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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Every page on a website needs a title tag or page title (both terms refer to the same thing. Here’s a quick explanation,) It’s not the visible title or headline on the page. Instead, it’s in the code of the page. But the page title is visible in three important places:
The headline of your listing in search engines
This is often the very first thing a visitor sees about your website. It’s one of the most important factors in encouraging a user to click on your page.
The tab of your browser
This is most helpful for people who have many tabs open in their browser, making it easier for them to get back to your page. Having keywords for the page near the front is helpful here because your page title’s likely to be truncated.
Social media platforms
This is an example of a blog page that’s been shared on Facebook. Notice how prominent the title tag is here.
Your page title tags are very important to your SEO, but they also contribute, positively or negatively, to the user experience of searchers. They should be crafted with care. Here are some rules of thumb to keep in mind.
Length
Avoid truncation if you can. Search engines allocate a finite amount of space to listing headlines. If your page title tag is too long, it will get truncated, possibly hiding important words. I suggest keeping your page titles under 60 characters. The real limit is in pixels, not characters, because some letters (M, W) are wider than others (i, l, t) but the 60 character limit is a good, easy rule of thumb.
Uniqueness
Every page deserves — no, needs — its own unique title tag. Too often I encounter websites that have dozens of pages showing the same page title; often it’s just the company name. When this happens, it not only doesn’t help the page to rank highly in search engines, but also doesn’t compel the searcher to click on it.
Some micro businesses who don’t pay a professional web designer find themselves left with the default page title from the theme that they use. You can spot these sites because page title of their home page is “Home” or some pages on their website have a title tag that reads “New Page”. Let me just ask: how likely are you to click on a page that shows up in the search engines with the headline that simply says “New Page”?
Focus
To achieve high rankings in Google or elsewhere, your pages must have a clear focus. A services page that lists everything you do or products page that lists everything you sell isn’t really “all about” anything. And the page title of “Services” or “Products” is equally unfocused. It’s unlikely to rank highly in search engines and if it does show up for search it’s unlikely to encourage the searcher to click on it. Every product or service needs its own page with content that’s completely focused on that product or service. Similarly, each page is title tag needs to clearly reflect the focus of the page.
Keyword placement
A good page title with keywords for the page near the front can grab the searcher’s attention immediately and assure them that clicking on your listing will provide information highly relevant to what they’re looking for. If you feel compelled to include your company name in page titles, it needs to go at the end — with the exception of your Home page where your name is also an important keyword. or the About Us page which is all about you. I typically discourage including your company name in title tags for internal pages because it dilutes the power of the keywords you’ve carefully included in the title tag.
If you have a well-known brand, see the exception to this rule next.
Your brand or company name
If you have a well-known brand name that’s respected nationally, or even locally, it may be well to ignore the prohibition recommended above. A strong brand name can increase your conversion rates — the likelihood of someone clicking on your listing when it shows up in search results. I would still recommend using it at the end of the page title except for your Home page and perhaps your About page.
Keyword stuffing
I’ve written before about the dangers of keyword stuffing. Since the beginning of search engines, business owners have felt a need to throw as many keyword phrases as they can at search engines so the page will rank for almost any way people search for it. That tactic may have actually worked 20 years ago, but once Google came on the scene it quickly became wise to that trick. Instead of helping, keyword stuffing actually hurts your ranking chances. And if such a page does attract visitors, the user experience of keyword-stuffed copy quickly drives them away.
Similarly, a keyword-stuffed page title is unlikely to attract clicks. What is the value to a searcher of the listing with a headline that says “Best Car Repair, Auto Repair, Car Repair Shop, Local Car Repairs”? Title tags like this are bad for searchers and are very likely to hurt your rankings. Search engines understand variations of keywords and common synonyms (car, auto) and would consider a title like this to provide a poor user experience, making it counterproductive.
Spend a little more time on your title tags
When creating a new web page or blog post, it’s tempting to write your page title and then create your content. Once you finish the content, you’re eager to publish it and get it out there. That’s when you should stop and take a breath. Revisit the title tag and make sure it still clearly identifies what your page is about. Think about it with the above rules of thumb in mind before you finalize and publish your content. A little extra thought and care can make a big difference in how many people choose to read your material.
Want to dig a little deeper? Online marketing agency Distilled has an in-depth article on how to make your title tags the best they can be.
Update September 2021 —SEO Owl has a nifty little tool to see if Google is truncating — or even completely rewriting — your title tags before they appear in search results. Check out the Google Title Rewrite Checker.
Facing challenges with your own page title tags? Start a discussion below.
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Meta descriptions are not used to directly determine your SEO rankings. However, they do convince searchers to visit your website. A bad meta description might undermine your web page — or your brand.
