Google’s algorithms take a lot of factors into account when they decide where to rank your website. We’ll show you how to check the 5 key factors Google checks for SEO ranking and how improve them.
Checkpoint One – Content
There’s a saying in digital marketing – that ‘Content is King’. Put simply, if there is no content on your website, there’s nothing for Google to find or display to searchers. If your content is poor-quality, then Google will penalize your website by ranking you lower than similar websites with better quality content.
So how does Google determine what good content looks like? They look for the following factors:
Original – your content needs to be unique and original. Duplicating content across your own website, or having content that mirrors somebody else’s will result in you losing ranking.
Meta Content – your page titles and descriptions should match what the content on the page is about.
Internal Links – High-quality, relevant links in your content to other pages on your website can help Google understand what your content is about. It’s important to use relevant anchor text for the links to allow Google to make the correct connections.
Time on Page – if searchers click through to your content but spend very little time viewing, or immediately leave, then Google perceives this as the content not matching the search intent for the keywords.
Checkpoint Two – Technical SEO
So you have great content – now you need to make sure that Google can find that content and identify it.
Search engines use crawling and indexing to discover your website and understand what your content is about. If your website is poorly structured, has slow loading speeds, or doesn’t make good use of structured data markup like noindex tags, then search engines can’t properly identify when they should display your site in search results.
These are technical aspects of SEO that are best dealt with by SEO experts. They’re not easy to see at a glance, or to test and fix yourself – unlike broken internal links or poor quality content.
Checkpoint Three - User Experience
Google takes user experience very seriously. If users aren’t able to easily navigate and use your website, then you aren’t providing a positive user experience. Things that can affect your website’s user experience are:
Slow loading times. Lots of ads and images can cause slow loading times. Check the size of any images you are using and compress them if needed to speed up your site.
Intrusive pop-ups. Google refers to these as ‘intrusive interstitials’. This doesn’t mean you can’t have pop-ups, but they shouldn’t be presented immediately when a user lands on your site, and they should be easy to close and not take up the whole screen (a common issue on mobile browsers).
Cumulative Layout Shift. This is a customer experience metric that measures when elements on a page shift as they are loading. Shifting elements can cause a poor user experience.
Checkpoint Four - Mobile Friendliness
To rank highly, your website needs a mobile-friendly, responsive design. This means it should:
Adjust to the device’s screen size and present your website in an easy to navigate format for that particular screen size. Users shouldn’t need to pinch and zoom to read your content.
Only include any animations and pop-ups that work smoothly on mobile.
Load quickly on mobile devices.
Be easy to navigate using a mobile device with touchscreen-friendly buttons, sliders, etc.
Checkpoint Five – EAT
EAT (Expertise, Authority, Trust) is crucial for achieving a good ranking.
Expertise relates to the writer’s experience, knowledge or skill pertaining to the subject matter. It’s more important for highly-regulated or academic areas like medicine or financial advice. Google will try and ascertain if the writer of the content has any credentials like a degree. For more ‘normal’ content, Google will simply try and ascertain if the writer is likely to have ‘everyday expertise’ based on factors like age.
Authority is based on how often your website is mentioned or linked to by other, high-quality, sites. Authority takes time to build up, but the sooner you start creating great content and generating high-quality backlinks, the sooner your authority will increase.
Trust is based on any available reviews of your website or business. Lots of negative reviews will impact your Trust score negatively, whereas lots of positive reviews will boost your ranking.
Getting your website to rank, and then keeping it there takes consistent work. Use this checklist to help you audit your website regularly and keep your rankings healthy.