Mindless Digital Marketing Blogs

Tag: Off Page SEO

  • Top 40 Google SEO Ranking Factors – Rank on Top of Google Search Results

    While Google’s SEO algorithm is highly dynamic with over 200 SEO Ranking Factors impacting your website’s visibility in Google Results, there are 40 SEO Ranking Factors which are more important than all others.

    To rank your website on top of Google’s results, you need to be careful while managing these 45 factors on your website. These SEO ranking factors can be sub classified into On Page or Off Page

    Top 40 Google SEO Ranking Factors

    On a higher level, these factors can be divided into four categories

    1. On Page Technical
    2. On Page Non-Technical
    3. Off Page
    4. Off Page Local

    Let’s list them down.

    On Page Technical SEO Ranking Factors

    1. Website Speed
      • Website Speed is one of the most critical factors in technical SEO, especially the speed for your website on mobile devices. Always ensure that the top fold of your website loads within 1.5 seconds on desktop and 2.5 seconds on mobile.
    2. Core Web Vitals
      • Core web vitals are divided into three parts: LCP (Largest Contentful Paint), CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) and INP (Integration to Next Paint). These essentially define both the speed and structure of your website. How the content loads based on the coding and requests along with how quickly your website responds to user interactions.
    3. TTFB (Time to First Byte)
      • TTFB is basically your server’s response time. Keep till below 600 ms and try to bring it down to 200 ms. This can be done by using faster servers, better hosting, CDN and most importantly by reducing the number of requests needed by your website to load above the fold content.
    4. URL Structure
      • Well defined url structure makes it easy for Google as well as the users to understand your website. Thus, improving user experience.
    5. Schema or Structured Data
      • Schema helps Google and other Search Engines to understand your website content, especially the objective part of it. This is one of the most important factors and helps build the authority of your content in Google’s Ranking. This is not visible to the user.
    6. Robots.txt
      • Well, if you want Google to rank your website, you have to allow crawling and indexing. However you want to block unnecessary pages or duplicate/canonical pages from both the user and the search engines.
    7. HTTPS or SSL
      • Users don’t want to visit websites which can be harmful to them or may fraud them. Thus, always use HTTPS and SSL
    8. Server Responses or Errors
      • Use proper server responses so that Google can understand the state of each page on your website.
    9. Forwarding or Cloaking
      • Google hates forwarding and cloaking. Avoid the same as much as possible.
      • Forwarding is however allowed at server level as it does not impact user experience much
    10. Sitemap
      • This allows search engines to find all the pages on your website and link them intuitively. 
    11. Canonicals
      • Who wants to read duplicate content? No One!
    12. Google Site Verification
      • Another tool used by Google to ensure who owns the website and how interested you are in analyzing your website. Thus, making GSC an important factor.

    On Page Non-Technical SEO Ranking Factors

    1. Content Quality and Length
      • Content is King. It’s the most important SEO Ranking Factor. Structure your content in a readable manner, use lists and make it decently lengthy.
      • Use as little of AI as possible. While it may make it easy to scale content and initially gain ranking, the long term consequences are not that good.
    2. Keyword Density
      • Target 4-5 keywords or key phrases for one web page
      • Use each of these at least 2-3 times per 100 to 150 words.
      • Keyword density allows search engines to find out what the page is actually talking about.
    3. Entity SEO
      • In simple words, it makes your content or topic unique.
      • An example here would be Hotel Mindless – A 5-star pet friendly hotel in Hell’s Kitchen New York with ample parking space.
      • As you can see, this tells the search engines about Hotel Mindless while also making it unique by adding identification 5-star, Hell’s Kitchen and New York; and features such as pet friendly and parking space
    4. Meta Title and Description
      • Always provide these two as they have immense impact on SEO
      • Always include your top KW in both Meta Title and Meta Description
      • Make it unique and always ads a CTA
    5. Header Tags
      • These define the structure of your content
      • Try and use tags H1 to H3 in all you content and sometimes go beyond till H6
      • H1 should always contain the main KWs while H2 and H3 should contain secondary keywords
      • Always use them in proper order
    6. Image Alt Tags
      • These define the images on your website
      • Always use unique Alt Tags for each image and include the placement of the image in the tag
    7. Internal Linking
      • Good content should guide the user as well as the search engine to more good content on your website
      • These also help Google understand the linkages between various webpages and content on your website
    8. Website Age and Authority
      • To anyone who says that website age does not matter – I did an experiment by adding a few blogs to a newly bought domain and they dint get any traction. Then, I added the exact same blogs to an older domain I own and got good results. Both sites used the same hosting, same wordpress theme, same optimizations, speed etc.
    9. EEAT
      • Focus on Authority and Expertise in these two by providing the details of the experts and linking their profiles from LinkedIn or other sources.
      • Always add a bit of context about the authors to make their content more trustworthy.
    10. Readability
      • Too small or too large text, or low contrast make your website content unreadable. This is poor user experience and should be avoided as much as possible.
    11. Dwell Time
      • How much time users spend on your website is a direct indicator to Google about the quality of content on your website. So make your content interesting and engaging. Give trailers and teasers, ask questions or tell them that there are bonus tips at the end.
    12. CTR
      • This is extremely rank and industry driven, thus, you can’t really define it as high or low. Just compare it to your previous rank and CTR while always trying to improve.
    13. Pages Visited
      • How many pages do the visitors of your website go through? Google finds this to be an indicator of great content which is being liked by users. Internal linking is extremely useful to improve this metric.
    14. Bounce Rate
      • Again, great content will make people read more and reduce bounce rate.

