Mastering SEO Rankings: A Comprehensive Guide for 2024
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Many people obsess over SEO Rankings but have no idea where to begin. They read the latest blog posts or Google’s cryptic best practice recommendations and quickly feel like they’ve fallen down the SEO rabbit hole. Others think they’ve finally nailed it because they see results in the short term, only to have their hard work come crashing down after the next major algorithm update.
That’s one big reason why the global SEO industry is forecast to reach a staggering $122.11 billion by 2028. SEO Rankings drive real business results for brands, businesses, and organizations of all sizes. They are a vital part of any digital marketing strategy that is seeking more than just clicks; SEO is key to long-term growth and success.
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What Are SEO Rankings?
Simply put, SEO rankings refer to a website’s position on a search engine result’s page (SERP) for a particular keyword. The goal of search engine optimization (SEO) is to rank in one of those top slots, preferably at position one. This means your page will appear first when people search for the relevant term.
That translates into more clicks to your content, which also means increased visibility and traffic to your website. It’s not merely about getting more eyes on your content; it’s about attracting the right audience – those who are actively searching for information related to your niche.
Although it may seem complicated at times, a strong SEO ranking hinges on matching great content to a user’s intent while giving search engine crawlers the information they need to understand why your content is great. The ultimate goal is to help the crawlers see your content as being the most authoritative and relevant answer to the questions users are asking through their searches.
Factors Influencing SEO Rankings
Search engine algorithms use a complicated combination of factors to determine which pages rank. They are constantly evolving and being tweaked, so it’s important to stay updated and use the latest best practices to achieve search engine success. Google, in particular, has become increasingly sophisticated in its ability to evaluate content and user experience. Gone are the days when simply stuffing keywords into your content would guarantee a top spot on the SERP feature.
We’re going to dive deeper into those best practices now to better understand how each can affect a page’s ranking. Although Google doesn’t make it explicitly clear which factors matter the most and how much weight each one is given, SEO pros generally agree that several factors repeatedly rise to the top. It’s often best to see this as a combination of content quality, user experience, and technical optimization.
1. Quality Content
Quality content is an extremely important piece of this SEO puzzle. Google’s algorithms increasingly aim to display content that is most useful and informative for searchers. It does this, in part, by rewarding content that displays E-E-A-T – experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Google has stated clearly that this update was “about making sure users weren’t just getting the highest quality content but also the right information,” which is a critical factor when it comes to SEO.
While this initially targeted Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) content in areas like medical and financial sites, Google expanded this to other areas as well. Essentially, any website providing information that could impact a person’s health, finances, safety, or happiness should demonstrate these qualities to rank well.
To make your content great for search and users, ensure it’s the following:
- Original – don’t plagiarize, even inadvertently.
- In-depth and well-researched.
- Targeted to a particular audience with a clear understanding of searcher intent.
- Factually accurate and free from error.
- Formatted and optimized for readability.
While creating the kind of content you would want to read is a good place to begin, that content still needs a technical boost to stand out to those busy crawlers. That brings us to the next crucial SEO ranking factor: technical optimization.
2. Technical SEO
Technical SEO refers to your website’s back-end or structure to help crawlers find, access, and understand it more easily. Optimizing this also makes your content more visible to search engines. Think of this as a signpost for those bots. Even the best content on the internet isn’t going to rank highly if the bots don’t even know it exists.
While this can include complex aspects such as using semantic HTML and prioritizing web core vitals, some common examples include:
- Migrating from HTTP to HTTPS to improve security.
- Optimizing page loading speed.
- Building a user-friendly mobile-responsive site.
- Creating a simple site structure that crawlers can easily follow.
- Submitting your sitemap to search engine tools like Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
- Using schema markup to provide information to Google.
Speaking from experience, schema markup is especially important for Google to identify publishing dates. This is especially crucial for news stories, press releases, or timely articles, because it helps Google deliver the most up-to-date information in its search results. Without this important markup, Google may assume an article is brand new, even if it’s ten years old.
A website needs technical optimization to get the attention of crawlers. This gets it into the running to be placed in Google’s massive index of billions of web pages. But there are even more important aspects of technical optimization – those that directly affect user experience, which Google’s systems seem to love.
