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Most Important SEO Ranking Factors That You Should Know

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If you’re an SEO professional, you’re bound to know the various ranking factors that Google considers to index sites. More than 200 factors contribute towards ranking a site on top of Google SERPs, and nobody knows them all.

Some ranking factors outweigh others in terms of rankings. So, while it’s not possible to know all the ranking factors that the search engine considers, you can still focus on the core metrics and improve your website rankings.

If you’re starting as an SEO specialist or looking to boost your content by yourself, some essential elements have to be fulfilled to rank high on the SERPs. We’ve compiled together this checklist of the basic SEO elements that Google considers to rank sites.

Most Essential Google Ranking Factors

Ask any two SEO professionals with considerable experience, and you’ll be surprised to find that both of them are driving results but with a different approach than the other. In the field of SEO, there’s no set formula for success. You can improve your rankings organically by tweaking the critical on-page and off-page factors. Yes, you don’t need to pay attention to all 200 ranking criteria of Google.

By just focussing on the main on-page and off-page elements, you can start to improve your site’s ranking soon enough. These factors are:

  • High-Quality Content

For those who have been in this field for some time now must’ve heard the phrase ‘content is king.’ Many industry experts would tell you that your only focus should be to create useful, relevant, and fresh content for your users as the most crucial ranking strategy. Regardless of how well your website is optimized, if your content is written poorly or is not helpful to users in any way, you’ll not rank high on Google SERP.

Right now, you must be wondering as to what constitutes high-quality content. For Google, high-quality content is all about the uniqueness, originality, and relevance to users.

Every time you’re creating content, ensure that it’s unique and not plagiarized from any other source on the internet. You should also look to churn out content regularly with the latest news and events surrounding your niche. Lastly, focus on keeping your content organized with proper headings and subheadings to improve its readability.

  • Search Intent

Search intent is another key aspect of your SEO strategy. Google outlined the importance of keeping the user’s search intent in mind while creating content with targeted keywords. The idea is to provide the user with relevant information based on the search query. You need to identify why the user is searching for a specific query to satisfy their needs with your content.

Once you identify why the user is searching for the specific keywords, your content should match their search intent. This could be either in the form of videos, infographics, listicles, etc. You need to provide the exact type of content that the user wants to digest.

Understanding your target audience’s search intent has benefits that go beyond ranking. When you know why and what your target audience is looking for, you can know the buyer’s journey and where they stand in terms of purchasing a product or service. Search intent will tell you whether they’re looking for basic information or if they want to compare similar products to make a purchasing decision.

  • Keyword Targeting

With high-quality content, targeting the right set of keywords and including them in your site is vital for ranking your site on SERP.

Keywords are the search phrases or queries by which users access information online. Identify the relevant keywords for your niche and start including them in your site and content so that search engine crawlers index your site for those search phrases. It’s pertinent here to understand precisely which phrases your audience is searching for to optimize them on your website.

Ensure to include your primary keywords in the meta description, title tag, URL, and as the image alt text for Google to fetch whenever users type in your targeted phrases. Remember to use LSI keywords or the related phrases apart from your focus keywords and include them in your content as well for Google to easily understand what your content is about.

Most importantly, don’t do keyword stuffing or unnecessarily incorporate keywords throughout your content. Doing so will end up with Google penalizing your site.

  • Link Building

Link building or backlinks are the most important off-page ranking factor considered by Google. Backlinking builds relevancy and trust in your content, something Google highly prefers in ranking sites.

Backlinking also helps you gain inbound organic traffic from other sources relevant to your niche. With incoming links from high authority websites that point towards your content, you can establish yourself as a trustworthy source and be ranked among the top 10 on Google SERP.

  • Page Load Speed

As part of its Core Web Vitals update in 2021, Google emphasized the need to improve the page speed of websites in order to rank them on SERP. Page speed refers to the responsiveness of your web page and how quickly the visuals and fonts load to be displayed to the user.