    Off Page SEO Ranking Factors

    1. Anchor Text
      • This is usually considered as a link back from a specific text on some other website to your website. The text in the link back is a strong indicator of the content on your webpage.
    2. Back Links or Referrals
      • These are similar to the above but are direct linkages to your website from articles such as listicles or reviews of your products or services on other websites.
    3. Social Presence
      • Maintain your social presence on all major social platforms including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, Quora, Pinterest and more.
      • This allows Google to build knowledge graph around your business or brand while also authenticating relevant details.
    4. Forums
      • People mention websites, brands and products on multiple forum websites such as Reddit, Quora, Github and more. Engage with your audience to generate more traffic to your website and please Google to improve your SEO rank.
    5. Product Reviews
      • Same as above, just a bit more specific about products being sold by a brand.
    6. PR and Influencer Marketing
      • Create chatter about your brand, get more backlinks, referral traffic. All this will indicate to Google about your being serious about your business and making efforts to expand it. Over time, Google will return your efforts with better ranking and more traffic.
    7. Google Ads Marketing
      • While Google says that this is DEFINITELY NOT a ranking factor but time and again I have noticed a very strong correlation between Google Ads Spend and Google SEO rankings. Thus, try and spend some bucks on Google Ads.
      • As a secondary benefit, it creates awareness and more people start searching for your brand on Google, thus improving authority and ranking.

    Off Page Local SEO Factors

    1. Ratings
      • For local businesses, your Google Rating can be a make or break factor for your business.
      • Try and keep your ratings above 4.5 and Google will reward you handsomely in local SEO rankings
    2. Reviews
      • Generate regular reviews and those too good ones of 4 or 5 stars. The more detailed reviews that people provide, the more information Google gets about your business which improves your ranking on local and maps.
    3. Response Time
      • Always respond to reviews on Google Business Profile.
      • Try and respond within 24 hours to show Google that your business is highly active in serving clients
    4. Listings and Directories
      • Google picks up and authenticates your business information from multiple other listings and directories.
      • Ensure that your business information is the same and updated on all listings including Apple Maps, Bing Places and others.
    5. Knowledge Graph
      • You don’t have direct control over this but keeping your listings updated and ensuring you follow Entity SEO and generate citations on Wikipedia etc will help Google curate a beautiful knowledge graph about your business or brand.
    6. Citations
      • There are many crowd sourced or open source websites that provide information to the world, Wikipedia being an example. Create citations on such websites and improve Google SEO rank.
    7. Social Presence
      • Again, keep your social media presence intact across all major social channels
      • Post regularly and engage with users.
      • Increase your brand mentions and incoming traffic from social media websites. This will impact your SEO positively.

    With this we cover the top 40 most important Google SEO Ranking Factors. If a business takes care of these, then Google takes care of that business. That’s how you rank on top of Google Search Results

    Maintaining so many SEO factors by creating highly engaging content and also implementing the best technical improvements to your website is a task for more than a team. You need experts from various backgrounds including developers, content writers, graphics designers, SEO experts and data analysts managed by project managers. While large businesses build their teams in-house, the same is not possible for medium or small businesses. 

    Mindless helps you manage all your website and SEO needs by providing you expert resources who stay updated on all industry requirements related to SEO, have worked in multiple industries and scaled the online presence of several brands.

    If your business is facing the challenge in optimizing website SEO or other paid media channels, then book a free consulting session with our experts and find out how we can help your business achieve new heights.

    You can also mail us on sales@mindless.digital for any queries.

    About the author:

    Pragun Jain is a seasoned digital marketer who has worked with over 500+ businesses ranging from billion dollar SAAS enterprises to 5-star hotel chains, restaurants and retail stores. He has managed over USD 75M in paid media spend across Google Ads, Meta Ads, LinkedIn Ads and other digital marketing channels.

    You can visit his LinkedIn profile here.

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