Essential Google Ranking Factors To Consider in 2021

As a person or as an organization, what gives us a good sense of direction to propel our endeavors in is a set of goals/agendas that can be utilized as milestones to keep a track of the journey and efficiency of our ways.

Not only do they help us track our progress but also indicate us if we are moving in the right direction. 

Every legit business owner has a list of things to be accomplished and ticked off the list to consider the business as a success. Since the world has moved online and almost all of our activities and engagements, from the very basic to the very complex ones, take place on the internet, securing a top rank on the search engine should be a top priority for every business, big or small.

Goals are most feasible when they are broken down to basic steps that can be performed without worrying too much about the bigger picture and that will eventually take care of the ultimate goal. 

When it comes to ranking higher on Google, it comes down to taking care of and fulfilling the ranking factors as these ranking factors dictate the time and how well you will rank on Google.

With so many factors to consider, things might seem a bit daunting and therefore to get you out of the dilemma, here’s a list of 7 essential Google ranking factors to consider and work on in 2021.

1) Building The Brand Authority

One of the most important things that determine the level of success that an online business will get to experience is the brand authority of the business.

 In fact, we can gauge the importance of a solid brand authority when we understand that almost all of the ranking factors, including the ones that I have listed in this article, ultimately aim towards building your brand’s authority and credibility in the eyes of the customers as well as the search engine.

There are two major fronts which you need to work on:

• Improving the quality of the products/services that you offer.
• Taking care of the online needs of your business.

While there’s little that I can tell you about the first front except for the suggestion to improve your services with the notion to deliver the best consumer experience, I have experienced insights to offer you for the latter.

As an SEO Expert, taking care of the online needs of your business in the best possible manner is what I specialize in. And while you might have the ‘PR vs. Online Marketing’ debate in your mind when it comes to choosing the best course of action, I always emphasize on the need of an exclusive SEO strategy for online success.

2) Making Right Use Of The Right Keywords

Time and again, I have emphasized upon the role that keywords play in determining the amount and kind of traffic that your website will generate and the customers that your business products/services will reach out to.

Since these keywords have a very direct and decisive role to play in your chances of finding the target customers and business prospects, ignoring to take them into consideration will severely hamper your mission.

It all starts with determining the type of customers that you would like to target. Once you have that decided, you need to conduct an exclusive keyword research to help you outline the most rewarding keywords that are capable of steering your ship to the port of your choice. Your specific goals decide which keywords are right for you. 

Once you have them all jotted down, you need to incorporate them in your content.

3) Creating High Quality & Relevant Content

Keywords won’t help you as standalones. Their potency is realized when they are appropriately incorporated in the content that you publish. It is rightly said that content is king and I have already talked about how utilising solid content can help your online business.

It is therefore very important that you work on creating the right kind of content that will boost the engagement and ranking prospects of your business.

While going into the details would be too much for this article, let me tell you the crux of it.

Quality, coherence, relevancy and uniqueness– these are the points that you need to keep in mind and base anything that you create on. If you would want to get into the details of the process, you can check out my SEO Copywriting Tips.

4) Creating A High-Value Backlink Profile

Focusing on building a high-quality backlink profile for your online business’ website is very crucial and indispensable for successful business growth on the internet. In fact, in my experience, it is the single most important thing that determines the level of success that your business is allowed to experience on the search rankings.

However, before you go on stacking links, there’s a need to understand what goes into a valuable and rewarding backlink profile.

The first thing is relevancy. Not all backlinks will serve as an asset. If they are random links from random sites, they will turn out to be liabilities for your website and will ultimately be weighing your business and its success prospects down.

The second is quality. Backlinks from websites that have a good reputation, solid brand identity and credible authority in the industry will add tremendous quality to your business as such backlinks are bearers of the message that your business, in itself, is credible and valuable.

5) Incorporating Structured Data

To crawl the information on your website, the search engine has a set of AI bots to look after this job. It must be noted that data and information on your website is not organized and structured by default. As such, at times it gets difficult for the crawlers to figure out what’s important and what’s not. 

We don’t want to take that risk and to avoid incurring it, we need to make things easier for the crawling bots. This is done by making use of structured data.

By making use of structured data and schema markup, you can highlight different parts of your website and label them as important under different categories. By doing so, you make it possible for crawler to exactly understand what they are looking at, thus making it possible to sort things in a better way.

Once you have done that, you have already gained an upper hand over those websites who fail to do so. Thus, in a game with cut-throat competition, you have an edge. The benefits are many. In fact, making use of structured data also allows you to be qualified to rank in Google’s featured snippet.

6) Amping Up The User Experience You Offer

When it comes to utilising various strategies, methods and tools to boost your business, all roads should lead to the same destination- providing customers with the best possible user experience.

In any market system, online or offline, a business can only prosper when it has realized the fact that consumer is king. You, as business owner, are there to serve them. Based on that, you can only claim to be successful when you have done the job of satisfying your customers with the best user experience.

As online marketers, it is more important for you to keep the aforementioned things in mind and act upon them. Your website needs to be in such a state where it delivers what the visitors are looking for.

Some of the key areas to focus on are:

• Keeping things structured: Make sure that the layout of your website is structured in the right manner making it very easy for visitors to scan and navigate through different parts of it fluidly.
• Keeping things mobile-friendly: With the majority of customers making use of mobile devices to surf the web, it is your responsibility as a marketer to ensure that you keep the elements of your business website in a way which is mobile-friendly to offer a conducive experience to customers.
• Keeping things quick: No one likes to wait on a loading screen. If your customers have to wait for things to load on your website, they will bounce. There’s nothing as bad as losing customers. Make sure that your website meets the standard speed and loading requirements.

There’s a bunch of things that can be done to enhance the experience of your customers. My article on landing page optimization will help you learn more on that.

7) Voice Search Optimization

The evolving nature of the internet and specifically of the online market makes it paramount for business owners to keep themselves updated with the latest trends and ensuring that they do all the right things to get themselves in a position to get the best out of those trends.

One such trend, which has grown limbs rapidly over the past years is that of voice search on Google. 

Whether it is entertainment, commerce or just casual surfing and browsing of the internet, people have now begun to rely more on voice searches to an extent that it has almost taken over the conventional methods of conducting searches on the internet.

These voice search statistics reveal that voice search is a trend of the era and is here to stay. In that situation, service providers who take note of this shifting dynamics and adopt methods and strategies to adapt themselves to the same are bound to fare better than those that don’t. 

I am sure you don’t want to end up missing out on opportunities and therefore it is essential for you to work on optimizing for voice-based search on Google.

Concluding Remarks

That’s it. These are the top 7 essential search ranking factors that every business owner must work on in order to have a better experience and a better shot at success in 2021.

It must be noted that no factor is more or less important than other. Infact, working on only one or two of them won’t make considerable difference. It needs to be done in a holistic manner ensuring that you cater to all the requirements for a better ranking prospect on the search engine. A well formulated strategy based on your business and its goals can help you do so.

If an exclusive and tailored SEO strategy is what you need, look no further. Contact me now and we can get to work.