When businesses look to add Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to their online marketing strategy, the ultimate goal is to appear at the top of search results. Google, the most popular search engine, has several ranking factors that it uses to determine which pages offer the best value to users and, therefore, the order in which they appear in the search results.
Unless you are a digital marketing professional, understanding how and what it takes for a website to climb the search rankings to the point it appears on page one may not come simply. In fact, with the industry constantly evolving and with Google releasing updates on a near-daily basis, the goalposts never stay in the same place.
With that being said, some constant values will serve you well in your pursuit to ranking number one:
What Are You Trying To Rank for?
Before you begin to optimise your website, you must know what you are optimising for. What, exactly, do you want your website to rank for? This means understanding what your customers are asking and, with that, the best keywords to target to match those queries. There is not any point in ranking for a search term that has little to no relevance to your business or offering.
Value
When you know what you are trying to rank for, you need to consider what value you are offering to the audience. Does your website or page provide what the user is looking for? Also, is the page you are trying to rank in the correct format? By this, we are referring to whether the search results consist mostly of product pages, blog posts or other landing pages. For example, if the majority of pages that appear on the first page are blog posts, your chances of optimising a product page to rank on the first page are remote.
User Experience
If you want Google to value your website it must offer a good user experience. You can have the best content in the world but, if the website itself is unusable (which can be indicated by a high bounce rate) then Google is not likely to rank it. This is why it is important to ensure that both your desktop and mobile websites are in working order.
Backlinks
Another key ranking factor is backlinks - although there are always exemptions to the rules. Generally speaking, if a page is considered to offer value, search engines would expect that page to have backlinks pointing to it from other websites. The easiest way to understand the value of a backlink is to think of each one as a vote of confidence – so if your website does not have anyone linking back to it, Google will likely view that as a vote of no confidence.
These are just some of the basics to consider when it comes to getting your page on Google’s first page, with numerous ranking factors determining the search engine’s ever-changing results.
