The Ranking Factors You’re Ignoring
SEO, just like any marketing technique, is in a perpetual state of change. Google is constantly looking for new ways to bring its users what they want, and by the same token, business owners and marketers should always be looking for new ways to play ball with the world’s biggest search engine. If you think you’re doing all the right things but still not seeing good results, here are a few SEO ranking factors that too many business owners ignore.
Content Needs to be Detailed!
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Focusing on a specific set of keywords and including them in the right places within your content is still very important and relevant. However, if you become too wrapped up in getting exact keyword matches, and don’t pay any attention to related keywords, you can easily end up shooting yourself in the foot. These days, Google is performing semantic analysis on everyone’s content in order to find out what the page is really all about. You can read more about this factor at www.moz.com. This is the reason why long, detailed pieces of content tend to perform better than shorter posts. If you make your content more in-depth, you’re more likely to include a good concentration of related keywords, even if you don’t mean to.
Site Speed is More Important Than Ever
(Image credit Pixabay)
A site’s loading speed has been important for some time now, and in recent years this importance has gone up once again. The average loading time for domains that show up in the top 10 spots on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) is well under 2 seconds. This is mainly down to slow-loading domains giving off poor user signals. If you have a slow-loading site, users are less likely to wait for it to load, and will disappear before they take any action on the site. Google doesn’t want to send its users to a poor site, so this kind of user behavior won’t do you any favors. There are many ways you can improve your site’s loading speed, from cutting down on some of its more gimmicky visual features to switching to a new hosting company like this: in the UK www.wizzhosting.co.uk or in the US www.mediatemple.net. Whatever methods you use, site speed is one factor which you really can’t afford to neglect.
Keep an Eye on Your Bounce Rate!
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As you probably already know, your bounce rate is a measure of the users who arrive on your landing page, and then leave without going any further. While Google can’t access your own site analytics, they can tell when a user lands on a single page and then goes straight back to the search results. They can also measure how long people are spending on a given web page. So, if someone spends mere seconds on a page before returning to Google’s search results, they can gauge that the page didn’t help them find what they were looking for. Playing with content structure and including more related articles are great ways to reduce your bounce rate.
There you have a few of the most commonly neglected ranking factors. Don’t let them slip through the net!