Google Ranking Factors 2020:- Do you know how Google brings a website top on the search result page? Do you know how Google Ranking Factors works? What factors are considered as the Google Ranking factor? What are the top Google ranking factors?
The websites that are well optimized get priority to rank on Google. The SEO requires changes in their process due to changes in Google ranking factors. Well, SEO websites get more traffic and lead. They have a better chance to get more conversions.
If you do not optimize your website with proper SEO, people may not find your website easily and you will lose your valuable customers. Your hard work will bring nothing then.
To make the website well optimized and grow your business, you should know the basic Google Ranking Factors.
Google Ranking Factors 2020
Here, I have made a short list of the most important and best Google ranking factors to get you helped in SEO. The factors are –
- Content Quality
- Backlinks
- Content Length
- Page Speed
- Mobile Friendliness
- Domain Factors
- Click Through Rate
- Technical SEO
- Social Signals
- HTTPs Encryption
1. Content Quality
As content is the king of a website, quality of contents is the major factor to rank a website on Google or other search engine. SEO is nothing but optimizing your web contents in many ways.
Good quality contents are unique, written in easy and simple words, do not contain unnecessary hard to understand terms, has a good sentence length, and zero copy score. Copy contents, rewrite contents are considered as bad contents.
The content should be clear to explain the title and main ideas of it. A random paragraph will not express your words what you are trying to present in your content.
2. Backlinks
Backlinks are the strongest factor that can pick your website up on the search engine result page. Google search algorithm emphasis more on backlinks to rank a website. The more links you can build with other websites, the more it will get ranked on Google.
But the links should be from good quality and higher ranking websites. Bad links will do the opposite. SEO masters and online marketers are now giving more efforts in building high quality backlinks which will pass a healthy juice to their website.
3. Content-Length
There is no specific boundary of how long should be your content. But Google algorithm is set up to give more importance to those websites having good quality and lengthy content.
We can see that websites enriched with high quality and relatively longer contents achieve higher ranks on search engines. A comprehensive study by Neil Patel has revealed the secrete of content length on Google ranking.
4. Page Speed
Page speed has been mentioned as one of the most important ranking factors in SEO. Google wants to give the users better experience on the web and great page speed will do that definitely.
Recent Google update focuses on the page loading speed and uptime quality of a website. Faster page loading will give your website more importance to rank on Google. Page loading speed on mobile is also counted as ranking factor.
You may have a question, how fast it should be. There is no exact outline of speed. The faster , the better it is.
5. Mobile-friendliness
Today, most of the internet users are from mobile device. There is more traffic from mobile phones than desktop users. If your website’s interface is fixed for desktop view, mobile users will get a bad experience with your website. It will be complicated to scroll the web pages from mobile.
More than 85% of websites are now mobile friendly. Google also take it as a ranking factor. If your site is not mobile-friendly, visitors may switch to other sites. So, build your website as mobile-responsive to get ranked.
6. Domain Factors
Domain age, URL and authority are one of the main ranking factors. If the domain age is older than other website of same worth, gets more importance from Google. Older websites are seems to be trusted to Google as well as visitors.
The URL of a website is responsible for ranking up on Google. If the search phrase becomes relevant to your web URL, it will come on the top of SERP. But Google kick out exact match domains. This penalty is due to looking the site spammy with low quality contents.
Good domain authority score is a matter in ranking on Google. The authority works in combination with both domain and page. Websites that are optimized well in terms of on-page and off-page SEO and contains good quality contents will rank faster.
You can check the domain and page authority of websites using SEO tools like Ahrefs, open site explorer (MOZ), etc. These tools will help you to know in detail about a website’s domain and page authority.
7. Click-Through Rate
Google continuously changes the search algorithm based on new inventory technologies and interests of people. Although Google keeps these algorithms secrete, the click through rate (CTR) is opened for the web masters. CTR is a measurement value of successful SEO of a website.
CTR is calculated as the total impression your site gets from the Google search result divided by the total number of clicks it gets. This simple metric indicates how your website performs on SERP. A higher CTR means users like your website and gets engaged with it.
8. Technical SEO
There is no alternative of optimization of the web content. Technical SEO is nothing but optimization of the content and building healthy links like internal, inbound and outbound links. In technical SEO, you should do the following tasks.
On-page SEO – On-page SEO means optimizing the content visibility. You should choose a focus keyword for the content, use the keyword on SEO title, headings and subheadings, in Meta description, and at least 3-4 times in the body of content of 1000 words.
The keyword should be presented naturally in the content. If you unnecessarily use the keyword and over optimize it, Google will take it spammy and penalize the site.
Use relevant images in your post and use the focus keyword as image Alt tag in any one of the images.
Build internal links with another post of your site and out bound link from authoritative website. Linking to such websites is a good sign of on-page SEO.
Off-page SEO – Off-page SEO is one major factor in successful SEO. You should increase the number of linking domains and pages to your site. Get links from authority sites as domain authority and page authority of links are important in good SEO.
Links that you have built should be natural and relevant. The anchor text should be as relevant to the linking site. Irrelevant links and anchor text will cause harm rather than benefits. Do not make links of same type. Keep diversity and uniqueness in your links.
Keep all links nofollow. Dofollow links can affect your sites rank. It is better to build contextual links. Links in text, worth better value than links on sidebar or elsewhere.
9. Social Signals
When Google notice that people share your contents on social network, it seems that this piece of content has a good value to people and they get benefits from it. Though it is not a direct ranking factor, it implies a good effect on the site.
Google can see that people like it. So, the ranking algorithm of Goggle will bring it first to users in a relevant search. That is probably, the interests of people get importance to Google.
You can see, the top ranked websites has a massive social share. So, more and more social shares ca boost the rank of your website.
10. HTTPs Encryption
This an official Google ranking factor which was announced by Google as “security is our top priority.” HTTPs is a sign of security on your website. Google has confirmed that those website having HTTPs encryption will perform better on SERP.
Though it has not a great impact on SEO, but it can make your website looking trusted and reliable. Visitors will feel secure while browsing your website. You should use HTTPs to avoid future mishaps of Google update as Google pays more attention and priority for visitors.