Google is always updating its algorithms to reflect a better user experience online. And in the first part of this series, I gave some helpful tips on the top 4 ranking factors companies should focus on to see better rankings in 2017. In this video, we’ll share the final 6.
#5 AVERAGE TIME SPENT ON PAGE
The average bounce rate for blogs is 70-98%. And that hurts when the average time spent on page is a factor Google uses to determine a website’s credibility. So what can you do to reduce your bounce rate? Offer users rich content like videos to watch and podcasts to listen to. Give visitors something to interact with to increase time they spend on your site.
#6 DOMAIN AUTHORITY
Domain authority is a formula that considers 40 different ranking factors and rates websites on a scale of 1 to 100. The higher yours rates, the better your ranks. Age is a factor of domain authority, so be sure to extend the expiration date of your domain name to the maximum to show Google your site is legitimate.
#7 KEYWORDS IN TITLE TAGS
You can’t rank your page without having keywords, they’re that important. It’s easier for Google spiders to understand pages with keywords that are placed at the beginning of title tags and Google will give more weight to those pages.
#8 KEYWORD POSITIONING & RELEVANCE
Google crawlers check for keywords in your page URL, your posts, and in your H1, H2 and H3 tags. Google is paying attention to how you position your target keyword on your webpage. And if your page content doesn’t match with your keywords, your site may be penalized. So be sure to structure your page using relevant keywords and put them in the first 100 words of your posts, in your page URL, and in your H1/H2/H3 tags. Also include keywords in the beginning of your meta descriptions, too.
#9 PAGE LOAD TIME
We should all know by now that slow page time drastically affects your website’s performance. A fourth of web users will abandon your site if it doesn’t load in under 4 seconds. Google takes page load time seriously and penalizes websites with slow load times. To find out how slow your website loads, use Pingdom’s speed test, then be sure to compress files and images.
#10 RESPONSIVE DESIGN
51% of worldwide internet use comes from a mobile device today. And Google began its mobilegeddon rollout back in 2015 and even penalizes sites that are not mobile responsive. So if you want to gain search rankings in Google this year, be sure you have a website that is mobile responsive.
As a bonus, be sure your website is complying to best the user experience possible. Over the years, Google has become pretty good at shifting its algorithms to mimic how web visitors naturally prefer to interact with sites. So as long as you’re focused on user experience, the rest should fall into place.
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