Below I’ve explained how your business can write great meta descriptions in order to turn casual searchers into paying customers.
Why are meta descriptions important to your business?
SEO makes your web pages rank well in SERPs. You then need to convince searchers that your business provides them with the result they’re looking for. This is what your meta descriptions do – meta descriptions are your sales people.
You need to produce winning sales pitches for you business by writing great meta descriptions for your web pages. Here’s how.
Before you do anything you need to get inside the heads of your customers. They’ve searched Google because they’re looking for answers. Your way to to make sure your business has these answers is to follow the PSO (Problem, Solution, Outcome) approach. I’ll use the example of health and fitness – something I’ve searched for plenty of times myself!
Problem: Your customers want to be fitter and healthier
Solution: How are you going to help them achieve their goals
Outcome: Make your customers see how your business has improved their lives
Here is an example of a meta description for a business in the health and fitness industry. I searched fitness wear to get the results:
This brand is all about showing love to US made products. It knows that its target audience is searching for workout clothes. But it goes further. It sells itself as being exciting. The outcome? You’ll look so good in these clothes that “you’ll wear them all the time.” It’s just a shame that the number of brands in the title and meta don’t match.
Meta description length: Make sure Google doesn’t cut you off
A copywriter will tell you that one of the basic rules of writing is to deliver the right amount of content. Don’t go over the word count and don’t run short. You have to take the same approach with your meta descriptions.
If your meta descriptions are too short you’ve missed valuable space to sell the value of your business. If your meta descriptions are too long Google will cut them off, leaving half complete words and sentences.
You might have read that your meta description length is all about characters. And that your metas need to be up to 160 characters long – or 300 since the changes made by Google in December 2017. This is wrong. It’s all about pixels.
The reason that pixels are so important is that some letters and numbers are longer than others. This means you could have the right number of characters but still find your metas cut off. To make sure your meta descriptions are the right length keep to the following:
920 pixels for desktop
680 pixels for mobile
If you have a mobile responsive web design the same page will be used on mobile and desktop. This means the same meta will be used, which means the meta could be squashed. To get around this problem, use 920 pixels and then enable the viewport tag. The video below explains how to do this:
To be certain your meta descriptions don’t have too many pixels in them I recommend using a tool to view how Google will see them. My preferred tool is from HigherVisibility but there are plenty out there which you can use – a tool wouldn’t have stopped the below meta description from being terrible (the content is all kinds of awful), but it would have meant Sears knew it was too long:
Focus on your customer – not your business
Too many businesses forget that their customers don’t care about them. What their customers care about is their needs. The structure of your meta descriptions will be formed from the PSO approach. The content of your metas needs to be inspired by your customers.
Product pages and blog posts need to tell your customer how your products are going to improve their lives. Gymshark is the top fitness and apparel brand on Instagram. I’ve picked a random page to show how Gymshark writes a great meta description:
The customer is the center of the content. It’s “your” back “your” all-important rest day. It’s playful and caring. But what’s really great about this meta is that it uses curiosity to create a great CTA – more on that soon…
Your home page needs to make a personal connection between your brand and your customer. The Fit Boxx is one of the top performing fitness brands on Exchange. I’ve looked at its home page to see how great the meta description is: Your customers want to be told about the benefits of your products, not the features. In this great example, the customer is told that The Fit Boxx will provide them with the key fitness products they need “and more.” Not only that, the brand will deliver to their door.
All of the major questions a customer would have about a crossfit brand are answered in the meta. And the focus is purely upon the benefits. Now they just need to click through and find out how much this will cost.
Make sure you have a CTA
While it’s important to show your customers that your brand has what they need, don’t forget that your meta description is a piece of sales copy. In order to make sure you convert searchers into customers you need a CTA (Call To Action).
There are a number of top tips to writing a CTA that will give you a great meta description:
Use a command verb: These tell your customer to do something. Great examples include “buy,” “now,” and “visit.”
Include offers with a timescale: Giving your customer an offer or discount is always a winning sales tactic. Telling your customers they only have a limited time before it runs out encourages them to act, NOW!
Inspire curiosity: Another technique is to keep your customers in the dark (a little). Tease them by giving part of the message and leaving some of it open. While it may sound counterproductive, industry-leading marketer Neil Patel has explained that curiosity leads to increased sales
For more information on how to write a CTA that converts, check out the brilliant video below:
A great meta description will convince your customers that you have what they need, getting them on to your website where they can buy your products. Follow the guidance in this article and you’ll be writing great meta descriptions that will win you business.
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!
