This means that high search engine ranking positions help you generate organic traffic, brand awareness, and other business results. SEO rankings matter in search engine optimization (SEO) because the higher you rank for a given keyword, the more likely users are to see and click on your result. When people share your content on social networks, that’s another sign that it’s valuable. Cognitive SEO’s study of 23 million shares found a definitive link between social shares and search engine ranking. SEO ranking is a website’s position on search engine results pages (SERPs) for specific keywords or phrases.
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Displaying the results that use the keyword most isn’t always the best experience for their users. So they had to find a way to better handle how potential results were being ranked. Search engines like Google started working on ways to get smarter and rely less on ‘tricks’ and static ranking factors.
Content Quality Still Reigns
This is the number of pages a person visits before leaving your SEO Anomaly site. After you claim your listing, you can improve its visibility by adding as much information as possible to it. Photos capture the attention of people who are seeking out a business like yours.
- Domain age and domain authority are sometimes described as ranking factors.
- Although having a keyword in your domain may help people searching better understand what your website is about therefore encouraging more clicks from relevant people.
- I have seen sites with decent traffic yet very short page duration, which signals a mismatch between expectation and content.
- Reach out to those websites with updated content to reclaim those lost backlinks, boosting your authority without new link-building efforts.
Use Relevant GBP Categories
Ensure that your site is responsive, with easy navigation, fast load times, and content optimized for smaller screens. Test every element for mobile compatibility to make your mobile design seamless and user-friendly. Focus on improving your Core Web Vitals, which measure loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability.
Furthermore, including keywords unnaturally into your pages may lead to keyword stuffing. On the other hand, Google does use a specific algorithm as a signal that determines the relative importance of the web page in Google Search – PageRank. In researching this article, the author spoke directly to Pedro Dias (former Google employee), Ammon Johns (SEO Pioneer), and Dan Taylor (Russian search engine and technical SEO expert). Google’s Search Quality Raters Guidelines used to be a closely guarded document at Google that was eventually leaked online. Google now openly publishes the document as an example of what its Quality Raters are looking for when they manually review websites. For example, queries such as “best coffee shop” are considered location-dependent and will deliver a map of results based on your location.