How to Increase Your Google Search Ranking

We all dream of the moment we get to see our page ranking first in Google’s search results.

It’s like placing first in a tournament against all of your competitors, and solid proof that your marketing and SEO campaign is working wonders.

After all, there’s no escaping the fact that 68 % of online experiences start with a search engine. If your customers are online (and they probably are), then 68% of their interactions with the internet start with their search engine.

Due to the sheer amount of benefits to ranking on Google, figuring out the actual factors that you need to optimize can be a nightmare.

Keep on reading for our full breakdown of the best tips on how to perfect your SEO ranking and organic marketing.

Google Website Ranking 101: How Are Your Backlinks?

We can’t really start talking about SEO marketing and strategy without talking about backlinks.

Once you ask any veteran marketer about the king of ranking factors, more than 90% will tell you that it’s the quality of your backlinks.

The backlinks forming the core of the PageRank, which is the baseline of Google’s ranking algorithm.

However, you’ll want to keep in mind that if you prioritize quantity over quality, your strategy will backfire.

Two main categories help you identify whether your backlinks are of sufficient quality or not.

Relevance
Think of it as asking for recommendations on a specific type of shoes. You’ll trust the recommendation coming from a shoe manufacturer or seller like Toms, rather than a certified accountant.

As a matter of fact, you’ll start asking why on earth is an accountant writing about shoes? On the other end of the spectrum, if you’re looking for an easier way to fill out your taxes, then you’ll definitely trust the advice of the accountant over a shoe manufacturer.

This is the base of relevancy when it comes to backlinks. The more relevant the websites and pages to people’s search terms, the higher the degree of relevancy, which increases your backlink quality.

Authority
In the simplest of terms, the stronger the pages that your backlinks are placed, the better Google considers your links.

Speaking of keeping an eye on your backlinks, you’ll need to pay attention to the analytics when it comes to your SEO campaigns.

After all, how are you going to recognize when a specific backlink or strategy is doing well or not?

How’s Your Freshness?

Alright, we know that this one sounds a bit unusual. But, hear us out. Freshness is considered a query-dependent ranking factor. This is a fancy way of saying that Google considers it more important than other queries.

When it comes to the news cycle, freshness is a key business factor. As a matter of fact, it’s so important that it can prevent a suffering business from going under.

Even Google will have a “Top Stories” feature, which showcases the newest of articles that are only a couple of hours old.

The reason behind this setting in the Google algorithm is that they understand that people want to see recent news, or learn about new developments.

This rule applies even to industries that have nothing to do with time-sensitive content. For instance, if a person is searching for the “best office desk,” Google can show a good-quality recommendation that’s (maybe) a couple of months old.

However, it won’t show an article from 2006, that’s for sure. In addition, some industries or businesses will public evergreen content, which is information that never changes.

For example, if you’re looking for the best way to iron your work shirts, you can find a decade-old guide that’s just as good as a month-old one.

This is why Google can always rank a mixture of old and new pages in its top five spots. It all depends on the industry and the degree to which “freshness” matters.

Topical Authority: Are You Specialized Enough?

Sometimes, you’d be surprised by Google’s way of ranking different pages. For example, you might know a leading blog that specializes in all things publishing and literature.

You’d think that with the numerous high-quality backlinks, referring domains, and even freshness, this blog should be the crowned king of search terms like “Sci-Fi reads,” or “bestsellers of the month.”

Yet, two other pages rank above that blog. The reason behind Google’s ranking here is the topical authority. Basically, the one that ranked first specializes in Science Fiction content.

So even though the other blog can be a better quality page, it doesn’t have enough topical authority to win against the Sci-Fi page. This will mainly depend on the search terminology.

Page Speed: How Fast (or Light) Is Your Page?

Page speed has been one of the key SEO factors since 2010. Needless to say, with the ubiquity of mobile searches, the same rule is applied to mobile devices.

So the question becomes: how fast is fast enough? The tricky comparison point here is that beating your competitors with a few milliseconds won’t actually make that much of a difference to your ranking.
On the other hand, if your page takes forever to load from the perspective of your users, then you’ve got a problem.

You’ll need to ensure that your site downloads and displays all its content quickly enough so that it doesn’t negatively your user experience numbers.

Google’s rule of thumb for mobile pages is that your content should show up in less than three seconds, and the size of your mobile web page should be around 500kb or less.