There are over 3.5 billion Google searches every day, and approximately 35 percent of these searches are new search terms. That is why it’s no surprise that more than 40 percent of advertiser revenue comes from search engine marketing. Due to the high-pressure website owners experience daily to ensure a good ranking, SEO professionals had to deal with numerous factors that affect website ranking.
Truthfully, there are about 200 elements that affect website ranking. However, the good news is that not all of them directly or quickly impact the website.
You may have just built a new website, or you are already ranking well. Either way, there is no doubt that SEO is here to stay and that SEO efforts aren’t going to die anytime soon. Since publishers make revenue by having ads on their websites, it becomes more crucial for them to rank on the search engines. The idea is to attract new users who potentially click ads.
So what exactly are the factors that immediately affect your website ranking or hinder you from being visible on the first page? Let’s discuss these factors one by one and then find out what you can do to correct them.
Site or Page Level Elements
The first thing that affects website ranking is the site/page level. This is also the first thing you need to correct before moving on to the other factors. You need to make certain site/page level changes. These changes offer instant fixes that ultimately affect your ranking right away. Moreover, this process does not require experimenting long-term as this involves the backbone f your website.
In most cases, site/page levels involve the following:
- Missing domain security
- Missing robots.txt
- Poor website architecture
- Schema markup
- High page load time
- Overburdened server
Content-Related Factors
Your content must be creative. But you should not focus on creating engaging content. You also need to have an ongoing experiment to determine if publishing can attract users or people.
Content-related factors become even more critical because Google has recently updated its search engine ranking criteria algorithm. This is a big update that will have a massive impact on existing websites. If possible, you might need to consider core web vitals optimization. Shoring up your website ensures you follow the best SEO practices to include it in the relevant Google searches.
As a publisher, here are the practices you need to consider:
- Average content and SEO
- Google RankBrain
- Unoptimized content
- Winning competitors
- Inadequate linking
User Experience (UX) Factors
Providing an excellent user experience is a must and non-negotiable. You can integrate the best SEO practices with quality content. Still, those things won’t matter if you cannot provide great UX. Use experience may rely on many things. For instance, if your website looks unappealing, you will find it hard to provide a satisfactory user experience. Here are the sub-factors that affect user experience:
- Absence of accelerated mobile pages (AMPs)
- Non-mobile-friendly website
- Poor website layout and design
- Bad ad layouts
Tips to Improve Your Website
Now that you know the most critical factors affecting your website ranking, it’s time to make a few changes and focus on improving it. However, keep in mind that the following tips won’t put your website on the top right away. Building website rankings take time, so you need to work on it and be patient. Here are some tips to help your website tell Google that you are making all the necessary efforts to improve your ranking:
- If you don’t have one yet, create a Webmasters account.
- Take the time to determine and fix the broken links and redirects in your website. Google hates them.
- Refresh or repurpose your old content but never archive them.
- Set 404 directs where they are needed. This shows Google that you are not ignoring your inactive website pages.
- Find and correct poor-quality links. Stay away from them as much as possible.
- Take some time to monitor your website overhaul. Sometimes, your updates can cause website downfall.
As mentioned, ranking on Google takes time. It does not happen overnight, and it indeed does not happen with a few tweaks. You might even spend a few weeks or months before discovering what’s wrong and what causes your website to have poor performance. But don’t let that discourage you.
If you have a hard time, you can always consult the experts. Hire a website manager or outsource a company that specializes in optimization. The key here is not giving up and learning more daily to improve your website and attract users.
