How to Find Your SEO Ranking: A Step-by-Step Guide to Tracking Performance

To find these golden nuggets of SEO, various keyword research tools are at your disposal, each offering unique insights and data to shape your content strategy. While search engine algorithms continue to evolve, the constant factor remains the demand for high-quality content. Investing in quality content creation lays a solid foundation for your SEO strategy, ensuring that your site can adapt to changes in algorithms and maintain its rankings over time.

Conduct Keyword Search and Analysis

Carmen Santaló, Freelance SEO Consultant, says “It is difficult to choose only one ranking factor because SEO is about many different elements on the site. Google by no means looks at a page’s bounce rate and determines if it should be ranked higher or lower. That’s because a higher bounce rate isn’t always a negative signal if we take all the diverse kinds of queries into account. Data privacy is becoming more important, and having SSL or other data protection certificates for your site can help a piece of content rank in the Google search results. He says that a way to test this to access your website on your phone using mobile data, not Wi-Fi. If nothing loads within the first few seconds, your site likely has issues with mobile loading speeds.

seo ranking factors

Title tags are one of the most important on-page SEO factors of your website. Besides the content itself, this is how you tell Google what your article is about. Blog comments are also considered an update to existing content, so it is very important to make your users share their opinion. Duplicate content can be your worst nightmare because it’s often hard to identify.

Social Presence

seo ranking factors

In fact, most of these Google ranking factors do not even have a direct impact on SERP rankings. One of the most important Google ranking factors that few people talk about is organic CTR. A good internal linking structure can decrease the bounce rate and improve the overall user experience. Before getting started with the SEO ranking factors, I would like to point out that Google changes their algorithm a few times over the course of a year.

Because links from sites with more authority tend to hold more value, it’s a good idea to focus your link-building efforts on these sites. Page speed (the speed at which your website loads) is one of several technical SEO ranking factors. It matters because bounce rate tends to increase as page speed increases. Because Google emphasizes creating reader-first content, good user experience (UX) is an important ranking factor. Essentially, any top-ranking content should be easy to navigate and provide a good experience.

seo ranking factors

Incorporating personal experiences that resonate with readers can boost engagement and meet Google’s SEO Anomaly preference for content that connects on a practical or emotional level. This is especially effective in niches where personal testimonies and narratives add value beyond what generic information can provide. You want to create webpages that respond to your audience’s needs, provide unique value, and are not copied from another source. Stay up-to-date with the latest trends and algorithm updates to ensure your website remains competitive in the ever-evolving search engine landscape. While longer content can sometimes rank better, quality is more important than quantity.

Link velocity is a measurement of how many links you gain over time. Although links from Wikipedia are Nofollow, Wikipedia backlinks are highly authoritative. Google knows the difference between user generated content and site published content. Links coming from the main content of a page are known as contextual or editorial links. You want to have links from lots of different domains and IP ranges for maximum effect.

seo ranking factors

They play a crucial role in SEO as they provide search engines with insights into the quality and relevance of a site’s content. It isn’t enough to “have a blog” if you aren’t using it to converse with customers. How your business is seen on social media has become one of the fastest-growing ranking factors since 2015.

10 Mobile-Friendliness

Your first step is to benchmark your site’s current loading speed. That way, you know where you’re at before you start making changes. So if your site is hard to use, uses intrusive popups and ads, and has a bunch of broken links… people aren’t going to link to it. UX can indirectly help with SEO because people are more likely to share and link to user-friendly site. Instead, I optimized my page (and title) around ONE important keyword. It’s no secret that you want to use your keyword a handful of times on your page.

  • For example, the topic “keyword research” scores a “3”, because it’s nearly impossible to do good keyword research without a tool.
  • These are metrics Google uses to measure the health of your website.
  • With All in One SEO, you can set a focus key phrase and additional key phrases, and the TruSEO on-page analysis will score how well your pages and posts are optimized.
  • You need to improve your overall SEO performance, especially strengthen your backlink profile, to increase your authority.
  • This is because other links are found further away from the homepage in structure.

Our Premium plugin gives you access to some more features like AI-powered features, a redirect tool, and the possibility to add multiple keywords per page. There is also a Yoast SEO app for Shopify that comes with a lot of the same features, but is more focused on SEO for online stores. Before you get to content creation, it’s important to get your technical SEO in order. If you know your way around redirects, optimizing page speed, crawlability, security and structured data, make those your first priority. If not, let your site builder help you out or hire someone with a background in technical SEO. When that’s done, you can start looking at site structure and the content on your pages.