Top 9 Google Rankings Factors (for SEO)

so google uses over 200 ranking factors but what's most important for seo in this video i'll show you exactly what you need to focus on and don't worry i won't bore you with patents or geeky seo terminology instead i'll show you the 20 of actions that drive 80 of results in an seo campaign so if you're excited to start improving your google rankings then like this video right now and let's dive right in [Music] okay so the most important google ranking factor is is your website crawlable and indexable now probably not what you expected but none of the other google ranking factors matter if google can't crawl and index your pages it is a prerequisite for ranking and the easiest way to know is to download the detailed chrome extension and then look under the robots tag section as long as you don't see no index you're good to go you should also set up your website on google search console because it'll notify you if you're having crawling and indexing issues and it's the first place you should go to diagnose crawling problems now there are many other factors that dictate how well google will crawl and index your site but the good news is that the other factors i'm about to share will take care of it this brings me to google ranking factor number two which is is your website structured to maximize crawling and indexing so there are four core elements you need to focus on number one your site-wide navigation this is particularly important for e-commerce but it applies to every website the site-wide navigation is the single best tool for improving crawlability in short you're giving google an entry point on almost every page on your website and in general your goal should be to have all your pages on your website no more than three clicks deep and that's why in the case of e-commerce it's best to place category or collection pages in the navigation number two internal link coverage if a page isn't ranking well one question you should ask is does this page have enough internal link coverage and in our seo campaign process we classify any page with less than five unique internal links is not having enough internal link coverage that means you'll need to find pages to build more internal links or we'll need to create more content to support those assets now here's how to find these pages with screaming frog okay so all you have to do is just run your target website through screaming frog and once the crawl's completed you just need to go and scroll over all the way over here to the right until you see unique in links okay this column right here and then you can sort it to see the pages that have less than five unique in links now five is a big number we just want to make sure that we're really hitting that page well with internal links and giving it the maximum internal link coverage but you could lower that even to three if you wanted but regardless you need to find these pages that have poor internal link coverage then you need to figure out a way to drive more internal links to these pages either by finding existing assets where you can add internal links or if you don't have any relevant existing assets then it's an indication that you need to create more content to be able to support these pages and this is one of the best ways to not only build topical authority but increase internal link coverage improve crawling and indexing and ultimately just build the authority of your site so it has a cascading effect and so you absolutely need to identify these pages and when you drive more internal links to these pages they will perform better and then number three are you optimizing internal link anchor texts almost all of your internal links should use exact match or partial match anchors to describe what you're linking to now keep in mind this rule does not apply to backlinks but sometimes modifying internal link anchor texts can produce big gains for example we worked with a supplement company that sells protein powder but their anchor text within the navigation was just protein and the problem with this is that it sends confusing signals as far as intent now look at the search results for the head keyword protein versus protein powder the protein results are informational and focused on the macronutrient itself while the protein powder results are specifically about the supplement that means that we're optimizing for the wrong keyword variation and intent so we simply switched it to protein powder in the navigation and it shot their rankings up so the next google ranking factor to focus on is is your website optimized for core web vitals now google has confirmed that core web vitals is a ranking factor and but for now just ignore the technical jargon and it just means how fast your page loads and the overall experience now there are two primary ways to see how well your site is doing first is lighthouse you can download it as a chrome extension and generator report you can also just right click on any page and inspect element then go to the lighthouse tab and generate a report number two you can use google page speed insights once you've benchmarked your scores you'll just need to work to improve them in most cases you'll need to work with a developer and in addition to core web vitals you should also make sure your website has an ssl certificate because it's another confirmed ranking factor and there are many more micro technical and ux activities but focus on these first and you'll be ahead of most websites now let's tackle content so the first question is is your content different and better than what's currently ranking now while it's true that longer content tends to rank better some people have taken this idea the wrong way the goal shouldn't be to create a long regurgitated piece of content the goal should be to create something new and unique for the keyword while continuing to satisfy the intent of that keyword now speaking of intent it's the most important ranking factor in regards to your content if you get it wrong you will not rank and that's why it's critical to understand the different types of search intent and how it fits within the context of a sales funnel so at the top of the funnel you have informational keywords and these are keywords like how to dribble a basketball in the next stage of the funnel you have investigative keywords like best basketball shoes further down the funnel you'll encounter comparison keywords like nike air jordans vs kobe's and lastly at the bottom of the funnel you'll find transactional queries