Page speed is a part of the overall user experience that your site offers to searchers. Thus, your web pages should completely load with all visual elements displayed to the user within 3-4 seconds after the user clicks on your site. Beyond this time window, there is a great chance that the visitor will leave your site due to poor user experience access information from your competitor’s site.

To improve page speed, you can use any of the various online tools that inform you of the page speed of your website pages and identify areas for improvement. Popular tools include Google’s PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom Speed Test, MonsterInsights Site Speed Report, etc.

  • Mobile Responsiveness

There are over 3.5 billion mobile phone users, with More than 70% of online searches globally made via mobile devices. Needless to say, Google considers mobile-friendliness as another critical ranking factor.

Due to the high number of mobile phone users who are searching for information every day from their hand-held devices, Google indexes and ranks the mobile version of your website for search phrases. Without making your website responsive to mobile phones, you can’t expect to rank high on the SERPs.

  • Domain Authority

Domain authority is the next step in ensuring an SEO-friendly website. Domain authority is a Google ranking metric that dictates the ability of your site to rank on SERPs. It also establishes you as a trusted name in your niche.

The higher your domain authority is, the better your chances to rank favorably by Google. Improving your site authority can be done in a number of ways.

One way is to acquire quality backlinks for your site with niche relevancy, though a high number of backlinks don’t always guarantee higher rankings. The second way is to focus on creating high-quality content for your target audience to engage them.

You can check the domain authority of your web pages through online tools like Moz and MonsterInsights.

  • Site Security

Site security is another important issue that you need to focus on. Google considers the safety of users and their data as a prime concern, so your site should have an HTTPS encryption and SSL certificate for SEO success.

Conclusion

These were some of the major ranking factors in Google’s algorithms that influences the indexing of sites online. Though there are a number of other elements in Google’s ranking algorithm, paying attention to these will surely see improvement on your website rankings with consistent efforts. As you gain experience in optimizing these vital factors, you can learn more about the other criteria measured by Google for ranking websites.

If you need SEO services or want to make your business visible to thousands of prospects online, contact SEO specialists at Brampton Web Design agency. We’ve gathered valuable experience by serving clients from diverse industries and bringing them online success and growth.

Brampton Web Design

How Meta Descriptions Improves Engagement and Rankings

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Meta Descriptions are the short descriptions of your web page that appear on SERPs or Search Engine Results Page. Whenever a user searches for information on Google, they’re displayed with results related to their search query. These results are web pages containing the information the user is looking for. A meta description is a text that appears below the results describing the content inside the web page.

Meta descriptions inform users and search engines about the summary of the page so that they can figure out the relevancy of the content inside the web page. Meta descriptions consist of 155 characters on desktop view and 120 characters on mobile view. Within these character limits, webmasters and content creators need to include an excerpt for the contents of their web page.

But why are they needed? What purpose do they serve? And can one excel in SEO without focusing on meta descriptions?

We’ll talk about all of this in this blog post.

Why are Meta Descriptions Important?

As mentioned above, meta descriptions are informative tools for users and search engines that inform them of the context of contents inside a web page. Meta descriptions are essential for SEO as users click on a website after reviewing the meta description and ascertaining whether the content inside is helpful to them or not.

Some SEO experts and marketers will tell you that Google declared that meta descriptions aren’t a factor in its organic ranking criteria. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t serve any purpose. A well-written meta description can significantly improve your click-through rate, which increases traffic on your site and helps in ranking higher on SERPs.

We established above that meta descriptions have character limits, which means that any meta description beyond the character limit won’t be fully displayed to the user. So staying within the character limit is needed to show the full description of a web page in the SERPs.

Look at Google Analytics and Google Search Console to understand your traffic source. If you have more visitors from mobile devices, ensure to limit your meta description to 120 characters. Conversely, if you have more visitors to your site from desktops, you should conform to 155 characters with your meta description.

