10 Things Google Looks for When Ranking a Website
To get your business front and centre of your target audience, you need to make sure your website is working for you. No matter how amazing your products or services are, if potential customers can’t find you, you’ll struggle to succeed!
Getting your website fully optimised for search engines like Google is crucial for making sure it’s visible in those all-important search results, so here are 10 things Google looks for when raking websites – does yours tick every box?
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Responsive web design
Visitors need to be able to view your website across all devices, mobile or desktop. That means if the design of your site isn’t responsive, it won’t rank as highly.
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Website loading speeds
Users aren’t just looking for a site that’s easy to use and attractive – they also want to be able to access it quickly! It’s about the overall experience, so sites that take too long to load won’t be as successful.
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High-quality links
One of the most important factors in your website’s Google ranking, having high-quality, relevant links from authority websites is a must. It’s not just having them there, you should make sure they’re prominently positioned and linked to relevant text.
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Keywords in Title Tags
Each page of your website should have title tags, and those titles should have your main keywords included.
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SEO optimised URLs
That means short URLs that contain your main keywords, having a consistent URL structure, and submitting an XML sitemap to the search engines.
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Keyword Variations in Headings
Use keywords (main and other long-tail keywords) in your H1 and H2 headings, as well as H1 and H2 tags, and your rankings will get a boost.
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Optimised image names and ALT tags
The images on your site have to be tagged and named in order for Google to ‘read’ them, and making sure the file names are relevant to your business and that ALT tags are used to describe the images certainly helps.
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Quality content
One of the things your website is ranked on is the value it gives to visitors – so make sure the content is valuable! That means long, high-quality, properly formatted, and in-depth.
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Engaging multimedia content
As one of the things Google ranks websites on is the amount of time visitors spend on them, make sure you use interesting multimedia content to encourage people to stick around. Things like data, videos, and images are all good – just make sure they’re relevant to your business!
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Outbound links
While you won’t want to include outbound links to any of your competitors on your website, look for other relevant information and websites you can link to. In this case, directing visitors elsewhere isn’t a bad thing in terms of Google rankings!
Hopefully this checklist has given you a few things to think about in terms of killer website SEO, and you can start implementing some of the tips (if you’re not already, of course).