like nike discount code now understanding intent is critical for how you'll develop the target page for example let's say you're targeting an informational keyword like how to dribble a basketball well first go to google and enter the keyword and then right away we can see that google is delivering informational content but it's also determined that this keyword has video intent as well meaning google has enough data to know that people prefer videos to learn how to dribble a basketball and that's why google is prioritizing video in this case so in this case you'd want to try to rank on both google and youtube for this keyword and now let's look at the keyword nike discount code which has transactional intent look at this page from retailmenot that's ranking it's structured to satisfy the intent perfectly in other words it's giving the searcher exactly what they're looking for which is the discount codes now notice when you scroll down though they still have content built to feed google's algorithm in most cases no matter the intent you'll still need copywriting to rank in fact i tested this theory when i created blog content around different colored youtube subscribe buttons for example i wanted to see if i could rank for keywords like yellow subscribe buttons by just satisfying the intent perfectly but having very little copywriting and as you can see from the page it was just a title intro sentence and then the designs and it was enough to rank number 26 but it stuck there so then i tested the same strategy across seven different colors and pages and the results were exactly the same it ranked okay but it got stuck so then i executed the second part of the test and added some copywriting to each page and guess what these pages now rank consistently number one and two so in theory this page satisfied the intent perfectly but in reality google still gives tons of weight to the volume of words on a page so you'll need to do both for now now the only nuance here is where the copywriting should live on the page in the case of informational keywords it should be at the forefront above the fold but for transactional keywords the focus of the page should be on conversions now i could dedicate an entire training series to content quality but there's one principle that will help you dominate your competitors it's a concept that i call the seo content mode in short your keyword driven content should find an angle that makes it difficult for any competitor to beat you for example look at the search results for keyword research services gotcha seo floats around number one and number two for this keyword and notice that my page is the only one that's taken a unique angle and it's a true purple cal situation and that should be your goal create something that's so unique that people a have to pay attention b want to click on it and c want a link to it now the good news is that it's easy to find unique angles in almost every vertical because most people creating seo content are creating nothing more than regurgitated nonsense so focus on being different and finding that unique angle while continuing to satisfy the intent of the keyword now you might be wondering how do you create unique content on category or lead generation pages on the local level well the content that lives on any given page should be 100 based on the intent of the keyword for example if someone searches st louis personal injury lawyer and lands on your page then the content should emphasize why they're the lawyer that you should work with in other words the content should persuade the searcher to become a lead so content that will achieve that goal are testimonials client case studies client stories frequently asked questions or even hiring guidelines like five steps to hiring a personal injury lawyer without getting burned the goal of content on transactional pages is to drive conversions so don't treat these pages like informational content now once you've got the content all squared away you need to optimize the page itself to feed google's algorithm at a bare minimum you should place your primary keyword in the url title h1 tag and first sentence and sprinkle it a couple times naturally throughout the page you should also optimize the content using server's nlp tool here's how all right so let's say i wanted to improve my seo performance for this keyword seo for flora so we put it into surfer in the serp analyzer and then we go down here and we can look at a few things first we can look at the averages for various variables but in this case it's just looking at word count so what i recommend doing is actually looking at the top five this way you can get a better understanding of what you're going to be up against because at the other day we need to beat the top five we don't need to be the number eight guy we need to beat the people in the top five to really see the impact of our rankings so based on this we need to get to about a little over a thousand words so before we even think about optimizing for nlp or natural language processing you need to make sure you hit your minimum word count that's absolutely critical so go down here and you'll see i put gotcha seo in here this is a brand new page so i would recommend putting your page in here and then we can go over here to the audit section and then based on this before we even do the true density we just want to make sure that we've hit the word count based on what surfer is telling us so in this case we've definitely hit the word count at least the minimum word count we need now we may need more words but this is just enough for us to optimize and ultimately see how far we can go with this now go up here now we want to start to optimize based on the true density so look at these various keywords and see if there are opportunities to add these keywords to that page so in this case it looks like we haven't really hit many of the important keywords that we would need to to ultimately really optimize this page for search and in some cases we've actually been a little over optimized so there's plenty of opportunity to improve here and i've never seen a page that doesn't have room for improvement the question is how far do you need to go with this optimization and we aim for at least a 70 but in a case like this where you see that the top five or so pretty much everyone is below 70 except for one competitor that's a 72 so in this case we want to beat the top competitor's score so in this case a 75 beats that top competitor so then we know at this point that we can