You may have checked some of your competitions and asked yourself the same question. Why are there websites, despite of minimal SEO, ranks better than those who do optimisations regularly? Why are they ranking even if they have lesser backlinks? Isn’t SEO the only option to raise your rankings? Is there something fishy going on?
This may seem a mystery to you but the reality is this, SEO is a great method but you don’t have to devote your entire time on it. There are other factors that can affect your site’s ranking and that are what you should know. Remember that search engine optimisation is a huge field. You shouldn’t focus on one area alone. There are other terminologies that need your attention as well. And we have listed some of them. Hopefully, you’ll apply these to your backyard as well.
CTR or Click-Through Rate and Bounce Rates
Aside from the other factors of your website, Google also takes a look at a click-through rate. It presents itself in percentage which measures the amount of clicks that your website or page has received from the total number of people who have made a search for a particular keyword you are trying to rank. The higher your percentage, the more potential you have against your competitions. Higher click-through rates, once noticed by Google will earn you rewards and one of those would be a slow increase in your rankings. This particular algorithm by Google signifies that your page is more preferred.
Another factor that Google looks is your Bounce Rate. Click-through rate isn’t enough because you can easily create false title and meta-tags and descriptions. Bounce rate is a measure which determines that people who are leaving your website by clicking the back button on their browsers and return back to the search engine results page. Like CTR, it’s also being measured in percentage.
For example, if around a hundred people are being led by Google to your webpage and all these hundred people immediately hits back button upon landing on your site; then it tells Google your page isn’t relevant. So, a well ranking website usually has a high click through rate and low bounce rate. This balance is significant in maintaining your ranks in SERP.
The Age
Age is a huge factor that can affect your rankings in Google’s SERP. In general, most sites that rank well are a few years old. Now, don’t ever think that all old websites have relevant contents and quality links. Even if your website is new, as long as you have the right, accurate and relevant contents as well as a good amount of high quality links, you can surpass some of these old websites. Also, since age requires time, you have to be patient as well.
Backlinks
Don’t fall into an impression that you need tons of backlinks to improve your rankings. Google doesn’t look at the number of your backlinks alone but the relevance of these backlinks as well as the authority. A lot of good ranking websites only have a few backlinks but they are of high quality and are pointing to the right page. A few links but are coming from.gov and .edu sites can give you much potential. Look at your stream of backlinks; do they contain the right ones? If not, you may have to make some adjustments.
Cross-links
You can have the not-so-best on page SEO and thousands of high quality backlinks but you can rank well on SERP’s. How? It’s if you know how to cross-link your pages. Adding in-content, connecting your webpages from one to another, you have the edge. Make sure to have the balance of linking your content pages since not all your pages will rank well.
Quality of contents
This should be common-sense to you. Google has been keen on looking for quality contents of every website it crawls and scraps those that are not. Since the Panda update, Google has been able to determine if a website has a duplicate content or too little content or has a poor quality of content. Google doesn’t only look at the content itself but it compares this particular content to another website on the same field. So, if your website has more quality contents than your competitions, chances are you will outrank them.
Growth Rate
You might believe that in order to rank well on a certain keyword, you create tons of backlinks to it or create super high quality contents on these keywords. It’s a good belief but Google isn’t dumb not to notice this growth rate. That’s the reason why older sites tend to rank well. They grow naturally and not fast. The secret: don’t build your links fast.
In conclusion, these factors (and a lot more) are the reasons why there are websites that rank well without too much SEO. Learn from these pointers above and see where you can make improvements. If you don’t have the time nor the expertise in SEO and want it ‘Done For You’ simply contact our office today on 07 5609 9457 for a free 30 minute consultation with one of our experienced consultants.