5 Heavyweights in the SEO Battle

There are over 200 factors that influence how your site will appear in the organic search results. Some of them have a small influence while others play a major role in the ranking process. Today we are going to talk about 5 factors that can make a significant difference in how you well your website performs in Google.

1. User Experience

You have undoubtedly heard that user experience is an important factor; but how is user experience measured by Google for the purpose of ranking your site?

- Click thru rates
- Time on Page
- Bounce Rate
- Return Visits

2. Social Signals

Last week I mentioned that social signals could no longer be ignored and that they have a meaningful and lasting impact on rankings. Not all signals are weighted equally but a focus on getting more of the following signals will translate into more search traffic and higher rankings.

- Facebook Shares
- Facebook Likes
- Tweets (even more impactful is tweets come from authority account)
- Google +1s
- Video Embeds/Syndication
- Social Bookmarks / References

3. Brand Searches

For a long time in SEO there has been a struggle to separate fake websites from actual businesses. One solution for doing this is to consider the number of branded searches that occur for a website. If people are searching for several variations of your brand name, you are much more likely to be a legitimate company. Promoting your website offline at networking events, on print materials, and giving presentations is a good way to increase branded searches.

4. Content Quantity and Quality

As illustrated in the case study by Quicksprout the length of content corresponds directly with the average ranking.

If you think about factor #1 which was user experience, you can see that longer content can positively influence time on page, return visits, and reduce bounce rates. Combine that with the fact that longer content is more likely to attract links and it clear why it leads to better rankings in many cases. Remember though, if you write a long piece of content that is not useful, you are just wasting your time.

5. Links

Regardless of what you hear, links are still extremely important if you want your site to rank well. The type of links you need have changed and the methods that work well for building links have also changed. If you plan to do link building in 2015 take a moment to stop and think about how natural links are formed.

- Social shares put content in front of interested bloggers
- People link to an updated piece of content of one better than an existing piece they link to
- Your email list receives notice of new content and share/link to it