Ranking factors for 2023
In the world of SEO, some things never change. One of them is content and that is something that Google values highly. Content on your website is essential however it must be relevant. Not only must it be relevant but it needs to be helpful to the user and not seem like a bunch of text to improve your keyword density.
There are also many things which do change within the world of SEO. For example, in the last few years, something Google has pushed is user experience. User experience is more crucial than ever, especially with the core web vitals update in July 2021.
In this article, we will take a look at the essential ranking factors for 2023 and what you should do to your website to improve those organic rankings.
Content
It is no surprise that content remains one of the top ranking factors for SEO. It is something businesses, mainly ecommerce businesses, will neglect on their website as they believe it affects the user experience. However, this is not the case and is something a user does not look too much into. If there is a large paragraph of text at the top of the page, they probably won’t be bothered by it. All they will do is scroll beyond the content to the products.
Content must be unique, helpful and easy to read. Additionally, NLP needs to be used for this which stands for natural language processing. The content needs to be lengthy as well. If you manage to do all of these, you should see your rankings increase.
Link Building
Link building is one of the oldest methods to help improve your organic rankings. Nonetheless, Google still considers this to be valuable which is why you should use this method. Although a high number of backlinks are important for your website, they must be high-quality backlinks. Nonetheless, the more high-authority backlinks you have, the more valuable your website is to Google.
Relevant Content
Something else which is important is ensuring your content is relevant for search intent. Search intent is what a user wants to see/read when searching for something. Is their search term a question where they are looking for the answer or are they looking to buy a product?
Ensuring you match the other results on the search engine results page is important for you to rank for the search term. If you are not showing the same information as everybody else, you won’t be anywhere near the first page of Google.
For example, when searching for Chicken Teriyaki, there will be recipes which will appear on the results page. Another example would be “SEO Manchester”, this would only show SEO agencies located in the Manchester area. Ensure you are corresponding with the other results on the first page of Google to compete.
Users Experience
We briefly touched on this in the introduction of the article. User experience is something Google has heavily focussed on with their algorithm updates and it is easy to understand why. If a website wants to be near the top of the page, they want to be able to keep the users on its website.
A responsive website is something that will help keep your customers on your website. Furthermore, there are many tools to use for this. One of those includes Google’s tool, PageSpeed Insights. It is great for breaking down your website and highlighting the good and the bad things about your website. Improving those minor details that Google has flagged will improve the user’s experience and increase your rankings.
As you will already know, the primary device for many users is a mobile. People will read articles on their mobile as well as do their weekly shopping. We have never been so reliant on a piece of technology until the modern-day phone came along. That is why your website must be mobile-friendly.
Domain Authority
Domain authority is the final ranking factor we will look at for 2023. You could do everything on your website to ensure you improve the rankings of your website. Nonetheless, a website can still rank above you because of domain authority.
The easiest method is to build high-quality backlinks but that isn’t easy all of the time. One of the best ways to do this is to look at your existing backlinks and then check their referral links. We advise you to look at similar websites with high authority so it is likely you can build a backlink to that website.
Website Structure
Something that is forgotten in SEO is website structure, especially if your website is new. There are many positives to the website structure.
Website design is essential for crawling and indexing. Furthermore, a good website structure can make it easier for Google’s crawlers to index the website.
The way to structure your website is to create a sitemap would make this a lot easier. This sitemap is to direct crawling towards the essential pages of your website which you want to see running on the search engine results page.
The reason you have a sitemap is to ensure the crawl bots are reading the important pages and to recognise new content on the website. Furthermore, you can have more than one sitemap. A sitemap can also be used to crawl video and news content.
You can also optimise your robots.txt file to make it easier for Google to crawl. Once optimised, it provides a pathway for Google and tells them how to crawl and index your website. Again, this helps identify the pages which Google should crawl and the pages it should avoid.
Once you have completed this, the bots will not crawl irrelevant pages such as the about us page and contact us page. The less time they spend crawling irrelevant pages, the more time they can spend on relevant content which you want to get ranking.
Summary
There are millions of websites on the internet and competing with them can be difficult. You could complete all the best SEO practices and fall short of that first-page ranking. Nonetheless, there are just some websites you won’t be able to rank above because of their authority.
Technical SEO is also something you should remember for your website. The reason why is that if your website is difficult to crawl, your website will take much longer to start ranking. Ensure you have a sitemap that is easy to understand for Google and your rankings will increase. Use the many excellent SEO techniques and ensure your technical SEO is complete. Once you have, you should start to see those rankings improve.