Meta Descriptions helps your website in the following ways:

  • Higher CTRs, which result in more conversions for you
  • Informs users about the page contents
  • Helps to rank higher on SERP with improved indexing

Tips to Write Meta Descriptions that Boost Engagement and Rankings

Google has published its webmaster guidelines which entail how to write compelling Meta descriptions to improve your CTRs and list you higher on its SERP. As a marketer or content creator, a compelling meta description is an essential ingredient for success in your SEO campaign.

  • Stay within the Character Limit

The first thing you need to do is to include the relevant information inside your web page within the meta description character limit. It’s important to remember that this limit doesn’t mean that you won’t be able to write more than 120 or 155 characters, as the case may be, but rather, Google will display the number of words within this limit to searchers.

Ideally, you should write meta descriptions within 120 to 155 characters so that it’s displayed to both desktop and mobile users. Remember to place the most important words relevant to the page topic at the beginning of your meta description. This way, you won’t risk losing necessary information on the SERPs.

  • Go for Accuracy

Beyond the right character limit, it’s more important to have an accurate meta description that correctly summarizes the content within the web page. This summary should be correct, relevant, and compelling enough for the user to click on the link and read the full content inside.

Incorporating your focus keyword on this summary is a good practice for writing meta descriptions. But, you should avoid stuffing keywords in the meta description just for the sake of it, as it provides little value or information to the searcher. In the absence of a relevant meta description, your overall user experience will be affected along with a low CTR. Just like the high-quality content you’re creating on your site, it’s essential to have a quality meta description that summarizes the entire context accurately.

  • Ensure Uniqueness

Meta descriptions are often not considered an important part of your SEO strategy because they aren’t always displayed to the searchers. Site owners, thus, focus on improving the page experience and visual elements of their website. However, that’s not a good practice for SEO management.

Whether it’s displayed to users or not, it’s still visible to Google and other search engines. Meta descriptions make it easier for search engines to understand the nature of the content and index them for the particular search phrases. That’s why each and every web page of yours should have a unique meta description summarizing what the searcher should expect if they visit the page.

The originality of meta descriptions becomes exceedingly important when the web page doesn’t contain any text inside. Each page in your website has something unique to offer to users, like products, about us, contact us, etc.; the meta description for that page should also be unique.

  • Use CTRs

CTR or call-to-action guides the user towards the next step. CTRs are vital tools for conversions and compel the user to take any action, whether a subscription, registration, downloading content, or providing content information.

Meta description and CTRs become important when running a paid ads campaign on Google. The meta description becomes the ad copy, laying out what the ad is all about and what it has to offer. Include compelling CTRs on your meta descriptions, beginning with “How to…” or “Discover…” and similar copies. Meta descriptions that start with these lines influence users to click on the ad and learn more about your products and services.

High-Quality Meta Descriptions Mean More Conversions

Just like title tags and headers in your content, meta descriptions are crucial to improving your on-page factors that positively influence SEO. Meta descriptions can increase your CTR and help users connect and engage with your content.

Without accurate meta descriptions, search engines won’t understand what your content is about, which makes it extremely difficult to be indexed on the SERPs. Therefore, you should create unique, enticing, and relevant meta descriptions for every web page that invites searchers to click on your site and read your content.

Brampton Web Design

Choosing the Best Social Media Channel for your Business

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Today, social media has become an essential tool for reaching out to potential customers and forming meaningful relationships with them. It’s a vital part of your digital marketing strategy, one that’ll reap you rewards in enhancing your brand visibility and image. Numerous studies have already shown social media marketing to be the most effective digital marketing strategy for ROI. Social channels have the power to boost your marketing campaigns and help you gain customer insight while generating a handsome ROI.

Targeting the right channel for your social marketing strategy is important for your business to get the right results on the investment made. When implemented correctly, social media marketing helps you get more leads for your business, improve the organic ranking of your business website, drive heavy traffic and increase conversion.