I often explain that despite the “Magic” in our company name, SEO isn’t magic, and there really should be no secrets about how it works. Nevertheless, it does require a little shift in how you think about your website to understand what works and why. Small business SEO mistakes can be pretty easily avoided if you know what they are.
Startups and small business owners, especially those with cash flow concerns, often try to do things for themselves. We found that there are some common SEO mistakes that small businesses make which are easily avoidable.
Here’s a list of the top ten things small business owners often mess up when trying to do SEO. (Needless to say, if you want or need professional help in optimizing your site without making these errors, Rank Magic is here to help.)
Small business owners often spend months or years designing their websites and creating content. Without an SEO strategy in place from the beginning, they often find their efforts to be sub- optimal.
When they come late to the SEO process, very often much of what they have worked on so diligently on the website needs to be redone in accordance with SEO best practices.
The best time to start SEO is when you start designing (or redesigning) your website. This may be the single most common small business SEO mistake.
2) Avoiding low-competition keywords
It’s easy to think that you should focus on the keyword phrases everyone is searching for all the time. It feels like a waste of time to optimize for niche keyword phrases that receive fewer searches. But for a new business or a new website, the reverse is actually true. It takes months and years to develop the online authority to rank highly for those keyword phrases – you may be trying to compete with Amazon or Wayfair or Costco for those super-high volume keyword phrases. They’re the most competitive.
Optimizing for appropriate low competition keyword phrases is easier and much more likely to result in success over the shorter term.
For local businesses, niche keyword phrases might include a county, town, or neighborhood. Think electrician on the upper East Side or Indian restaurant in Morristown.
Those kinds of keyword phrases narrow your competition dramatically and make it much easier to achieve first page rankings. At Rank Magic, we do extensive keyword research and analysis for our clients.
3) Optimizing for Google instead of the customer
Just about anything you do on a website specifically for Google, is likely to fail to address the needs of your customers. As Google has improved over the years, it’s gotten very smart about identifying websites that are helpful to users as opposed to being focused just on Google. It’s important to bear in mind that the user experience on a website is a ranking factor at Google.
4) Ignoring or avoiding long-tail keywords
Long-tail keyword phrases are more precisely focused on your products or services than more general terms. A new plumbing company may optimize for the keyword plumbing.
But most people searching for that phrase are looking for general information about plumbing — or perhaps jobs in the plumbing industry — rather than looking to hire a local plumber.
The keyword plumbing services receives fewer searches per month but is much more closely focused on the needs of the plumber’s customers. An even longer-term phrase for one of this company’s services might be sump pump repair or sump pump leak. Our new plumbing company is likely to have much better success with these long-tail phrases.
I see this often, especially with new businesses that have tried to create their own website using one of those do-it-yourself sites like GoDaddy or Yahoo Site Builder. The code that runs the website is not visible on the page and is easy to ignore. But that code includes lots of information critical to search rankings and to conversions once you do show up in a search. Things like
The page title, which shows up as the headline of your listing in Google,
The meta-description tag, which often shows up as part of your listing in Google,
Page and image file names,
Image alternate text,
URL structure and more.
These items all relate to the underlying code of your web pages which either A) help Google understand what the page is about and the value it offers or B) contribute to the likelihood of someone clicking on your listing when it shows up in Google.
6) Keyword stuffing
The now-ancient practice of keyword stuffing involves using a keyword phrase over-abundantly on the page in the hopes that it will convince Google the page is really, really, really about that phrase.
It doesn’t work. And it makes the user experience on the page really crappy, driving people away instead of converting them to paying customers. This is a small business SEO mistake that was usually made many years ago and has just never been fixed. If it applies to you, it’s time to fix it.
7) Forgetting internal links
Once you have people on your site, you want them to stay long enough and learn enough about you so they want to do business with you. Internal links – links among the various pages on your site foster those more extensive visits on your site.
8) Not measuring results
You need to know if your efforts are working or not. If they’re not helping, you know you need to change things.
How are your search rankings doing over time?
How much traffic are you getting from search?
Is it improving?
You need to know this. Rank Magic provides extensive reporting to our clients on the essential things they need to know but if you’re not a client of ours you should take steps to track results yourself.
9) Focusing on features instead of benefits
You’re enmeshed in your business and are proud of the features of your products or services. Small businesses often get bogged down in the details of those features and go on at length about them.
Guess what? No one cares.
Your customer cares about benefits, not features. They want to know how you can address their concern or relieve their problem. They won’t search for a high tech toilet float valve — they want you to stop their leaky toilet.
This is one of those SEO mistakes that small businesses make that requires you to change your perspective about what to tell people about your business.
Order a hamburger at any fast food restaurant and I’ll bet the person taking your order asks “You want fries with that?” They sell a lot more fries because they ask. That’s known as a call to action.
