%
3.3
1.5%
4.2
1%
5.7+
0.6%
Of course, this is less of an issue if you’re not trying to sell anything. Given the stats though, we reckon that’s unlikely — online retail sales are set to grow 50% in the next 4 years, with the current market value of the industry recorded at $4.9 trillion. And if you’re not planning to ever sell any products through your site, you’ll still want to monetize it in some way to take advantage of the traffic. Doing otherwise is leaving money on the table.
In addition to following the aforementioned steps, you should keep an eye on your image sizes. Using image compression plugins (or sites such as TinyPNG or Squoosh) can help you avoid using more space than you need to, cutting back your required server resources and giving your website visitors better experiences.
If you’re using WordPress, a free plugin like W3 Total Cache can also help you to cache your web pages. This is one of the best ways to speed up your website, as caching stores copies of all the bulky files on your site. This reduces the load on the host’s servers when a user loads your page, ensuring that load times are minimal. [Editor’s note: another one we like is WP Rocket.]
Website load speed matters — hopefully we’ve been able to convince you of that! Find that balance between great design and optimized content, and we’re sure you’ll have no trouble keeping the attention of any visitors that come your way.
About the Author
Rodney Laws is an ecommerce expert with over a decade of experience in building online businesses. Check out his reviews on EcommercePlatforms.io and you’ll find practical tips that you can use to build the best online store for your business. Connect with him on Twitter @EcomPlatformsio.
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You’re probably not a professional writer, so you may be excused for not realizing if your website copy isn’t “readable”. After all, it’s in plain English, right? But readability is more than that.AJ Kohn points out the importance of readability on your website:
Readability is about making your content accessible and comfortable. Never make it a chore. If you make your content difficult to read the value of that content goes down. Lack of readability frustrates comprehension and reduces sharing. This, in turn, limits the social echo of your content and lowers the chances of it obtaining organic links.
Here’s your clue: Heed the warning sign of a high bounce rate.
If poor readability is driving away visitors on your website, the clue will be a high bounce rate — the percentage of visitors who leave immediately after arriving on a page without looking at anything else on your site.
If you have a bounce problem, you may have a readability problem.
When readability is compromised, you’re also losing valuable visitors who are all potential customers.
Readability is certainly related to the words you use and your sentence structure; that may determine the reading level or grade of your content. But it’s much more than just that. There are things other than your words that can make your content easy to read or difficult to follow.
Here are some important readability factors to consider
People Don’t Read, They Scan
It’s important to structure your writing to make it easy for people to scan down the page and quickly find the information they need to read carefully. They usually start with developing an understanding of the page layout and navigation and perhaps looking at images.
Noted usability expert Jacob Nielsen conducted a study that found that users “read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.”
Use Font Size Smartly
Headings and subheadings need to be clear. You need a hierarchy of font sizes, and possibly even colors and boldness, to help the reader immediately grasp the structure of your content. I start with a body font size of 16 points in my own blog, and headings & subheadings are clearly larger. Also, think of your headings as representing the structure of your content, much like an outline.
Use Subheadings
Subheadings don’t just visibly demonstrate the structure of your content. They also improve your readability by making your content less dense and, as a result, less intimidating.
Use a Legible Font
Getting fancy with your fonts can easily become counterproductive.
Avoid infatuation with artistic fonts. Make sure your body text and headings are all legible. Some fonts become difficult to read in bold, and research has shown that some fonts that are easy to read on paper are not as easy to read on a computer screen.
My preference is for serif fonts for printing and sans serif fonts for web content. Simple is better; I recommend fonts like Arial, Humanist, and Century Gothic. I typically use the same font family for headings. But since headings are larger you may be able to take more leeway there. Here are some font suggestions to consider.
Pay Attention to Line Height
If the lines of text on your screen are too close together, that reduces your readability. A good rule of thumb is to use a line height of about 1.5, but that can vary depending on your choice of font. The goal is to avoid your text looking cramped or looking too spread out.
Watch Your Color Contrast
An actual example of poor readability because of insufficient color contrast.
Be cognizant of your text color in comparison to the background color. Inadequate contrast can have a dramatic impact on readability and eye fatigue.
I like black text on a white background, and absolutely hate the popular fashion of using gray text instead of black. Colored backgrounds are fine, but pay attention to the color of the text to make sure it’s easily readable.
Use Highlights
Don’t be afraid to italicize or bold important words or phrases – or even whole sentences – so that your most important content stands out. If you’re particularly brave, you might decide to use color or highlighting so the importance stuff jumps off the page.
Shorten Your Paragraphs
Nothing is worse than a paragraph that rambles on and on and on. You may be familiar with the expression TL;DR. That stands for Too Long; Didn’t Read. That almost always means the content is too dense and paragraphs are too long. Three or four sentences is about as long as you might want your paragraphs to be.
And don’t be afraid of one-sentence paragraphs either.
Just like a long paragraph, a long sentence compromises readability. If the user has to parse the sentence grammatically to understand it, it’s too long. The Yoast SEO plug-in for WordPress discourages too many sentences that are more than about 20 words. I agree. A couple of long sentences spread across the entire page or blog post are okay, but too many of them can drive people away.