at least mark it off the list as far as being having that minimum optimization or at least putting it in the best position to succeed so we're not looking to jam a bunch of keywords in there or over optimize we're just looking to beat the top competitors in this specific instance now the next big google ranking factor is organic ctr now this only applies once you're actually ranking but it's critical for maintaining your rankings and getting further up the results first i recommend benchmarking your current ctr so go into screaming frog connect the google search console api and then run a crawl then export the results and filter the position column to only show positions less than 10. change the formatting in the ctr column to percentage and then filter all pages to show only those that have a ctr of three or less and now you're only looking at pages that are ranking well but have low organic ctr now keep in mind there are many variables that affect organic ctr for example once again the intent matters a lot we rank for the keyword blogspot and the ctr is super low because it's a navigational keyword for a brand that isn't ours as a general rule ctr will be very low for these types of keywords and should be avoided in most cases now the question is how do you improve organic ctr well in short you need to test and there are only a few variables that are possible the title tag the meta description site links and microdata i recommend testing each individually with a tool like seotesting.com so now you can do everything i've mentioned well but the next ranking factor plays a huge role in your long-term seo performance and it's as simple as have you built enough topical authority in short you need to create more keyword driven content to support your existing content do this and you'll compound your topical authority now think in terms of clusters for example if i wanted to rank for the keyword backlinks i would need to build content to support that primary mother asset so i would create pages targeting keywords in that cluster that have different intent like how to get backlinks buy backlinks free backlinks or do backlinks still matter so if you aren't ranking well focus on creating more content to support those existing assets just be careful and don't create pages that are targeting the same keyword with the same intent because it will cause keyword cannibalization and the final ranking factor is no surprise but if you aren't getting the seo results you really want it's because you likely don't have enough backlinks and website authority so your overall website authority is one of the biggest ranking factors and it's why websites like forbes amazon and wikipedia rank for so many keywords in fact they can publish a brand new page and rank in the top 10 without a single backlink hitting the new page that's the power of website authority but for the rest of us you'll need to focus on two things acquiring backlinks to build your overall authority and acquiring backlinks to specific pages that you want to rank now the best thing to do is just be scientific about your link building first identify the link and authority gap between you and your competitors on the domain level here's how all right so just open up semrush and go into the bulk analysis tool under link building and then just enter the domain that you're competing against so in this case i'm just using semrush as an example because i would never dare to compete with them but when we look at the main thing i'm going to look at here is the total authority for the entire domain not just one page but the entire domain so a couple key things you want to look at here is the authority score so we see that there's a clear gap okay they're in 81 i'm at a 51 so there's a big gap that has to be narrowed here and the way that we narrow that gap is by acquiring more links so we look at you know 80 000 backlinks first 324 million backlinks we got quite the gap to narrow and then also looking at the total domains as well so this is how many unique domains are linking to our website so they have a hundred and twenty thousand unique domains linking to their domain and i only have about four thousand so clearly a lot of ground to make up but this is important to establish because then you actually can put a quantifiable number and a target to ultimately work towards now this is assuming that they're going to stop acquiring links which is not true but it also what we need to do is we need to accelerate our link growth so that hopefully we can start to make up ground on them or at least try to make a dent second identify the link gap on the page level for the keyword you're trying to rank for here's how to do that okay so the best way to identify the link gap on the page level is just to go into semrush and go to the keyword overview tool and then put what keyword you're trying to rank for and then click search now if you're ranking the top 10 you can see right away the gap between you and the competitors but if you're not you may need to find your page in this case we're looking at gotcha seo at about number 12 for this keyword and we only have about 40 referring domains so we'll go ahead and look back and we'll look at the top result and we're looking at about almost 500 domains okay so this gives us a good indication of what we need to do and ultimately a target to go after in this case you can of course grab the average top 10 but at the end of the day we need to get into the top three so even looking at the top three you know these first two competitors have a massive amount of referring domains so we're going to have a lot of link building that's going to be required to make a dent for this keyboard but this is the gap these are the gaps you need to be looking at because you can actually estimate how much of an investment it will be from a link building perspective just by looking at these numbers and it makes it very quantifiable so then all you need to do now is just start acquiring backlinks to narrow those gaps and ultimately improve your rankings so those are all the most important google ranking factors that you need to focus on if you like this video please like it and subscribe right now because i have a lot of cool stuff coming out very soon so thank you so much for watching and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Nathan Gotch

Views: 59,015

Keywords: google ranking factors, search engine optimization, seo

Id: mN5Dmst6p0M

Length: 18min 51sec (1131 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 13 2022