Top 2 Ranking Factors [as Revealed by Google]

Being found on search engines is becoming more and more important.

In fact, service businesses rely on them so much that it’s matter of thriving or going out of business.

By itself, the search behemoth Google boasts over 3 billion searches per day.

While the company won’t disclose the exact number anymore, we know it’s currently more than 2 trillion per year.

So what does this mean for your business?

Well, if your customers search something in Google to find you, you need to pull up high in the rankings.

First things first. You need to identify which keywords are important to your business.

For instance, if you own a plumbing company, it might be “plumber + city” or “plumber in +city”.

These keywords need to appear somewhere on your site. While it may seem obvious, it’s crazy how many people forget this.

Keywords in general feed into what Google has called it’s number one ranking factor:

1. Content

This is only logical- Google won’t rank a site that only has text about headphones for the search query “Dog Grooming”.

Content isn’t just throwing keywords on a page, though.

A lot goes into crafting the right words for your audience.

Your homepage is usually the portal through which customers interact with you. Is it inviting? Is there rich media on it? Is it clear, clean, and easy to read?

Above all, it should tell your ideal visitor EXACLY what they should do.

What is your call to action?

“Call Now”

“Sign up For Our Newsletter”

“Buy a Juicy T-Bone Steak Here”

“Learn How to Tie a Tie”

Forget your qualms about making things obvious. Just do it!

There’s thousands of signals that our brains pick up when we see colors, text, graphics, etc that make us like the site that we land on. Lately, minimalistic themes and sites tend to perform well. There’s no reason to have flashing lights and busy backgrounds distracting the user. Keep it simple, stupid.

2. Backlinks

Links, in other words.

Just as the name implies, links connect two pages or sites together.

There are internal links, which point to another page within your own site, and external links that point to a page on your site from a different website.

Both are important, but external links tend to have a more powerful impact on rankings, so we’ll keep focused on those.

For more info on how to come up with an internal linking strategy, click here.

Getting high quality links to point to your business website is probably the most difficult part of SEO.

That’s partly why I made it my main product offering.

There are a few things that make these links extremely effective for helping your site rank.

#1- You want to find sites that are high quality to reach out to for links. Contacting a crappy looking, out of date site might not be the best idea. There are tools that can help you see site quality, just google them!

#2- They need to be relevant to your industry. Sure, it may help to have a link from a great site, but if it has absolutely nothing to do with what you offer, it’s not the best fit. I once found out that an agency was building links for their client- and attorney- from a gaming forum. Hundreds of gaming links.

Don’t do that. Please don’t.

#3- Look into anchor text. Anchor text is the visible part of a link, the words you actually click on. Those words are an important factor, surprisingly.

Let’s look at a site we’re all familiar with to see what their anchor text looks like.

As expected, the most common anchor text is the brand name. This may be your case as well. Amazon may not have one specific product offering or keyword like you though. Whatever your main keyword is should make up a chunk of the pie- around 15-25% is fine. Too much of the same anchor text may send negative signals.

Let’s review.

Links give you an extra boost in:

• Rankings
• Referral Traffic- users click those links and end up on your site because they want to learn more.
• Organic Traffic- as your organic placement on Google goes up, more people will click on your listing, which creates a great cycle of increased traffic and increased rankings as a result.

Get in touch with us for SEO services in Boise, Happy Linking!