3. User Experience (UX)
Google doesn’t simply care whether your content meets the user’s needs. The search engine behemoth also assesses how that user experience plays out. Think about it – what’s the use of driving lots of people to your content through carefully targeted keywords if most of them instantly hit the back button to go back to the search results?
There are ways that Google judges this user experience. The company employs machine-learning artificial intelligence (AI) that evaluates specific behaviors that can predict how your website is performing:
1. Bounce rate: According to Google, if your page loads more than 3 seconds, 50% of users will bounce, and bounce rate is also an important ranking factor. A high bounce rate signals that users aren’t finding what they expected and are quickly leaving your website.
There could be various factors affecting bounce rate, including page load speed, misleading titles or descriptions, content that isn’t relevant to user intent, or a frustrating site experience that people are trying to escape from. While optimizing other technical factors such as a responsive mobile-friendly design will help improve bounce rate, also make sure that the first words people read are in alignment with the intent that brought them to your site.
2. Dwell time: This is a measurement of how long a visitor remains on your site once they have arrived from Google search. Obviously, a longer dwell time is best. If people spend an average of two minutes on a specific page after clicking through, that tells Google your content must be good enough to hold their interest. Think about things that might make a person close their browser – poorly written text full of errors, confusing headings, too many distracting pop-up ads that hijack attention, or just boring information that makes their eyes glaze over.
While Google doesn’t specifically measure readability, as we humans understand it, a high readability score would go a long way to increasing dwell time. People are more likely to stay engaged with content that is easy to read and understand. They’re also less likely to instantly click away if you avoid a huge “wall of text” that makes their eyes tired.
3. Pages per session: If you have lots of amazing, easy-to-read content, people might want to dive deeper into what you have to offer by exploring other relevant pages on your site. When users spend time with you and visit more than one page each time, it shows they are engaged and finding value. That’s something Google appreciates and wants to encourage.
All these behaviors can affect a page’s SEO ranking. However, Google is cryptic about which UX signal gets weighted most heavily by their algorithms, which leaves SEO pros scratching their heads about which should be prioritized. Google says each is important but then provides conflicting messages, so focus on making every area amazing. If all are as good as you can make them, it won’t matter as much which ones get favored by the all-powerful algorithm. The results will speak for themselves.
4. Backlinks
Another way to improve SEO Rankings is to earn backlinks for your content. Think about backlinks as being endorsements or votes of confidence from other authoritative websites.
Because this takes place “off-site,” link building falls into a special category within SEO referred to as off-page optimization. These are the efforts undertaken outside of your own website to help Google evaluate it in comparison to the rest of the sites indexed within their platform. These backlinks act as a signal to search engines that your content is valuable and trustworthy. The more high-quality backlinks you have, the more authoritative your site will appear.
As the concept of E-E-A-T would suggest, having high-quality sites “recommend” your website means something because their authority, expertise, and experience lend credibility to yours through association. It also means there is some measure of trust involved.
While SEO experts have long understood backlinks to be one of the most important ranking factors, there have been conflicting opinions within the last few years about whether that still holds true, and to what degree backlinks actually influence SEO rankings. In fact, more than 50% of websites that ranked on the first page of SERP are three years old or older, and very few sites that are less than a year old are ranked on the top ten spots. This has made some speculate that Google gives a slight edge to websites that are deemed credible based on a longer history and proven track record of value. If so, this wouldn’t bode well for younger websites that may have high-quality content and great user engagement but lack historical longevity.
Also of note from that same research, 74% of online shoppers start product searches on Amazon. This might lead marketers to question why it would even matter to work on backlink campaigns since that’s not something a website owner can control on an external platform like Amazon. But, in my opinion, building backlinks from a large network of sites will strengthen a brand’s authority in the eyes of Google’s complex algorithms. Having a strong overall SEO ranking might offset some of the disadvantage presented by searches beginning outside a website.
5. Internal Linking
This SEO Ranking strategy isn’t something many consider, because unlike building backlinks through guest posts, press releases, and email outreach campaigns, it takes place inside your own domain. Yet, it’s another ranking factor many speculate to be heavily favored by Google.
Think of internal links as breadcrumbs that not only help users to navigate easily within your website and find more related content of interest but which also create paths for search engine bots to crawl more easily.
