Importance of Google:
Undoubtedly, Google is the most dominant search engine in the world. When we think of searching something on Internet, we are actually thinking of Googling that particular thing. Google is the king among the search engines and we do not think twice when we have to search something online, we simply go on Google to search about that.
The majority share in the search engine industry is owned by the technology giant Google. Bing and Yahoo are nowhere near the number of searches which the Google gets on daily basis. Currently, almost 70% of the online searches are made through Google, which make it crucial for the success of online businesses. By ranking for relevant keywords on Google, your website can manage to grab a lot of visitors from the 3.5 billion daily searches made on Google.
Benefits of better Google rankings:
Here are the benefits that one can get by ranaking higher in the Search Engine Results Pages(SERPs):
- More exposure and brand awareness: Ranking on the top of search results means that more people will see the name of your company and website. This will increase the brand awareness and brand familiarity on the part of people even if they had not purchased anything from you earlier. People become aware of the services and products offered by your website and whenever they need such services, they will immediately rush to your website.
- More website traffic: Being on the top of search results on Google means a huge amount of traffic is driven to your website. Here are the details about how much traffic each position on results page gets. The statistics for Google show that the first website on a search engine gets about 43% of total traffic. The traffic reduces to 12% for the website positioned on second number. The website ranked on third position gets almost 8% of the total traffic on Google and it goes on decreasing as we move down in the search engine results pages. Almost 91% of the Google searchers visit the websites placed on the first page of search results and only 4% move on to see the next results page. This traffic further decreases to only 1% for the third page.
- Improved business image: Data shows that 93% of the purchasing decisions start with an online search. People try to find the business enterprise on Google before making a purchase. So, if they do not find the company in first few results, they are very likely to go to the other companies which are better ranked.
- Relevant traffic: The better rankings for your website bring more relevant visitors which are interested in buying your products and services. This significantly increases the conversion rate of your website.
- Website authentication: In addition to the enhanced website traffic, the better rankings in SERPs increase the authenticity of your website. Reports demonstrate that the online visitors think of the top ranked websites as the most authentic websites in their business category. This psychological game helps you to dominate your business industry by outranking your competitors.
What are SERPs:
SERPs or Search Engine Results Pages are the pages shown by Google when a particular query is made by a searcher. The search results are triggered by the keywords used by people in their search queries. The results shown by Google in response to the query may be of two types, organic search results and the sponsored search results. The pages which are retrieved by Google’s algorithm are termed as organic search results. Sponsored search results are the advertisements related to searched keyword.
Generally, the result pages are ranked from top to bottom keeping in view their relevance to the searched keywords. Every organic search result consists of a website title, page link which drives the visitors to the actual web page and a small piece of content from the website which has matched the searched keywords. The sponsored results can be customised by the advertisers and these results display whatever the advertisers want them to display.
What are the Ranking factors:
Due to the incredible benefits of the better search engine results page rankings, all the website owners try their best to get their websites ranked on top of the search results. But to optimise the website for higher Google rankings, one has to know the factors which account for the better ranking of a website.
The requirements for search engine optimisation keep on varying and it is hard to maintain an accurate list of the factors which ensure better ranking for your website on Google’s search results. However, the following ranking factors are the base of a successful search engine optimisation strategy:
- Website security: Your website needs to be secure even it does not feature online payments. The secure websites are considered to be more authentic and are allotted higher place in the search results by Google.
- Website accessibility: The URL of your website should allow easy website access and crawling to the Google’s bots. Google must be able to check the content on your website to gauge its relevancy to a search query. The websites marked as relevant by Google are ranked on the top of the SERPs.
- Page Speed: To improve the user experience, Google prefers the websites with fast loading speeds. Google can penalise the websites which take more time to load and may give them low rankings.
- Mobile Friendly: More that half of the Google searches are made by using a smartphone. So to secure the interests of smartphone users, Google checks the mobile friendliness of the websites through its mobile-first index, before deciding about their rankings on search engine results pages. The websites which are compatible for mobile usage are given better rankings by Google.
- Content Optimisation: To get higher ranks on Google’s results pages, the content in your website needs to be optimised according to the most searched keywords and the user intent. Furthermore, Google also penalises the websites for keyword stuffing and posting irrelevant content by decreasing their rankings.
- Technical Search Engine Optimisation: Technical SEO elements like using keywords in titles and headings, using header tags, creating meta descriptions, using keywords in image alt tags and using schema markup also account for the higher rankings with Google.
- Domain Authority and age: About 60% of the websites placed on the top ten positions of Google’s search results are 3 years or more old. So domain age is an important ranking factor along with page authority and domain authority.
- User Experience: By evaluation of the click through rates, bounce rates and dwell time of a website, Google improves the rankings of the websites who provide better user experience.
- Business Information: The websites, who provide the name, address and phone numbers of the business entity they represent, are considered authentic and are given better rankings.
- Social presence: Having an active presence on social media accounts for better Google rankings.
How to maintain Google rankings:
After reaching to the top of search engine results pages of Google, it is very important to maintain this position by using the latest SEO techniques. You can easily maintain your top rankings with Google by adopting the following techniques:
- Continuously updating your website
- Increasing your page speed
- Expanding the link juice
- Improving the internal links
- Increasing your social media engagements with the customers
- Increasing the website authority
- Optimising the meta and title description
- Tracking the traffic and making changes accordingly
