With over 200 ranking factors that Google’s algorithm considers, it’s important to know which ones to really focus on. Your name, address, and phone number must be accurate and consistent everywhere it appears online. Even small differences — like using “St.” on your website but “Street” on your Google Business Profile — can create confusion with search engines and hurt your rankings.
#20 – Outbound Links
Getting a local business to rank highly on search engines is becoming much more difficult. Local SEO has become increasingly competitive as more and more businesses recognize that they need to optimize for local searches – both for the local pack, and for SEO Anomaly localized organic rankings. Meeting users in these new places starts with understanding the ranking factors powering these AI experiences. Since 2023, our team has been researching how these platforms and language models generate responses and how to improve an organization’s visibility in these responses. Another SEO ranking factor that relates to user experience is page load speed.
When people conduct local searches, many of them are looking for this information. If potential customers can’t find it, they’ll seek out another business. An owner-verified listing is one of the factors that will help improve your GBP ranking. You want to claim ownership of your GBP listing so you can include all the information potential customers need.
Encourage User Engagement
Google wants to deliver the best product on the market, and this is a critical part of SEO that has been overlooked. Focusing on Google’s motivation and working with this will get you better results for ranking than anything else. The concept is important for all niches, but especially for anyone in YMYL niches, such as finance or health, where the results can really impact the user’s life in a significant way.
Optimize Website Structure
More specifically the number of internal links and quality of those pointing to a given page on your site. Although outbound links have been widely believed as a ranking factor this is not the case. Check out this image SEO guide and infographic by SEO Sherpa to learn the exact steps for optimising images for search engines. The Google sandbox is a temporary filter that Google places on new websites for the first 3 to 6+ months. Regardless of your SEO – The website won’t rank well for keywords during this time.
- For example, the number of citations in directories, mentions and backlinks from respected local websites, online reviews, as well as the business’ website and blog content/structure.
- So… this question of… how should I order my H1, H2, H3, headings and what should the content be, that’s something from my point of view isn’t really that relevant.
- Page speed, along with responsiveness, and visual stability is a part of the Core Web Vitals report, recently added to theGoogle Search Console.
- One behavior that is important to your ranking is the pages per session.
- Use tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush to find broken or outdated links pointing to your domain.
- Since user engagement metrics are clearly used to adjust the SERPs for quality, and rank position changes as a byproduct, it’s safe to say that SEOs should optimize for engagement.