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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While SEO is the result of globalization, the evolution of SEO has seen the rise in importance of bringing localization to your strategy; if your startup wants the highest sales figures possible you need to know about local SEO.
Below I’ve run through what local SEO is and how your startup can incorporate it into your strategy. Read on and you’ll be a local SEO pro in no time.
You and your startup already know about traditional SEO and will have your own strategy for it.
However, local SEO is not the same and has tactics and features to the SEO skills you’re already employing. Here are the headline features of local SEO:
For local searches
When your customer make a search in Google, the search engine knows which part of the world you’re in. Google exists to give its users the best possible outcome to their searches and if that means giving them a local solution that’s what it will give them.
Targeted on local keywords
Most users who benefit from local SEO have a specific business in mind when they make their searches. However, they might not be seeking a specific company.
When Google compiles the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) for these searches they target companies which have the closest match to the industry their user is seeking, along with the location their user is based in. The results are targeted around local keywords, so you need to make sure your startup is aware of how to find the relevant keywords for your locality.
It’s a mobile thing
Mobile phones and tablets now account for around 60% of all web searches made. Local SEO is particularly relevant to these devices and is especially relevant to your startup if you are based in the services industry.
Let take restaurants as an example: If a user is out and searching for the best food in their area, they’ll almost certainly be making their search via a mobile. Using local SEO means that your startup has the best chance of being the first business that your searcher sees when Google directs them to the best local restaurant.
Like traditional SEO, there are many different tactics that you can, and need, to employ in order to make sure your startup gets the most out of local SEO. These are:
Make sure your startup is listed correctly in Google My Business
If your startup isn’t in Google My Business, or your listing is incomplete, then you won’t feature on Google Maps – which isn’t much use to your searcher if they’re trying to locate your business.
Getting your startup listed correctly on Google My Business is quick and easy. Check out the excellent video below for a guide on how you can make sure you’re on Google My Business.
Incorporate online reviews
93% of your customers are influenced by reading online reviews. It’s for this reason that Google loves to use online reviews to build its local SEO rankings, and that you can’t afford to add them to your startup’s strategy.
f you’re not sure how to make the most out of online reviews to maximize your local SEO, spend a few minutes absorbing the information in the handy video guide underneath…
Use City Pages
This tactic is all about getting the maximum value from the surrounding areas of the city, or town, that your startup is based in.
City Pages use LSI technology to allow you to target any combination of service, product, or metro area. The benefit of this is that it allows your startup to appear in a broader range of local searches.
For an in depth guidance on the benefit of City Pages to your local SEO strategy, spend some time watching the following video…
Add content to Google Posts
Well-optimized content is a huge part of making the most of local SEO and Google has a place for you to publish it.
Google Posts lets you develop and upload content directly on Google. You can add your startup’s products, services, and events to Google Maps and Google’s search results. Your posts can be up to 300 words and you can add a CTA (call-to-action) button, date range, and image.
You create them in your Google My Business dashboard and they will appear immediately in Google SERPs. For more information on how your startup can start using Google Posts, watch the brilliant video underneath…
Onsite optimization accounts for 18% of Google’s decision making when it ranks your startup’s website in local searches, meaning it’s something you can’t overlook. What you need to know about your onsite optimization is this:
Title tags matter
Title tags are the most important part of on-site optimization. This means it is essential that you insert your locally optimized keywords into the title tags for your web pages.
Check out the video below to see how you can get your title tags right…
Write local content
Using Google Posts is a great way to link local content to your business, but don’t stop there; add local content to your website. There is a range of local content you can write for your website and this article is full of ideas to help you develop a local content strategy.
Be aware of schema markup
This is the code that you use to tell Google what your website is about, making it essential that you get this very technical aspect of on-site optimization right.
There are a number of great apps to help you with this. Schema App Total Schema Markup is an industry leader and comes with a range of great features. It makes optimizing your schema markup easy and can be added to your business in minutes.
If your startup isn’t aware of and employing the benefits of local SEO, then you won’t feature in Google’s SERPs and will lose potential customers. Thankfully, you now have everything you need to know about local SEO, so you won’t be losing any customers.
Victoria Greene is a branding consultant, freelance writer, and SEO content specialist. On her blog, VictoriaEcommerce, you’ll find an array of articles to help your startup make the most of ecommerce tactics to increase your revenue.
We welcome your thoughts and observations. Join the conversation in the Comments below!
An interstitial is an ad that appears in between two pages. Sometimes they can appear before the home page on your site. Often interstitials are pop-up ads, but sometimes they will be helpful, like an offer to chat with a live person. An interstitial ad is a form of interruption marketing used by advertisers who want their ads to be more like broadcast ads.
Many interstitials are just fine. But you want to be sure your interstitials aren’t intrusive.
What’s wrong with an intrusive interstitial?
An intrusive interstitial or pop-up ad is one that annoyingly blocks all or most of a page. This is more problematic on mobile sites where there’s much less screen real estate. With less room on the screen it’s very easy for an interstitial to be considered intrusive.
One thing intrusive interstitials do is that they annoy your visitors. That’s a bad thing in and of itself, especially if it’s annoying enough to drive the visitor away. They also slow down the loading of your site because it’s extra material to download into a phone or browser.
