Search engines prioritize websites that are fast, mobile-friendly, and easy to navigate. As the name implies, local SEO utilizes many of the aspects of regular SEO, but is focused on targeting users in a specific city or region. Your local online marketing efforts are designed to reach those customers and bring them either onto your site or into your store. As a local business, you’ll want to focus your SEO efforts on reaching searchers in your area.
To Sum Up: What Works Today for Local SEO?
It meets the needs of users and gives them an ideal user experience. Anchor text – the actual text linked in a hyperlink – provides context to users and to search engines for the page that the link is directing to. Relevant, keyword-rich anchor text can help with SEO, while over-optimization or irrelevant anchor text can be detrimental. Proper keyword optimization will help ensure your content is appropriate for users’ search queries.
- Additionally, consider long-tail keywords, as they often have less competition and can drive targeted traffic.
- The objective of Searchmetrics “Ranking Factors” studies is not to produce a gospel of absolute truth.
- You can rank your website high in Google for any keyword, by following the best SEO practices.
- But you can get the most value by focusing on the most important Google ranking factors first.
Best Practices for Preventing Duplicate Content
A Google Business Profile is a local listing with information about your business. It’s free and allows your business to appear in the map pack and Google Maps. Some of these are important for both the local pack and regular results, whereas others are more important for just one of them. This is because it’s close to me, has exactly what I need, and has a great reputation (4.7/5 from 994 reviews).
Don’t Create Content Until You Do This First
Your content can be anything from blog posts to videos to infographics. Search engines use crawlers to analyze each of your pages and determine what they’re about. Keywords are an essential part of this because they determine which searches your pages have the chance to BHS Links rank for. Many people will find your business for the first time because of your GBP listing and decide whether to become a customer. Because all content is different, and so is each audience, the best link building tactic is the one that you invent. This type of “natural” link building happens all the time, thousands of times a day.
They provide a kind of online word association to help Google know which results to show. Get more tips on mobile-friendly design to improve Google search ranking in our guide to improving your mobile conversion rate. Off-page SEO refers to actions taken outside your site to affect your site’s trustworthiness and authority by building the right inbound links and social signals. Two terms you’ll hear mentioned a lot when talking about SEO ranking factors are on-page SEO and off-page SEO. Now, some SEO-ers downplay the importance of E-A-T as an SEO ranking factor. And it’s hard to concretely argue with them because, again, no one truly understands Google’s complex ranking algorithms.
If you have the team, the time, and the energy, you should explore Google AMP (accelerated mobile pages). The upside is that your pages load nearly instantly from mobile devices. There have also been rumors that Google ranks sites built with AMP more highly than others.
You now know the AI ranking factors behind your search experiences. Now, get discovered in these search experiences with generative engine optimization (GEO) services from our award-winning team behind this research. Now that you know what SEO ranking factors are most important, it’s time to optimize your site. The final ranking factor might not be something you can control, but it’s worth mentioning. Domain age, or how old your website is, is often considered a ranking factor. While Google doesn’t clearly state this as one of its SEO ranking factors, research has found that older domains tend to rank better.