Have you ever thought about why certain sites rank higher on Google when they aren’t necessarily optimized for search engines. Sometimes, these sites may not even have any backlinks! Here at MyCity Social, a top SEO agency Fort Lauderdale businesses rely on, we’ve been asked this question from clients and curious onlookers quite often, which is why we are going to provide a blog post explaining why this situation may happen. Read on to learn more about what Google looks for with SEO branding in 2020 and some trends to keep in mind. Call MyCity Social in Tampa for your SEO and digital marketing needs today!
What Google Looks For When It Comes To SEO
Click-through rate- Part of Google’s algorithm will take into account the click-through rate. The click-through rate is calculated as a percentage, reflecting the amount of clicks that you receive from the total number of people who are looking for that particular phrase you rank for. The higher the percentage is, the more appealing your listing is when compared to the competition. If you can get your click-through rate much higher than all of your competitors, then Google will start to slowly move you up the search engine results page since this algorithm factor will let it know that searchers prefer your listing. However, just looking at the click-through rate isn’t enough, as people can create deceptive title tags and meta descriptions in order to increase their results. This is the reason why Google also looks at your bounce rate. The amount of people who leave your page by hitting the back button to return to the search listing page is assessed by Google. This means that if Google sends 1,000 people to one of your web pages and each of those 1,000 people hit the back button within a few seconds, it will let Google know that your web page isn’t relevant to the keywords that it is ranking for. A lot of websites that rank well on Google don’t seem to be optimized have a high click-through rate along with a low bounce rate, which assists with keeping their rankings up.
You can see and evaluate your click-through rates by logging into Webmaster Tools, and clicking on your site profile. If you don’t see a site profile yet, that just means you have to put your site on Webmaster Tools and then wait a few days until it shows up. After you can see your site up on Webmaster Tools, click on the navigational option “search traffic,” and then click on “search queries.” If you require assistance increasing your click-through rates, you can rely on the help of MyCIty Social, an SEO agency Fort Lauderdale business owners trust with their SEO and digital marketing services. We can take the hassle of having to figure out how to navigate SEO rankings and digital marketing off of your hands so that you can focus on making money and expanding your business!
Age- Another of the big factors that can help certain sites in ranking well is their age. The majority of the sites that rank high are at least a couple of years old. Of course the majority of these older sites will contain more backlinks and content due to the fact that they have simply been around for a longer period of time, but this is not true for all of them. What our analysts at MyCity Social have noticed is that if you take a brand new website, build tons of relevant links, and put in some high quality content, you still may not get as much search traffic as older sites will. There is not a lot that younger websites can do about this situation other than to just give it time. It is also a great incentive for businesses who haven’t had time to set up a website to do so and start optimizing, since the older your site gets, the more search traffic you will generally get, assuming that you are continually trying to improve upon it.
Backlinks- Google doesn’t simply look at the sheer amount of backlinks that a site has- it also looks at relevancy and authority. A lot of these sites that are non-optimized by ranking well, have a few high quality backlinks which point to the right internal pages. For example, if you have only a few links, but they come from .edu and .gov extensions, then your site will be able to rank extremely well in the search engines. Along with having the right kinds of backlinks, these sorts of sites will also have a spot-on anchor text for these links. The majority of SEOs think that you require rich anchor text links to rank well, but the truth is that you don’t. Google has the ability to look at the web page that is linking to you and then analyze the text around the link as well as the text that is on the page. It assists Google in figuring out if the link is relevant to your site and what you should be potentially ranking for.
What Google Looks For In SEO Branding
Monitor your link profile- The links that point to your site are able to be the make or break for your webpage. Recent research released illustrates that “high-quality backlinks account for 30% of your overall page score in Google.”
