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Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
SEO
How do search engine rankings work?
How can I improve my website’s search engine rankings?
For every query, Google checks its index for pages most closely related to that specific query, and then displays results for that query in an order that they believe will most likely solve the user’s query. This order of results is referred to in SEO parlance as “ranking”.
Google determines ranking based on its algorithm — a proprietary formula. While the minute details of this algorithm are closely guarded secrets, it is well-known that there are over 200 parameters that are factored by this algorithm. The top three factors that influence a page’s Google search ranking are:
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1. Relevance
The relevance of a page to a specific query is simply a measure of how closely / precisely the content on that page matches the search intent behind that specific query. For searches that are location-related (such as a search for a nearby restaurant, for example), distance is also a factor determining relevance.
2. E-A-T
Short for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.
Expertise is a measure of how knowledgeable a search engine perceives your website / page / business to be on a particular topic.
Authoritativeness is a measure of the degree to which other experts on the topic acknowledge or agree with your information, which search engines often infer from the quantity and quality of links to your website from other places on the internet.
Trustworthiness is a measure of how much users trust your website or brand, as inferred by Google from ratings and sentiment analysis of user reviews about your business / website, on social media and the public web.
3. User engagement metrics
Engagement metrics relate to how users interact with pages from your site relative to other pages in the SERPs, for a specific query. Google uses these as indicators to infer the quality or usefulness of the content on your site, and these include parameters such as:
- Click-throughs: The percentage of clicks that pages from your site receive, relative to clicks that other pages receive, for the SERPs of a specific query.
- Pogo-sticking: How often users click through to a result from your site, and then return to the SERP to click through to another site, for a specific query.
- Time on page: the length of time users spend on your page before leaving it.
- Bounce rate: the percentage of sessions on your website where users view only one page, and leave your site without clicking on anything else on your site.
An important thing to note about engagement metrics is that they are heavily influenced by the quality of content on a page: the relevance and catchiness of a headline, the usefulness of the content, the ease-of-use of the site’s design and navigation, and so on.