But creating the right digital strategy has a lot to do with the social media platform you choose to run your marketing campaigns on. While Facebook, with over 80% of market capture, may seem to be about the obvious choice, it isn’t always the case. Other platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, etc., can also become dependable platforms for you to attract more prospects to your business.

This blog will discuss what factors influence the choice of your social media platform, along with the best social channels for your type of business.

Factors to Consider When Choosing the Right Social Media Platform

Several factors weigh in when looking at the best social media channel to focus on. These factors are internal, i.e., related to your organization, or external. . Knowing your business needs and the niche of every platform is important to identify the best social channel. Still, there are other factors at play here as well.

  • Your Business Objective

Your business objective is the first thing that defines the platform you should target your social strategies. Whether it’s reaching out to new prospects, generating leads for your business, or simply getting known in foreign markets, your business goals should take the top spot in filtering out the right social platform for business marketing.

If you want to use social media to increase brand awareness, you should look towards well-established, popular platforms that have a large chunk of your target audience in them as active members. Also, consider the niche of every platform before advertising on them, as some channels may consist of the buyer persona, which is the target audience for your business. E.g., If you’re a B2B business, LinkedIn may be the perfect fit for advertising, whereas if your buyer persona includes a lot of youth, TikTok could be the platform to make a difference for you.

Similarly, if you’re looking for more brand visibility, Facebook is the right platform to market your business with billions of daily active users. For lead generation campaigns, LinkedIn is the most apparent suitor to take up to reach your marketing objectives.

  • Target Audience

The second most influential thing to remember is to be present where your target audience is. After you know the right platform best aligned with your organizational goals, it’s time to see where your prospects are engaged the most.

Ad campaigns help your business to reach your target audience based on the demographic set by you. Understanding the behavior, purchasing process, and interest of your target audience is vital for the success of your marketing campaigns. But most importantly, understanding the demographics is necessary to run ad campaigns on these social channels.

Always use data-backed insights for advertising on social channels. Your chances of conversions will greatly increase when you focus on the right set of people to listen to your marketing appeals.

You can also use online tools that help you gauge your current followers and segregate them on the basis of age, gender, location, and other specifics. By understanding your current prospects, you can target similar audiences through social media ad campaigns.

  • Competitors

What do you do when you can’t ascertain the right platform where your target audience is? You look at your competitors.

A competitor analysis also reveals other parts of their strategy, like which platforms they are using the most? What kind of content do they post? How much engagement are they getting on their posts? The answers to all these questions will assist you in formulating a marketing strategy of your own and target similar prospects as your competitors. It’s not the ideal way, but definitely, an excellent way to start.

Online tools, again, can help you in identifying the biggest players in your industry with the most reach and influence on social channels.

  • Content Strategy

There are various kinds of content that you can post online on social channels. Some posts are platform-specific, while others relate to your business’s overall vision or mission. As mentioned earlier, if you’re a business engaged in B2B services, LinkedIn and Twitter are ideal for creating content that taps into the interests of your fellow professionals.

If your content strategy is more visually inspired, then Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok can be the proper leverage to appeal to your target audience and get high engagement.

  • Marketing Capability

Most brands use multiple social media channels for marketing their business to prospective customers. Adopting a similar approach is recommendable, but with the right balance. Using various platforms for your online marketing objectives guarantees higher visibility and outreach, but engaging on various social channels also runs the risk of stretching your resources on platforms that aren’t suited well enough for your business.

Additionally, with more social media platforms, it may become difficult for your marketing team to manage, especially if you’re a small business. While this can be taken care of using online tools like Buffer, which allows you to schedule your posts beforehand, the real problem is churning out engaging content for each platform regularly. Although you can cross-post similar content on different platforms using tools like Buffer, it wouldn’t always be productive; what works on one platform doesn’t work on the others.

Thus, to save time and money, it’s wise to start with a single social channel and then move on to the next platform to meet your marketing objectives.