Ranking factors- It can’t be stressed enough how key it is to keep tabs on the sites that are linking to you. Low-quality, irrelevant, or spammy sites can often be the kiss of death for your rankings and make a major impact on your online business. One tool that you can utilize in order to see who’s linking to you is SEMrush. All you have to do is to put your site’s URL in the search bar, click “start now,” scroll down to the “backlinks” section, click on “view full report” for more details, and get a list. You will want to browse through the list and check for anything questionable. The Google Search Console can also be used for checking links, which you can learn about from MyCity Social or leave to our experienced engineers! If you have to eliminate any links, utilize the Google disavow tool.
Content quality- Since it went through the PAnda update, Google has been able to determine content quality of websites. This means that, for example, it is able to figure out if af site is too thin or has duplicate content, which allows for a much better analysis of content quality than before. A lot of these well-ranking older sites have extremely high quality content. While you may not think so, Google does. This is due to the fact that Google doesn’t just analyze the content on a site, it looks at the content on one website and compares it to others within that space. If you have higher quality content than all of your competitors, you are much more likely to outrank them in the long run.
Internal linking- One of the biggest mistakes that MyCity Social sees sites making on a regular basis is that they tend to forget to use internal linking, in which you link one of your web pages to another. And if you happen to use internal linking, then you are probably utilizing rich anchor text, which isn’t a great thing. Internal linking will help an article rank for long tail keywords related to the link content. The key to leveraging internal linking is actually to AVOID utilizing rich anchor text.
Mashable youtube- Immediate results shouldn’t be expected when you start adding internal links. Generally it takes more than three months for the links to start kicking in. And you are unable to go into your old web pages and posts and shove tons of internal links. You have to do this slowly, over time, and add internal links to new pages as well.
Website speed- Everybody gets annoyed when websites load slowly. Moreover, do you ever personally go back to websites that take forever to load? You most probably don’t! For this very reason, in April 2010, Google began to account for load time when it comes to ranking sites. It wasn’t due to the fact that you wouldn’t go back to those sites that load slowly, it was because they saw a trend that illustrated that you would decrease your usage of Google when Google showed you slow websites. And if you use Google less and begin to use other search engines instead, Google would then make less money from its ads. So how do you speed up your site and solve this issue? These are some tips from MyCity Social for improving site speed:
- Content delivery network- Your hosting company needs to have this feature, and you can contact MyCity Social to have this feature enabled. It puts your site on servers all over the world so that your site loads faster.
- Fast server- Pick the best website hosting provider. This will make a world of difference when it comes to site speed.
- Clean up your code- It is well worth it to hire a good developer due to the fact that it will make your code cleaner. Messy code will typically cause a slower site.
MyCIty Social’s experienced site engineers will make sure that your website is running fast and smoothly and keep it well maintained when you utilize our services! One great way to get started and test your website’s speed is with a simple Google Speed Test, which will provide you with tips to improve your website speed.
Social shares- Recently, there’s been a debate on whether social shares impact rankings or not. No matter if they do or if they do not, more social shares will result in more traffic. More people will visit your website, and the more people who visit the higher the chance that someone will naturally link back to you.
There’s been a recent debate on whether social shares impact rankings or not. Whether they do or they don’t, more social shares means more traffic. And the more people visit your website, the higher the chance that someone will naturally link back to you. And more links mean higher rankings. This is why you should try your best to get more social shares. Here are some easy ways you can get more social shares of your web pages:
- Put in some social sharing buttons to your web pages. Just like plugins you may already be using on your blog such as Sharebar, you will also want to use social buttons on the web pages that contain valuable content
- For your blog, you can always ask your readers to share a specific web page via Twitter or Facebook.
- If you have any connections to social media users with influence, then you can ask them to share your web page as well
- You can use the tool Triberr
- You can always put money towards a social share through Twitter ads
- You can always put money towards social shares and likes through Facebook ads
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The key to getting more search traffic isn’t simply about building more links or adding more content. It is also about truly comprehending how Google’s algorithm works. In order for you to take it to a deeper level, you need to really understand people since Google’s goal is to always do what best serves its users. When you utilize the services of a top SEO agency Fort Lauderdale like MyCity Social, you will be able to generate more online leads and business without having to deal with it yourself. Call MyCity Social in Tampa for your SEO Branding needs today!