We all think our website copy is going to make us irresistible and will make users reach out to us without us having to ask. We’re delusional about that.
What do you want your website users to do? Buy something? Call for an appointment? Subscribe to your newsletter? Ask them.
To finish up this post, here are a few examples of calls to action:
I shouldn’t have to write this post. Everyone should know that the keywords meta tag has been useless for years, right? Then why do I still see websites using sometimes elaborate and excessive meta keywords tags?
Stop it! Don’t use them.
Why? A little history might help.
This meta tag began to be used more than twenty years ago — even before there was such a thing as Google. We were using search engines like AltaVista and InfoSeek and Ask Jeeves and Lycos. And we were advising our clients to use the keywords meta tag.
They weren’t very sophisticated.
The keywords meta tag was designed to help them know what searches to rank a page for. Sounds easy, right? Well, maybe a bit too easy.
Quick story:
Back in 1995 you could look to see what the most popular search terms were. You still can, actually.
At the time, one of the most popular search terms was Britney Spears. For some website owners that was compelling. The theory went that if millions of people were searching for Britney Spears, let’s put her name in our keywords meta tag. Then search engines will send those millions of people to our website. Surely some of them will want to buy what we sell!
So they added “Britney Spears” to their keywords meta tag to fool all the search engines into sending Britney fans to their website. And back in those days excess was the rule. If having Britney Spears in the meta keywords tag once helped to rank for people searching for her, putting it in there a dozen times should bring even more of them! So that’s what they did. It might have looked like this:
<meta name=”keywords” content=”shoes, Britney Spears, women’s shoes, Britney Spears, pumps, flats, Britney Spears, high heels, Britney Spears, patent leather shoes, Britney Spears, red shoes, Britney Spears, brown shoes, Britney Spears>
It didn’t take long for the search engines to notice that the actual content on the web page — the stuff that people could read — wasn’t about Britney Spears at all. They spotted the cheating tactic and began to treat it as search engine spam. The result was they stopped using the keywords meta tag at all in deciding what a given web page was about or what searches they should rank it for
It’s been worthless ever since.
But myths and legends die hard. And as recently as 2008 Google Engineer Matt Cutts had to produce a video explaining that Google definitely does not use the meta keywords tag in ranking websites. Yahoo and Bing have confirmed that as well.
A keywords meta tag in your code might be seen as a spam signal: a ham-fisted attempt to fool search engines into ranking you better than you deserve to be. Spam signals are bad. Really bad. They hurt your rankings instead of helping them.
You can still do it. But don’t.
For some reason enough people still think they help that one of the most popular plugins for WordPress sites, the Yoast SEO plugin, includes an option for it. But with this warning: [Update 2/15/2018] Beyond that, the good folks at Yoast have just now removed any reference to the meta keywords tag and they explain why here.
Bottom line: just don’t do it.
Your opinions matter — especially if you disagree. Please share your thoughts in the comments below.
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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.
Every page deserves — no, needs — its own unique title tag. Too often I encounter websites that have dozens of pages showing the same page title; often it’s just the company name. When this happens, it not only doesn’t help the page to rank highly in search engines, but also doesn’t compel the searcher to click on it.
To achieve high rankings in Google or elsewhere, your pages must have a clea
r focus. A services page that lists everything you do or products page that lists everything you sell isn’t really “all about” anything. And the page title of “Services” or “Products” is equally unfocused. It’s unlikely to rank highly in search engines and if it does show up for search it’s unlikely to encourage the searcher to click on it. Every product or service needs its own page with content that’s completely focused on that product or service. Similarly, each page is title tag needs to clearly reflect the focus of the page.
If you have a well-known brand, see the exception to this rule next.
Your customers want to be told about the benefits of your products, not the features. In this great example, the customer is told that The Fit Boxx will provide them with the key fitness products they need “and more.” Not only that, the brand will deliver to their door.
There are a number of top tips to writing a CTA that will give you a great meta description:
I often explain that despite the “Magic” in our company name, SEO isn’t magic, and there really should be no secrets about how it works. Nevertheless, it does require a little shift in how you think about your website to understand what works and why. Small business SEO mistakes can be pretty easily avoided if you know what they are.
Just about anything you do on a website specifically for Google, is likely to fail to address the needs of your customers. As Google has improved over the years, it’s gotten very smart about identifying websites that are helpful to users as opposed to being focused just on Google. It’s important to bear in mind that the user experience on a website is a ranking factor at Google.
You need to know if your efforts are working or not. If they’re not helping, you know you need to change things.
We all think our website copy is going to make us irresistible and will make users reach out to us without us having to ask. We’re delusional about that.
Stop it! Don’t use them.