Achieve Business Growth with Stellar Social Media Marketing Campaigns

Brampton Web Design agency specializes in elevating your marketing campaigns across digital channels, including social media platforms, to foster the growth of your business. Our experts have a deep understanding of the basics and complexities of social media sites to design engaging marketing copies that attract your prospects into becoming long-serving customers.

Consult us today for higher engagement and conversions on social media channels to generate higher revenues for your business.

Brampton Web Design

What are Google SERP Features and How to Optimize for Them?

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Google has come leaps and bounds ever since its formation over two decades ago. The powerful search engine released its first update in 2003, known as the Florida updates, and hasn’t looked back since. Today, there are over 200 criteria for SEO specialists to optimize for ranking their website.

However, with great difficulty comes excellent leverage, and Google has done just that with its SERPs, leaving bits and crumbs for us to pick up.

Google has constantly been updating its Search engine result pages (SERP) with newer tools and functions that make the life of SEO experts easier. These tools can gain more visibility on SERPs and attract higher traffic to your content. Moreover, these SERP features tell us about the user’s search intent, paving the way for optimizing on-page and off-page elements to improve organic rankings.

This article will look into the top SERP features that can be leveraged to benefit your overall SEO campaign.

What are the SERP Features?

SERP features include additional information that Google pulls out to provide accurate and relevant information to the user. This data is drawn from various content sources, optimized for the user’s search phrase. SERP features differ as per the user’s search phrase, but they follow the same pattern concerning the category of the information displayed.

These features include related questions to the search phrase map locations if the search phrase contains any geographical keyword or a knowledge panel. A typical example would be if you search for a movie, the SERP includes images of the main actors in thumbnails.

These SERP features are bits and crumbs, which can be immensely useful for SEO purposes. By understanding the user’s search intent, you’ll know exactly which keywords to target. It’s like understanding your user’s pain and then providing them with the relevant information that they’re looking for.

If you’re a content creator or an SEO specialist, you should pay attention to these SERP features and improve your SEO campaigns. Your competitors are doing it, and so should you.

Here is a list of the SERP features that commonly appear upon a user’s search:

  • Related Questions (People also ask for)

Related questions mostly appear when a user searches for a question, but they also appear in other searches as well. This list is displayed in a drop-down which consists of inquiries related to the search phrase. The list is infinitely long, and at times, repetitive, but that only increases the opportunity window for an SEO expert to tap into.

One way to optimize your content to appear in a related question list is to organize your page with proper H1 and H2 tags with the relevant information pertaining to the search phrase. The idea is to manage your content in such a way that it is easy for Google to pull it off as related questions.

Several online tools like ahrefs and SEMRush can tell you which web pages of yours are ranking highly for keywords, including those featured in the related questions tab.

  • Featured Snippets

The search engine identifies the user’s search intent and returns relevant informational snippets in paragraph form, bullet form, or tabular form. Featured snippets are boxes that contain excerpts pulled by Google from the top organic results. Sometimes, these snippets are placed on the topmost section of the SERP, which means chart-busting CTRs for you.

The thing with featured snippets is that Google only uses these excerpts from the top ten organic results that appear in the SERP. So if your web page is ranking amongst the top ten results, your content will be automatically pulled out by the search engine as featured snippets.

But if you do not rank among the top ten in SERPs, the only thing you can do is to improve your organic rankings.

Optimizing for a spot on the featured snippets section is quite the same as related questions. You have to identify the informational intent that the user is searching for and then create your content accordingly that answers the questions related to the keyword.

A good way to start would be to analyze the questions and snippets populating the SERP for keywords you’re ranked for. Once you’ve identified the most relevant questions for the keyword, optimize your content with proper H1 and H2 headings, answering as many similar questions as possible.

Ultimately, with high-quality and relevant content, your information will be pulled by Google and displayed in SERP as featured snippets.

  • Local Maps

Any search that contains a geographical phrase around the device’s location will be returned with a list of local map results in the SERP.