By including relevant, strategic internal links within your posts and pages, Google bots will have a much easier time finding every single piece of content. You are, in essence, sending signals to let Google know where the best stuff lives and why it matters.
This helps contribute to link equity across your site — that is, spreading the ranking power around. Internal linking helps Google understand the structure of your website, the relationship between different pages, and the overall value of your content. It is a simple yet powerful tool for improving your SEO performance.
Partnering With High-End Publishers
Securing backlinks from high-authority sites is a powerful SEO strategy for enhancing your website’s ranking and overall authority. It’s about forming mutually beneficial relationships. If you want to rank on Google’s SERP, backlinks should be part of your arsenal. They are a crucial part of any comprehensive off-page SEO strategy.
High-end publishers generally possess a wealth of website traffic, established domain authority, and industry credibility. Gaining links from these sources can lead to a substantial boost in SEO rankings and drive high-quality referral traffic to your site.
You can leverage these benefits by actively pursuing opportunities to contribute guest content, get mentioned in their publications through expert round-ups or data-driven articles, sponsor their newsletters or participate in collaborative projects that benefit both parties.
Here are some examples:
| Strategy | Benefit |
|---|---|
| Partner with publishers to create joint research reports, white papers, or webinars. | This provides valuable data to readers and backlinks from those publishers, enhancing your website’s credibility and visibility within your industry. |
| Offer exclusive content, such as interviews with company leadership or insider tips, to niche-relevant publishers. | This increases visibility to a pre-existing audience of people who have a proven interest in what you offer, leading to targeted traffic and potential leads. |
| Collaborate with publishers to host an industry-related contest or giveaway that generates hype, traffic, and brand mentions through those publishers. | This creates valuable off-site buzz that sends social signals to search engines, indicating that your brand is engaging and relevant. |
| Submit data from your company or your client to publishers who curate lists of statistics. | This adds extra authority through source citations while also attracting potential leads who discover you as they’re looking for statistics – you’re providing value while attracting warm leads. |
| Promote the publisher’s content across your own website or social platforms with links back to their content as a reciprocal show of goodwill. | This demonstrates that you prioritize their success in hopes they will eventually notice you and return the favor by linking back to your site. |
Conclusion
While achieving high SEO rankings isn’t as simple as flipping a switch, by understanding the key factors involved, you’ll make content that is a winner in Google’s search results, while delivering an enjoyable and easy experience to those who find and appreciate your efforts.
Remember, SEO is a marathon, not a sprint, and by adopting a strategic and long-term approach to optimizing your content, user experience, backlinks, and technical aspects, you’ll be improving your chances of achieving lasting SEO rankings for the keywords you’re targeting. And of course, staying updated and adapting to those sneaky, ever-changing algorithm updates from those mysterious folks behind the curtain at Google, will keep you in the race.
Frequently
Asked
Questions
There is no specific “SEO World Ranking.” Instead of a singular global ranking, SEO rankings depend on several factors. The specific search engine being used, like Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, or even region-specific search engines used in some parts of the world, plays a major role. The search terms used by a specific individual, as well as a user’s physical location, also factor in.
The best SEO Ranking practices evolve based on how the various search engine algorithms change. One expert has created a massive table documenting Google's 200 Ranking Factors: The Complete List, and this can give an overview of things Google is rumored to consider most heavily. It was noted by others that even 15 years ago in a speech at a tech conference, one person claimed there were 200 Google ranking factors, suggesting that SEO strategy may be more difficult than it was back in the early years.
While some online SEO tools score aspects like technical optimization, on-page optimization, and others, there's no "overall" SEO score. Google's rankings change in response to its algorithms, which no outsider can fully grasp or replicate, much less score.
Many SEO pros have documented anecdotal evidence for hundreds of Google ranking factors, including on-page factors, domain-level factors, backlink factors, content factors, user interaction factors, and several others.
While you might focus heavily on increasing backlinks from sites with high domain authority (DA) and think you have things nailed down, a Google algorithm update may emphasize mobile page speed. Your perfectly optimized backlink strategy goes up in smoke while your ranking plummets. Suddenly you are no longer ranking highly. So it’s a mistake to assume that improving scores in one area will inherently improve your rankings on the SERP. It is more useful to think about SEO as a holistic process rather than a checklist of items to tick off.