Use Pronouns With Care
Be careful with pronouns in your content.
In a conversation, it’s easy to know what pronouns are referring to. If I talk about that here, the “that” obviously relates to using pronouns. That’s the antecedent. But if the antecedent is in a previous paragraph, and the person scanning through your content alights on the current paragraph, they’ve missed the antecedent. It’s not obvious what the word “that” is referring to.
Repeating nouns instead of referring to them with pronouns may have an added benefit in that nouns are more valuable to the search engines understanding your content than pronouns are. Just try to avoid being “over-redundant”with those nouns.
Preserve Some White Space
Your content – and your readers – need a little space to breathe. Inadequate white space on the page is one of those things that triggers the TL:DR response. Headings and subheadings, bullet lists, and images all help to increase white space on your page.
Avoid Distractions
In general, you want your visitor to read and absorb your content. You may want them to take action, like download something or buy something, or contact you. Don’t break the flow of your user’s concentration on your content. Distractions are a conversion-killer.
Sliders with rotating images, colorful banner ads, and pop-ups that obliterate some of your content are almost always counterproductive. Be particularly careful about pop-ups. Google refers to those as “intrusive interstitials” and they can damage your page experience. That’s important because page experience is a new and increasingly important part of Google’s ranking algorithm.
Images Can Help Readability
Images can may your content less intimidating and more approachable.
Always use at least one image on every page. I like to insert images with text wrapping around them. They serve many purposes — they can:
Effectively illustrate a point you’re making.
Draw the eye to a particular spot on your page.
Make your page more memorable.
Add a little white space around the image, and white space makes content less intimidating.
Make a long paragraph appear less dense.
Add color to a mostly black-and-white page.
Make your page more approachable which translates into better readability.
Maintain Paragraph Transitions
You don’t want staccato content. Your material needs to flow, to maintain the focus of your reader and ensure comprehension. So try to ensure a natural for progression from paragraph to paragraph by using transition words like ‘and”, “so”, “because”, and even “thus” or “therefore”.
When you maintain that flow, you retain the reader’s attention.
Pay Attention to Your Reading Level
There are a few ways to judge the reading difficulty of your content:
How many sentences in the paragraph?
What’s the average number of words in a sentence?
How many syllables in a word (on average)?
There are a number of tests to determine your reading level. Perhaps the most widely known is the Flesch-Kincaid readability test. That test calculates a reading grade level, calibrated for US readers. The Yoast SEO plug-in for WordPress evaluates reading level using the Flesch reading ease score.
You can get a reading level score online at a few places:
Keep your keyword phrases in mind, but whatever you do, avoid keyword stuffing in a misguided attempt to get better rankings in Google. Not only is it a readability nightmare, it’s also a red flag to Google that can hurt your visibility rather than help it.
Results
The goal of improving your readability is not just to get your point across. You also want to encourage the reader to do something.
Perhaps you want your reader to subscribe to your newsletter. Maybe you want them to call your office to ask questions or request a consultation. Or perhaps you want them to buy a product.
The goal of your carefully constructed readable content is to entice the reader to move down the sales funnel and take the action you want.
Make sure you include appropriate and compelling calls to action on your page for your reader to take the action you want them to.
Need help with your search visibility? At Rank Magic we’re the SEO experts for small businesses and startups.Reach out for help now.
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This major algorithm update makes Core Web Vitals a new ranking factor. Those of us who are working to get ready for it now have an extra month. Google released a statement saying that the Page Experience update will begin to roll out in mid-June, but won’t be fully integrated into search rankings until the end of the summer.
Google explained:
“We’ll begin using page experience as part of our ranking systems beginning in mid-June 2021. However, page experience won’t play its full role as part of those systems until the end of August. You can think of it as if you’re adding a flavoring to a food you’re preparing. Rather than add the flavor all at once into the mix, we’ll be slowly adding it all over this time period.”
While this update is a significant one, I don’t anticipate it having a dramatic impact on your search rankings, at least not for many months. That’s because Google has more than 200 ranking factors that go into where you show up in the search results for any particular keyword phrase. While this may be more important than a good number of those, it’s still going to have a relatively small impact.
Nevertheless, if you haven’t started to address these page experience factors, I encourage you to read our blog post, 7 Steps to Prepare for Google’s Page Experience Factor.
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The infographic below is from last year and from UK Web Host Review, but it’s still definitely relevant in 2021 in the US.
As just a single point of SEO related information, search engines have been increasingly penalizing web pages that aren’t mobile-friendly. Last year Google doubled down on its mobile-first policy. Now your website may not just rank lower if it doesn’t work well on phones, it might not show up in the search results at all.
Here are some more relevant statistics for you.
Prominence refers to how widely across the web you’re listed with a correct and consistent NAP (name, address, phone). It’s particularly important for small businesses to show up in local search results and in the Google Local 3-Pack. These listings are often called citations and citation management deserves ongoing attention from small local businesses. But don’t be misled by many of the common misconceptions about citations that are floating around.