A common example would be searching for a cafe or restaurant nearby, where Google fetches information from various sources and displays the results as a list with photos, reviews, and contact information. Thanks to Google’s local search algorithm update, the local map service has been essential for the recent boom in online visibility for small businesses.

Local map packs help small businesses located nearby to get visibility in front of searchers in their area. Therefore, as a local business, it’s absolutely vital to optimize your website to be featured in the map list.

You can get featured in the maps by updating your Google My Business account with high-quality images and an accurate description of your place. There are also in-depth categories that the user can access for information like parking space, disability-friendly service, etc. Another critical factor is having good reviews left by your customers online. Positive reviews from multiple online users largely influence local pack rankings.

  • Image Carousel

Image carousels appear when the search enters information with a visual intent, like searching for food or fashion. The SERP contains an image carousel with pictures related to the keyword searched.

Optimizing for image carousels is simple. You have to tag the images correctly and ensure that the text around them is descriptive of the image. You should also include keywords in your alt tags, captions, and file name.

  • Video Pack

Just like image carousels, Google responds with video packs to searches with visual informational intent. Videos are often returned by the search engine for searches that look for DIY content or begin with ‘How to.’ The videos are accompanied by timestamps, which provide an explanation to the searcher about their query.

The best thing about incorporating videos in your content is that they’re much more likely to rank than paragraphs of plain text. Similar to optimizing for other SERP features, Video carousels also require you to understand the user’s search intent. Once you’ve identified their informational requirement, you can create a video by targeting a keyword and then building the video around the topic.

Similar to image optimizations, your video file name should have the required keywords along with a detailed description. The thumbnail of your video should also be engaging enough to attract searchers to click on it. It’s also best if you publish the video on YouTube with a proper timestamped outline for the viewer to understand exactly what they’ll be looking at.

  • Top Stories

Top stories include the latest news stories and events that are relevant to the search phrase entered. Google scans through the user’s informational intent to return recent happenings from around the world in a carousel form from various sources.

As a news agency or publisher, if you want your story to appear on Google’s top stories spot, you’ll have to optimize your publication on Google’s Publisher Center as per the standard practice. While adhering to Google’s guidelines, you can create a story that will be featured in its top stories section upon the user’s related search. The title should clearly be related to the search phrase while incorporating the targeted keywords.

  • Sitelinks

Sitelinks are the additional links displayed by Google related to a branded search term, such as searching for Amazon on the search engine. These site links contain web pages to the same site, such as ‘Contact Us’ and other categories which direct the user to the information they want.

Sitelinks can also help you to improve your CTR with users entering your web pages that are relevant to their search query.

Sitelinks are auto-generated by Google, which means that you’ve to improve and maintain your site architecture and hope that Google fetches the links on its SERP. To optimize for site links, ensure proper internal linking of your web pages with appropriate anchor text to guide the user. Also, fix any broken links or duplicate content issues on your site.

  • Shopping Results

Shopping results mostly appear for searches related to eCommerce brands or products. Unlike other forms of SERP features, shopping results are paid ad placement on SERP that displays the product image, name, and price. Mostly, they appear on top of SERP above the organic results.

Also called the Google Shopping campaign, you can immensely benefit from this SERP feature as an eCommerce venture. To set up this feature on SERP, you need to build a Google Shopping campaign from scratch on your Google Ads account. Shopping campaigns provide a high conversion value along with an expanded outreach for your business.

Want to appear on the Google SERP features?

Do you want to make use of the fantastic SERP features and get your content listed on them for better outreach?

Brampton Web Design and Digital Marketing agency can help. We’ve served numerous clients across diverse industries to optimize their website and content to appear as a snippet on the SERP. Our experience in the field suggests that with an increase in Google snippet placement of your content, the organic traffic on your site also automatically hikes up.

If you want to feature on Google’s SERP and want to know how Brampton can deliver results to your business, feel free to contact us today. Schedule a meeting with our marketing specialists and learn more about how we can help you to grow your business online and offline.

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