It’s been well known for years that Google favors fast sites. If your interstitial is slowing down the display of your pages, that might hurt your ranking. But even beyond that, Google hates them. Google announced about a year and a half ago that at the beginning of 2017 intrusive interstitials would negatively affect your ranking. And here at Rank Magic we are always concerned about the health of your rankings.
A few exceptions
Google has identified three types of interstitials that “would not be affected by the new signal” if “used responsibly.”
Interstitials that appear to be in response to a legal obligation, such as for cookie usage or for age verification.
Login dialogs on sites where content is not publicly indexable. For example, this would include private content such as email or unindexable content that is behind a paywall.
Banners that use a reasonable amount of screen space and are easily dismissible. For example, the app-install banners provided by Safari and Chrome are examples of banners that use a reasonable amount of screen space.
Please join the conversation and share your observations in the Comments section below.
The fact of the matter is, more and more local searches are taking place on mobile. More importantly, many of those local searches come with a high purchase intent, making local mobile searches an incredibly important opportunity for your business
If your site isn’t “mobile friendly”, you’re missing out on business. More than half of all searches are now done from phones. And for those searches, Google gives preference to mobile friendly sites. So to show up prominently for local searches for what you do, the first step is to make sure your site is mobile friendly.
Apart from being mobile friendly, the next step is to make sure your site is “local friendly”.
There are two places you can show up prominently for local searches: in the Local 3-Pack of three listings beneath a map, and in the organic listings. Both require, at a minimum, effective local SEO.
First, list your location, including your Zip Code, on every page of your site. The easiest places to do that are in the heading of each page or in the footer.
Second, employ schema markup for your name, address and phone number wherever they appear on your site. For most small business owners this is technical enough that you’ll want to delegate it to your webmaster to implement.
Off-Page Citations
Your NAP – Name, Address, Phone – is important to be listed consistently across the web.
Google relies heavily on citations— mentions of your NAP (name, address, phone) — on other websites to develop trust in where you are locally and what your phone number is. Citations help even if they don’t include a link to your website. According to Moz, “Other factors being equal, businesses with a greater number of citations will probably rank higher than businesses with fewer citations.” The more citations you have, the better — with one important consideration:
Consistency
If you ask a few friends about a local Pizza restaurant you may not get the same thing from everyone. You may get variations on the Pizzeria’s name, inconsistent or old addresses, and different phone numbers. If that happens, you’re not sure which to trust. Google, Yahoo & Bing are just the same. If some citations have variations on your company name, a few have previous addresses, and some have bad or old phone numbers, search engines aren’t sure which ones are right and which are wrong.
If Google isn’t sure where you are, it’s reluctant to rank you prominently in the organic results. And it’s certainly unlikely to include you in the Local Pack. So be sure you have as many citations as you can and make sure your NAP is consistent across all of them.
We can help you identify some of the most important sites that provide citations. Run a free scan for your NAP here. You’ll quickly see whether you’re listed at more than 60 of the top citation sources. You’ll also see how consistently your NAP is shown at each of them. Use that as a guide for where to apply your attention to ensuring you have an excellent citation profile across the web.
Make it Simple
Given the time and attention, you can clean up your citation profile manually. But as those sites refresh their data from original sources like the White Pages or Dun & Bradstreet, errors can creep back in. That’s why we offer a PowerListings subscription to
get you listed consistently at all the sites on the list, and
prevent your NAP data from getting changed by a refresh at any of those sites.
US smartphone penetration is up to 75% as of the end of 2014. Late last year, mobile traffic exceeded desktop traffic for the first time. And according to Nielsen, 87% of mobile users used their mobile device for shopping activities like searching for a product or service, pricing comparisons, or brick & mortar address search.
According to Google:
Appearing on smartphones is critical for local businesses. 94% of smartphone users look for local information on their phone and 84% take action as a result, such as making a purchase or contacting the business.
Google has also been focusing more recently on the user experience of websites, preferring those that provide a good user experience because web users like those sites better. And a website that’s not mobile-friendly provides a poor user experience for smartphone users.
Google has previously announced that whether a site is mobile-friendly is a positive ranking factor. As a hint that it might be due for increased weight in Google rankings, early this year Google started issuing warnings to webmasters if their site isn’t mobile-friendly. Then as recently as last week, Google wrote “Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal.” Google has already begun a rollout of alerts for users indicating which sites in it’s search results are mobile-friendly. It’s not universal yet, but seems to be increasing in coverage.
The acid test: look up your site on a phone yourself and judge.
What if you fail the test?
If you fail the test, you have three options.
You can talk with your web designer about a site redesign to make your site “responsive”. Responsive means your website changes how it looks depending on what kind of device is used to view it.
Without a website redesign, you can use a tool like DudaMobile to create a mobile version of your site. Typically it replaces the “www.” prefix with a “m.” prefix and does a lot of the redesign work for you. You will still need to spend time tweaking it to look the way you want, and there’s an annual fee for the service.
Do nothing and take your chances with your Google rankings.
Not being mobile-friendly is not yet a major ranking signal at Google, but it will be increasing in importance over time as smartphones and tablets continue to displace laptops and desktops as the platform of choice.
The next big jump in its importance as a ranking signal is scheduled for April 21 of this year (2015).
If you’re not currently mobile-friendly, now is the time to fix that.
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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.
With the rise of mobile searches — more than half of all searches are now done from phones — “near me” searches have exploded from devices with GPS.
