SEO Ranking Factors: How To Handle And Improve Rankings

The ultimate motto of every website owner is to acquire a place on the first page of search engine results pages.

However, that is also insufficient unless you appear within the top three rankings.

If you are a budding website owner and still thinking, “Why is that so important?” then, you have landed on the right page. 

We will discuss SEO Ranking, its importance, the most important SEO factors for ranking, and how to improve your SEO rankings.

What Are SEO Rankings?

SEO rankings refer to the positions of websites on the SERPs for a particular search query.

The higher is your website ranking, the more the chances searchers will find it and click.

Importance Of Search Ranking

SEO rank plays the most crucial role in any website’s performance for the following reasons,

1. When your website ranks for more search queries, it frequently appears on search results pages. That ensures a higher number of impressions.
2. A higher search ranking drives more organic traffic to your website.
3. A higher volume of traffic boosts your click-through rate.
4. A higher CTR increases your chance of conversions.

How Search Engines Rank Pages?

Google being the most popular and widely used search engine, we will discuss how Google ranks web pages in this section.

Crawling:  The search bots of Google, also known as Google’s spiders, go through each web page of your website during the crawling phase.

Indexing: If crawlers find your web page content relevant to one more search query, then Google saves the information in its massive database, Google Index.

Ranking: Google ranks your web page for relevant search queries, provided it satisfies all criteria set by Google. 

Google SEO Ranking Factors

There are hundreds of factors considered by Google while ranking a web page. 

However, no one knows Google ranking factors in detail as Google restricts information related to their algorithm and ranking factors.

In fact, that applies to every search engine because search engine ranking factors are proprietary business information that requires privacy.

Though SEO experts speculate several SEO page ranking factors, we will only discuss the ranking SEO factors confirmed by Google in this section.

Content Relevance

Google prioritizes content relevancy of a web page a lot.

When searchers put in a search query, Google first measures whether a web page is relevant to that search query and then ranks the most relevant web pages in the SERPs.

Quality Of Content

Google ensures a web page offers top-quality content before ranking it on search results.

Google considers inputs from real humans and algorithms while measuring the quality of content. 

Backlinks

Google considers the presence of relevant backlinks on a web page as a sign of relevancy and trustworthiness.

Physical Proximity

When Google provides search results for local searches, it considers how far the business is from the searcher’s location.

Mobile Friendliness

Google has prioritized mobile-friendly web pages while indexing and ranking since it rolled out the mobile-friendly update in April 2015.

Hence, web pages that offer hassle-free navigation on mobile devices have better SEO rankings.

That makes it essential to check the mobile responsiveness of your web pages using a reliable mobile friendliness checker tool.

RankWatch’s mobile friendliness and responsive checker can make your life easier.

Page Performance

Google determines a web page’s performance by measuring its loading speed, responsiveness, and visual stability using its Core Web Vitals.

Core Web Vitals includes three metrics: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), which measures the web page’s performance.

HTTPS

Google prefers websites that offer more security using an HTTPS encrypted connection and considers it as one of the SEO ranking factors.

How To Improve Your Ranking SEO?

SEO is a long-term game. It demands relentless attention to hold and improve your SEO rankings.

That is why taking care of any specific aspect of SEO of your website is not enough. Instead, you need to take a comprehensive look at all the main aspects of your SEO and try to improve all of them.

Let’s dive in!

Perform A Thorough Keyword Research

Detailed keyword research is one of the most important parts of ranking SEO.

It provides you with the keywords you want your website to rank for. However, you must consider the following three criteria while choosing your keywords.

Search Volume: You must check the number of searchers looking for that keyword. Ideally, targeting keywords with moderate search volumes works well for most websites.

Competition: You must check how competitive is the keyword you are targeting. Targeting keywords with medium difficulty can be ideal for most sites. On the contrary, if you target highly competitive keywords, you have to compete with the most established websites in your niche.

Cost-per-click: You need to be aware of the CPC of your target keywords. That will help you determine the cost of your PPC campaigns.

RankWatch’s free keyword research tool offers thousands of organic and long-tail keywords in the blink of an eye.

The tool not only offers tons of keywords but also provides you with accurate data on all the above three criteria for choosing keywords.

Create Top-Notch Content

Unless your web page offers well-researched, informative, and high-quality content, Google will not consider it for ranking in its search results.

