You’ve probably heard about the importance of backlinks for SEO ranking hundreds of times. Perhaps you’ve even put that advice into practice, but you still aren’t getting the results that you’re looking for. The truth of the matter is that backlinks are only one of the components involved in search engine algorithms. If you want to boost your ranking, you need to address as many factors as possible, including the lesser-known ones. Here are five essential considerations that should play into your SEO strategy.
Google Reviews
Search engines look for proof that your business is trustworthy and reliable. Positive online reviews can provide a valuable source of this information. Reviews are particularly important for the SEO rankings of local businesses, but online companies can benefit as well.
Your goal should be to gather reviews from as happy, satisfied customers as possible. Installing a Google review link decreases friction and increases the likelihood that customers will leave a review.
Smooth Site
Web users want pages to load quickly, and they don’t want to sift through countless ads in the process of trying to access your content. If they find your site too slow or too difficult to use, they’re likely to move on right away. When this happens repeatedly, your bounce rate goes up. High bounce rates can negatively impact your SEO ranking because they make your website look spammy or untrustworthy.
To improve your bounce rate and, therefore, your SEO ranking, make sure that your pages are quick to load, optimized for mobile devices, and easy to navigate.
Differentiators
You’re probably not the only business that offers your particular products or services. Customers can choose from a variety of companies to meet their needs, and search engines could list any of those businesses first in search engines. If you want a high ranking, then you need to set yourself apart from the crowd by offering valuable tools and content.
To do that, analyze what your competitors are doing using tools like Mention. Spend time researching what social media platforms, calculators, blog articles, shopping cart tools, and other features successfully competing sites feature. Use this data to help you determine what elements you can add to your own site to make it more useful than the others.
Image Information
You know that the text on your site is critical for a high ranking, but the pictures on your page can be critically important as well. Search engines read the HTML embedded in your page, so they pick up on what’s hidden in the coding for each image. Therefore, the “alt text” line of your image coding is a great place to use relevant keywords.
Of course, the text in your captions can be just as important. Not only will search engines scan that text, but visitors will also. Even someone who’s just skimming your page might be drawn in by useful, informative captions. If the captions are enticing enough, those visitors more likely to spend quality time on your site.
Efficient Site Mapping
If you want search engines to crawl your pages effectively, you’ll need to guide them with a sitemap. This tool allows search engines to become familiar with your site and the pages that it contains. To simplify the job, you can use a mapping program.
Once it’s complete, submit your sitemap to search engines. Not only will this prompt search engines to crawl your site, but it will also pinpoint critical errors that you must fix.
There’s a lot more that goes into SEO ranking than just having good backlinks. Address these five factors, and you may see your ranking start to improve. Need help? Talk to us today.