Crucial Points You Need to Change to Improve Your Ranking

SEO can be slow. It takes years to build the authority of your domain, as well as your page's rankings. But without SEO, users won't be able to find your site, and all your hard work will be wasted.

Meanwhile, having a well-optimized site will help you gain more and more traffic over time, which results in more leads and sales.

How Do Google Search Rankings Work?

To get the best results, Google searches through billions of pages and generates an index. It's searching and indexing machines are called Googlebots. These machines go around the web to look for new and updated pages to add to their index.
Moreover, it uses an algorithm to search for sites to crawl, how long it takes to crawl, and how many pages to crawl. It also gets links, words, key content tags, and the location of the words in the site.
When someone looks for something on the search results, the machines will look for matching pages and show the most related results.
Another well-known factor is PageRank. It measures the relevance of a page via the incoming links from other pages. So once your page is cited by other pages, PageRank will conclude that the page is fairly important and credible to answer a question. However, PageRank is just one of the 200 factors.
Then, there's Google Penguin. It's designed to capture sites that are spamming the search engine's search results. If caught, the site will be penalized with lower rankings.
Google's advice to get higher rankings is to make your site useful and rich in information. You should also write pages that precisely and accurately describe your content.
But the thing is, Google won't give any specific details about their algorithm. That's to maintain their competitive edge, as well as to prevent anyone from cheating into their system.
So, if you're wondering how you can boost your rankings, you've come into the right place.
In this article, we'll share the crucial points that you need to change on your website for a better ranking on search.

Work on Your Page Speed

Page speed has been a primary SEO factor for years.
Last 2018, Google said that its using mobile page speed as a ranking factor. But while the company stated that its speed update will only affect minority of sites, you still have to make sure that your site is optimized for speed.
That will help boost your search rankings, as well as give an excellent user experience.
Utilize Google's PageSpeed Insights to know how quickly does your site's main pages load.

Create Long-Form, High-Quality Content For Your Audience

There's a direct link between long-form content (2000+ words) and high search rankings. So, think about the topics that are relevant to your audience, then write blog posts that cover every angle of the subject.
Also, based on studies on how your page should be ranked, it should have a content that is at least 1100+ words long in order to rank on the top ten pages of Google.
Content affects a variety of other factors such as the CTR and the bounce rate. So, for optimal results, create a kind of material that's both relevant and comprehensive for your audience.
It's also recommended that you utilize a content auditing software to:

• Search and fix thin content.
• Look for fewer topics in greater detail on each page.
• Boost your authority in your niche.

Improve your Backlinks

Backlinks are links from other sites to yours. They're considered as Google's heavily weighted ranking factors.
These incoming links from high-authority domain to your website content show your own authority. Moreover, it also brings in traffic and improves your search rankings.
So, if a Content Marketing Institute includes a link to your resource in content marketing, it will be perceived better, rather than random users linking back to it.
Ideally, you should avoid backlinks from low-quality domains. You can find these links by using a tool like SEMRush.

Fix Broken Links

High-quality links on your site are one of the most effective ways to boost traffic and establish your authority.
But do you know that links that bring up a 404 error can hurt both your search rank and user experience?
Utilize tools such as Dead Link Checker or BrokenLinkCheck to find for any broken links on your site.

Cater to Mobile Users

More and more users prefer mobile devices than desktops to access the internet. Along with the changing times, Google has also made changes in its algorithm.
Its mobile-first index is now a reality, so it's now drawing in results from mobile-optimized sites.
To check whether your site is mobile-optimized or not, take Google's Mobile-Friendly Test.
Here are other things that you should look out for:

• Whether you have a responsive site that automatically resizes to fit any device.
• Whether or not you're using big fonts for easy readability on small screens.
• Ease of navigation and accessibility, making it convenient to tap the menus.
• Ensuring that the content isn't hidden by interstitial ads.

Secure Your Website

Back in 2014, Gooogle confirmed that sites that have a strong HTTPS encryption significantly rank better than its HTTP counterparts. Google has been encouraging webmasters to migrate to a secure site by giving sites with HTTPS a significant boost in rankings.
Moreover, sites that have not switched to HTTPS yet are marked as "unsafe" on Google Chrome.
So if you want to rank on top of the search results, you should follow Google's heavy suggestion on having a more secure site!
There are many actions and factors to consider. For instance, a wildcard cert secures your domain name (and an unlimited number of subdomains.) It acts like a regular SSL certificate.
However, if you have the budget for a security certificate, it gives you a measure of comfort while creating trust and boosting user experience.

Over to You

SEO requirements are constantly changing. That makes hard to keep up with the latest changes. But if you want to gain traffic, you have to be in the know. Moreover, by applying these points in your own SEO strategy, you'll be able to improve your rankings over time.