And no matter how good writers you have in-house or how excellent their content is, there is always room for improvement.

And there comes Rankwatch’s on-page SEO analysis tool to provide invaluable tips for your content optimization.

Once you have designed your content using the targeted keywords, you can check your content using the tool’s SEO IQ feature to explore further optimization chances.

The tool suggests the exact keywords need to be included in the body of your content.

You can get suggestions on keyword usage by clicking the content recommendations tab. That also measures the relevancy of the keywords to the context of your web page content.

You can find the optimization status of your content by clicking on the ‘Content Editor’ tab. The tool also provides you with keywords for better optimization.

Clicking on the ‘Questions’ tab of the content editor will provide you with the most popular search queries often used by searchers. 

Using them as FAQs or headings in your web page content will definitely improve your Google SEO rank.

Acquire High-Quality Backlinks

Link-building will always stay in trend. 

Having high-quality backlinks on your web page provides you with better results in SEO rankings.

The main reason behind that is if your web page has backlinks from highly authoritative websites, it indicates to Google that it is a trustworthy source of information.

Research shows that having authoritative backlinks provides higher positions in website SEO ranking.

Hence, it is essential to check the backlink scenario of your website at regular intervals.

RankWatch’s free backlink checker tool provides a complete picture of your backlinks.

Clicking on the ‘Overview’ tab of the Rankwatch backlink analyzer tool will show your total number of backlinks, active backlinks, and deleted backlinks.

It also reflects how many of your backlinks provide you link juice (Do Follow) and how many don’t (No Follow).

You must analyze the backlinks of your competitors as well. That will give you an idea of the sources they are acquiring their backlinks from.

You can also reach those sources for link building.

Improve Technical SEO

The primary goal of technical SEO is to ensure that any technical aspect of your website’s SEO is not creating hindrances for search engines to crawl and index your web pages.

Conducting a thorough SEO audit is the best way to identify technical SEO issues.

You must opt for an authentic tool like RankWatch website auditor for that purpose.

You only need to follow a few simple steps mentioned below,

1. Log in to your RankWatch account and go to the dashboard.
2. Click on the ‘Site Auditor’ tab and enter the domain of your website.
3. Click the ‘submit’ button.
4. The site auditor summary dashboard will instantly generate a detailed crawled report showing HTTP status code distribution chart and total site score.

   

5. The HTTP status code distribution chart includes all the essential crawling stats like 200 pages, 301 redirects, failed URLs, and many more.

   

6. The issues found in the site score chart are distributed in three categories; high, medium, and low, depending on their type of criticality. It helps you decide which issues need to be addressed immediately.
   
7. Scrolling down further will serve you the page depth of all your web pages. 
8. The tool also provides you with a page response time distribution chart showing the speed of all your URLs. You can easily identify the slow URLs and can start working on them to reduce the bounce rate.

   

9. If you scroll down you will get the entire list of your non-indexable pages. This is crucial information and you need to re-work on these pages without delay.

However, in case you want to conduct an SEO analysis for a particular web page urgently, then the RankWatch site checker tool will be of great help. it showcases all of the above metrics, but only for a particular web page so that you can work on it immediately.

How To Track SEO Rankings?

You must monitor the outcomes once you have taken care of all the rank SEO factors.

You should check how your targeted keywords are performing by checking the changes in their ranks. 

 A reliable tool like RankWatch online rank tracker can help you with that.

If you click on the ‘Rankings’ tab of the tool, it will show you the total number of keywords your website is ranking for. The adjacent arrow shows whether the number has been increased or decreased.

You can also find how your keywords are ranking on an average.

The tool also shows how many featured snippets you are ranking for.

Conclusion

Website SEO ranking plays the most vital role in your website’s performance.

A higher SEO ranking drives more organic traffic to your website, boosts your CTR, and increases your conversion rate.

Search engines rank your web pages after crawling and indexing. They check hundreds of ranking factors in their algorithms before ranking a web page.

It is impossible to discover all the ranking factors of any search engine.

However, your web pages must offer relevant & top-notch content targeting the right keywords, authoritative backlinks, mobile friendliness, and fast loading speed to achieve a higher ranking in search results.

It is also essential to check the technical aspects of your website’s SEO by conducting a site audit at regular intervals.