3 Most Effective Google Ranking Factors You Should Focus On

By jack123 | SEO | 0 Comments

3 Most Effective Google Ranking Factors You Should Focus On

Google has over 200 ranking factors and nobody really knows each of them and the exact impact they have on rankings. However, there’s a handful of effective Google ranking factors that have been proven over and over again to work and deliver results when it comes to boosting the ranking of your pages.

We will be covering 5 of these factors, in this article. You don’t need to learn about dozens of factors if you perfect these you can surely get more traffic. Some of them provide direct results while others are more indirect. But, you should strive to implement as many as possible, hopefully, all of them in your day-to-day SEO strategy. This will prove to be the most effective way to beat competitors.

Backlinks

Many SEO experts say that you should focus all of your attention on creating quality content and helping your audience while the results will come on their own. This is slightly misleading but it’s the favorite advice Google likes to give. Truth to be told, backlinks are probably one of the most effective Google ranking factors out there.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that you can only rank based on links but they can surely help you go a long way. If you also have a solid on-page strategy and some in-depth quality content then, yes, links can make wonders for your site. The research on this is vast but, just by using common sense, you can notice the correlation between backlinks, domain authority and monthly traffic.

Keep in mind that not all backlinks have the same power and that’s why there are sites with thousands of links and no traffic.

Relevance & Authority

The backlinks from your profile need to be first and foremost relevant. This tells Google that other people from the niche approve your site and content, positioning you as an authority and making you rank higher for that niche. This is the same as word of mouth in real life. If you want to make a name in the business world, having people from that industry speak nicely about you will help a lot.

The authority of the site linking to you also matters. A link from a 2-moth old site and one from Forbes are obviously not going to be equal. Forbes has huge authority in its niche and a part of that authority can transfer to you by getting a link. The stronger the pages, the bigger their SEO impact will be.

You can use a multitude of metrics to count this authority like Domain Authority (DA), PageRank (PR), and Domain Rating (DR). As a rule of thumb, the more links you have from relevant and high-authority sites, the higher you can actually rank.

Topical authority

Generally, if your site has a high domain authority and solid link profile it can outrank countless competitors from your direct niche. But, if you do expand in other niches with the same site, you’ll see that niche-relevant sites will outrank you even if their overall authority is lower. This is why topical authority is one of the effective Google ranking factors from this article.

A site focused on app reviews will make wonders in its niche but would struggle to rank in the top ten for a travel-related article. This is the same reason why new general sites that cover all niches might have a decent ranking overall but can struggle to get the top results.

This is called topical authority and Google stands behind it since they follow something called E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness). If your site only reviews smartphones then it’s pretty easy to develop E-A-T for that topic. However, nobody can meet these criteria for every single niche.

You should keep this topical authority and E-A-T in mind when creating content. Try to write articles only about things that are directly related to your niche, at least in the beginning. If your site is about smartphones, only write about smartphones until you develop authority. After that, you can experience other tech-related topics.

Search Intent

Google became pretty smart at understanding the intent behind every search. If you’re trying to buy a smartphone but Google gives you news then they are failing at the job. That’s why Google ranks content differently based on search intent.

If you’re searching for “buy smartphone online” you probably want to do some shopping. That’s why Google will show you only eCommerce pages. But, if you’re searching for “how to speedup smartphone” you probably want to learn something new so Google will only showcase tutorials from blog pages.

You will need to map your content strategy based on the search intent of users and try to satisfy that. You should consider the content type (blog posts, products, categories) and format (how-to, news, listicle opinion pieces, etc.) whenever writing something. For the keyword “best smartphones 2020” you’d probably want to write a listicle on a blog page.

Bonus tip

There are a few more effective Google ranking factors that deserve to be briefly mentioned in this article. The quality of your content is also very important. The content should be in-depth but with clear answers and created with the user in mind. Also, the site needs to be optimized for mobile and have a decent load speed.

These factors are directly targeted to the experience users have on the site. You can rank high without them for now but, if you’re not providing a great user experience it’s going to be hard to maintain rankings in the long term.

Conclusion

Many people would consider the advice mentioned in this article and the ranking factors listed as being pretty basic. And, that is true. But, they are the most effective Google ranking factors that you should actually focus on. You want a good foundation which would be an optimized and mobile-friendly site that has good load speeds.

If you have that, you can start creating quality content for your niche, and for the search intent of your audience. If you focus all of the efforts on your direct niche and you try to get some quality links from other relevant and authoritative sites you can rank pretty high.

Ranking in Google is usually just about putting in practice some of the easiest strategies out there. You don’t need shiny tricks, all you need is to apply the basic tips mentioned above.