Even if you’re not selling your product or service directly via the internet, it is likely that your customers will want to review your website before making a buying decision. Failing to rank well in the search engines for key terms relating to your business, and making it difficult for customers to find you, could raise questions about the quality or professionalism of your operation.
Significant Google Ranking Factors
Although the Google Ranking algorithm is a tightly guarded secret, they have alluded to several important aspects that will give your pages the best chance of ranking well. These factors evolve over time as the algorithm changes, but some of the important ones currently include:
- Mobile friendly – As more traffic has switched from desktop to mobile, Google wants to reward pages that are the most mobile-friendly. It is therefore really important that you have a responsive design and check how well it performs on different mobile devices.
- Social signals – Social media is a growing source of traffic for website, and Google will look to see whether you have a presence on social media as an indication of your credibility. This applies in both directions e.g. do you have accounts set up with the major search engines and do you link to them from your site, but also, do your customers talk about you on social media and link back to your products and services.
- Backlinks – Links from other pages have long been recognised as a key factor in the Google ranking formula. Outside of social media, is your site linked to from other blogs or news articles?
- Tactical SEO – There are also several technical and tactical changes that you should keep on top of to help improve your search engine performance. For instance, a properly configured robots.txt will ensure that search engines are indexing and crawling all your pages correctly.
Google Ranking with AsOne
At AsOne we have a wealth of experience helping customers achieve a consistently high rank in the search engines. As the algorithms evolve over time, we work closely with our clients to conduct regular experiments and stay abreast of the latest developments.
We are also able to leverage our depth of knowledge from working with clients across a range of industries to highlight emerging SEO trends early on in their lifecycle and put them to work for our customers.
For more information on how to maintain a consistently high Google ranking for your business, don’t hesitate to get in touch and speak to one of our SEO experts.
Eligible businesses based in the North East could benefit from up to 40% off the cost of their project via a grant from the NEBSF funding scheme.
