Top 7 Google Ranking Factors You Shouldn’t Ignore in 2021

Top 7 Google Ranking Factors You Shouldn't Ignore in 2021

Google has mentioned its purpose, i.e., organizing the world’s data and making it worldwide available and useful. To accomplish its purpose, Google has more than 200 ranking factors that are used to rank sites. If you know google ranking factors, you can utilize this to optimize web pages effectively. Knowing google ranking factors is like you will come to know on which basis Google ranks sites.

First of all, let’s understand “What is google ranking.” Google ranking means whenever people search for any query; your content comes at the top position (Excluding Paid Results, answer boxes, and featured snippets) at SERP (Search Engine Result Pages).

If your content is ranking in the top three, your site’s CTR will be high, and you will get the maximum share of traffic.  

 

How Google Works?

Google has its crawlers called googlebots. Crawlers visit web pages and crawl that specific webpage. Then they add the SEO-optimized web pages to their index. And when people search, then Google shows the best results based on the query. Now let’s move on to the 7 top google ranking factors. 

 Top 7 Google Ranking Factors

1] Regular Publication of High-Quality and Engaging Content

A long time ago, it used to be considered that building backlinks are one of the top-ranking factors. However, it has been 3 years, content has outranked backlinks. Nowadays, if you provide high-quality content by keeping the searcher’s intent in mind, you will get a rank boost from Google.

Understanding Search Intent became very important. Because Google is analyzing users’ behavior on your site, if users are coming to your site and will not be satisfied with the content, They will hit back to SERP and visit another site. It will give a signal to Google that your site has failed to fulfill the user’s intent behind the query. Eventually, Google will derank your site. So make sure you are publishing high-quality content by keeping the user’s intent in your mind.  

 

2] Keywords in Meta Title Tags

Including your primary keyword in the title tag is a prerequisite for achieving ranking at SERP. Adding keywords is an actual SEO requirement, but adding keywords with the articles, prepositions, and adjectives is necessary for readability. Placement and Concentration of the keywords within the meta title tags are crucial. So it will take some time to create a keyword strategy.

 

3] Links

Links are the descriptive anchor text. If your website has a proper link structure, it will be considered one of google ranking factors. Usually, there are three types of links:

1. Inbound Links

Any high authority website mentions your site’s reference in any of its blog posts. Then it’s called an inbound link. Inbound link means links are getting from other websites. Link quality depends on the site’s authority. For example, if you are providing SEO Services, someone who has an older site loaded with high-quality content.

If that site links back to your site, it will be considered the highest quality inbound link. Your site’s authority will get boosted if your site has backlinks from high authoritative and reputative sites. High-quality Backlinks are considered as one of google ranking factors. 

2. Outbound Links

Suppose you are creating an informative piece of content, and for the user’s reference, you are mentioning descriptive anchor text navigating to the reference site. Then that descriptive anchor text is considered as the outbound links.

3. Internal Linking 

If you are linking to your site, then it will be considered as internal linking. For example, you have one long blog post and which is connected (linked) to other small blogs on your sites.

It helps passing link juice to weak web pages also.  

4] Niche Expertise

Niche Expertise means your site should have at least 10 web pages talking about the same topic. There is one nucleus keyword, and those pages should be revolving around that same nucleus keyword. After 2017, google started giving favor to those sites which contain nucleus keywords.

For example, “google ads” is the nucleus keyword. Other pages should cover content by targeting keywords moving around this nucleus keyword. For example, google ads techniques 2021, google ads pros and cons, google ads optimization techniques, etc. Niche Expertise is also considered as one of google ranking factors.  

5] User Engagement

Out of all google ranking factors, if you want me to select one that matters most, it will be “User engagement.” If you are publishing consistent content and that content cannot keep people on your site, you need to reconsider your content strategy. User engagement includes bounce rate, time on site, pages per seconds factors to check whether your content has a good engagement or not.

Even if your site is at the bottom of the #1 SERP and somehow few users clicked, and they visited the site. They read entire posts and visited/ interacted with other pages also. Google is continuously analyzing users’ behavior on your site. If Google sees that your site has a good engagement, it will automatically boost the site’s ranking.  

 

6] Mobile-Friendly Website 

Now Google has shifted to the “Mobile First” space. Google is expecting that website should be designed by keeping mobile-friendliness in mind. If you want to reach up to 2021 internet users, you need to create a “mobile-first” website that means users should navigate the site smoothly over mobiles and tablets. Google announced that they would be shifting to “mobile-first indexing.”

And it will be starting from Sept 2020. It means Google has started updating its index with a mobile-first version of your site.

7] Page Speed

It is no more secret that Page speed is one of the most important google ranking factors. Those sites load faster and have followed other SEO practices also, usually get an extra advantage over sites with low page loading speed. Google announced a mobile speed update on 9th July, and exactly after 6 months of this update. Google announced that page speed would be one of google ranking factors on mobile and desktop.

Web/Mobile Page speed makes a bad impact on your site indirectly. Because if the web page doesn’t load faster, users may bounce back to SERP. Thereby bounce rate will increase, and eventually, dwelling time will reduce. To check page speed, you can use a free tool by Google called Page Speed Insights. 

 

Conclusion

There are more than 200 google ranking factors. However, in this blog post, we have covered the top 7 Google ranking factors. If you improve your site as per the information provided above, you will see a boost in your site’s ranking. Other important google ranking factors, such as site security SSL Certificate, schema markup/structured data, etc. Above all, consistent publication of highly engaging informative content is one of the best google ranking factors.

Share this post

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Need Developers? We Offer Flexible Solutions For Any Project From $10/Hour

Ready to begin your AI/ML journey and uncover a future of success?
Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.
Services