Did you know that only 9.37% of all indexed web pages get organic traffic from Google? That’s a little bit scary statistics for SEOs.
With over 200 ranking factors that Google uses to identify which sites deserve to be on the first page of SERPs, it may be really challenging to make strategic and right result-oriented decisions.
Thankfully, in this blog post, we are going to share with you the TOP 7 factors that tend to have the biggest impact on your website rankings in 2021.
Awesome, let’s dive into the meat of this post.
Visibility and Domain Factors
First things first. Make sure your website is visible to Google. In other words, make sure it can be properly crawled by Google bots and get indexed without any issues.
To quickly check the visibility of your site, you can simply put this query in Google: “site:https://yoursitename.com/” it returns your home page and shows you the number of search results, everything is good. If not, then you need to dig into your robots.txt and Google Search Console for more answers.
Now, let’s talk about the importance of your domain and its impact on your rankings.
- Obviously, the domain age has a big impact on rankings. Usually, Google loves older sites (3 years and more).
- Also, you may be surprised to know that Google is still paying attention to the keywords in your domain name. It’s good to have one in your domain name for more relevance. If your strategic keyword appears as the first word in the domain name, it can give you an advantage over your competitors that have the same SEO metrics.
- Google takes into account the length of your domain registration (preferably it should be at least a few years), domain history (no penalties in the past), country TLD (a particular TLD can help you rank better in that country, for example, .ca in Canada, .pt in Brazil, etc.), and whether or not your domain is the exact match of the keyword you want to rank.
On-Site Factors
If you aim at high rankings in Google, get your On-Page SEO done properly and diligently. It means no duplicate content. Your content should be relevant to the search intent, of high quality, easy to read, contain a nice combination of text and eye-catching visuals (don’t forget about inserting video in your blog posts), and properly structured (with a handy table of contents, headings, etc.).
- Now, don’t forget about keywords but use them naturally.
- Insert your main keyword in H1, URL slug, a couple of high-level headings, use it in the first 100 words, and several times in the text.
- Use LSI keywords to make it easier for Google to understand what your article is about. However, you should always keep in mind the keyword density to avoid over-optimization as Google may not like that. The best way is to do it is to find your competitors with a pro SEO keyword rank tracker, analyze their articles that are already ranking well for that keyword and identify the golden ratio of your keyword.
- Obviously, your content should be 100% original and fresh.
- Don’t forget to optimize images and add alt tags to them. You can do it easily with special WordPress plugins (if you use WordPress of course)
To nail all the On-Site factors, you may like to use WordPress plugins like Rank Math or Yoast.
Off-Site Factors
These factors are extremely important. In fact, Google stated it very clearly that RankBrain, content, as well as links, are the most important ranking factors. Simply put, Google loves sites with a lot of high-quality backlinks.
Again, before you start your link building campaign, we recommend you use the best SERP keyword rank tracker to identify your top competitors for the desired keywords. Then you need to use a backlink analysis tool like SemRush or Ahrefs to analyze their link profiles.
Ideally, you want to beat your competition in terms of the number and quality of links.
Don’t forget also about anchor text strategy. Leave exact match keyword anchor texts for the most powerful and high authority sites and use bare links on sites with lower DA.
Be very careful with anchor texts. Your anchor text list should be a well-balanced mix of bare links, branded terms, exact match anchors, broad match anchors.
User Experience Factors & Rank Brain
User experience is extremely important for Google to rank your site. That’s because the search engine is aimed at pleasing its users and wants to show them only the best results that provide the better UX. Rank Brain is the AI of Google that is responsible for this. Your website should be easy to navigate, with a well-thought layout.
On top of that, your website should be 100% mobile-friendly, especially taking into account the fact that more and more people use their mobile phones to make searches on Google daily.
Search Intent
Don’t overlook this factor. Before you create content for the chosen keywords, make sure you use google keyword rank tracker or simply do a query in Google to find out what kind of results Google returns. Analyze the intent that stands behind the search query and understand properly what kind of content users would like to see when they type in this or that keyword in Google.
If your content doesn’t match the search intent of the users, they will simply bounce back from your page and it will be a signal for Google that your page is not good enough. Typically, there are 4 different types of search intent:
- Informational
- Navigational
- Transactional
- Commercial research
Once you know the type of search intent behind a targeted keyword you will be able to come up with the right content type, format, and angle. In its turn, it will increase your chances to rank well for that keyword.
E-A-T
Yes, you can’t ignore the notorious E-A-T in 2021 either. In these ultimate guidelines on search Google clearly sets the standards for quality. And they come hand in hand with expertise, authority, trustworthiness as you might have guessed from the abbreviation.
In other words, Google prefers to deliver to its users content written by real experts in the field that can be easily contacted via emails or social profiles. Your website and content should have a matchless reputation online as Google will look at it as well.
The Best Rank Tracker Tool and the SEO Master’s Journey
Of course, the SEO industry is very dynamic and changing constantly. That’s why to be ahead of your competition you need to keep mastering SEO daily. In addition to the factors that we’ve mentioned above, it’s very important to do daily rank tracking. With a proper Google SERP rank tracker, it is going to be easy.
Why is the rank tracker tool that important? That’s because an online keyword rank tracker will monitor rankings of your site and your competitors and inform you quickly about any major changes so that you can react ASAP.
FAQ
How Many Are There Factors That Have an Impact on Rankings in Google?
There are over 200 different factors that can define the rankings of the website. Of course, it can be really challenging to take them all into account. However, if you optimize your web page in accordance with the factors that we’ve mentioned above, you’ll get 80% of the most important stuff done to get your site on the 1st page of Google.
What Are the Most Important Google Ranking Factors?
According to the statements from Google, they are content, Rank Brand, and links.
What is Rank Brain?
Rank Brain is the artificial intelligence that Google uses to analyze the user experience in order to serve its users better results in SERPs.
Why Do I Need a Rank Tracker for SERP Tracking?
A good rank tracker Google will do a lot of tedious work for you and keep you updated about any slightest changes in SERPs so that you can take appropriate actions right away. Try our rank tracker tool to understand all the benefits.
Final Thoughts
With over 200 ranking factors, it’s not that easy to dominate SERPs in 2021. However, if you focus on the factors that we've described above and do your best to optimize your site taking them into account, you are more likely to get it on the 1st page of Google.
