There’s a list of factors Google considers when grading your website pages as high or low quality. These range from page load times to grammatical mistakes. Top rankings for your company's website are crucial to the success of your business. According to a study by Infront Webworks, the first page of Google receives 95 percent of web traffic, with subsequent pages receiving 5 percent or less of total traffic. Today, we’re going to unlock the secrets of how to improve your Google ranking.
Factors Google Considers When Ranking Your Website
Valuable Content: Google wants relevant, helpful content. This is information that’s typically not found anywhere else. This also factors in design and the presentation of your content.
External Links: High quality content links out to its references.
Internal Links: Google likes to see you linking to another page on your website.
Searcher’s Query: Google can tell if a user solves their search query using a page. For example, someone types in “businesses that sell widgets in my area,” and then clicks on your site. If they go back and visit a different site, or perform a new search, it tells Google that the page did not successfully answer that searcher’s query. If they click on a page, go perform an unrelated search and then switch back to their email, that tells Google the page solved their query.
Load Time: The pages must load quickly on any connection.
User Experience and Design: This means high quality design that is easy to navigate and accessible on mobile, desktop, tablet and laptop.
Grammatically Correct and Correctly Spelled: Google analyzes pages for poor spelling and bad grammar. If your site includes these, you don’t qualify as a high-quality site anymore.
Non-text Content Needs Text Alternatives: This is why Google encourages use of the alt attribute or video transcriptions on non-text content.
Well-organized Content: Content that is easy to consume and understand getting higher ranking.
As you can see Google’s algorithms are sophisticated and there is more to a website than just hitting “publish.” Start by analyzing the pages on your website. Make a list of high priority edits you need to make and use this list to guide you.
If your website is not living up to your expectations and you want to improve it, contact us! Whether you need a few tweaks or just content added to your current site, or a completely new, mobile-friendly website design, contact TotalCom Marketing to discuss what the process looks like.