Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is about optimizing for the organic, non-paid section of Google search results. SEO is an excellent source of targeted traffic, leads and customers.
Over 60% of all web traffic comes from search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and YouTube. Search accounts for 10 times more traffic than social media.
So yeah, social media has its place, but when it comes to actual business results, Search engines find something with a better ROI than SEO.
Sounds good?
Great, let’s get started. Before we dive into the nuts and bolts of keyword research, link building, and on-page SEO, we must have a firm grasp of how SEO works.
Once I sat down to learn how SEO worked at a high level, it was much less overwhelming. Finally, it was something that I could do on my own. This is why we will start this course with a rapid overview of SEO.
With a significant focus on what’s essential for getting higher Google rankings today. So now it’s time to go under the hood and learn how search engines like Google work.
When you search for something in Google or any other search engine, an algorithm works in real-time to bring you what that search engine considers the best result. Specifically, Google scans its index of hundreds of billions of pages to find a set of results that will best answer your search.
So, how does Google determine the best result?
You may have read that Google uses over 200 ranking factors in their algorithm.
Fortunately, you don’t need to optimize for or even know all 200 to succeed with SEO or to ensure that your site is considered the best result for a given search. Focusing on three key ranking factors is really all you need to do to have success with SEO.
Table of Contents
So, What are Those Three Key Ranking Factors of Google?
Even though Google doesn’t make the inner workings of its algorithm public, based on SEO experiments and official statements from Google, we know that websites and web pages are ranked based on three key factors.
Relevancy:
The first factor is relevancy. If you search for fried chicken recipes, you do not want to see results about apple pie. That’s why Google looks first and foremost for pages closely related to your keyword.
They do this by looking for important terms on a page. Specifically, a page that contains the terms fried chicken recipes and variations, like Crispy Buttermilk Fried Chicken, Lemon-Brined Fried Chicken, Air-Fryer Fried Chicken with Hot Honey, Rowdy Rooster Fried Chicken Sandwiches, Pickle-Brined Fried Chicken, etc., will be considered relevant for that search.
However, Google doesn’t simply rank the most relevant pages at the top. Every search term has thousands or even millions of relevant pages.
For example, the keyword cookie recipes bring up millions of results on Google. So, to order the results in order of best to worst, Google relies on two other elements of its algorithm.
Authority:
The second is authority. Authority is just like it sounds. It’s Google’s way of determining whether content is accurate and trustworthy.
Website authority refers to how much search engines trust and value a specific web page, influencing its likelihood of ranking well in search results.
This concept is often measured using third-party SEO metrics like Moz’s Page Authority (PA), Semrush’s Authority Score, or Ahrefs’ URL Rating since Google does not publish a single “authority” metric.
The question is, how does Google know if a page is authoritative?
They look at the number of other pages that link to that page.
Links from other pages are known as backlinks. The more backlinks a page has, the higher it will rank in Google. Google’s ability to measure authority using links
This separates it from old search engines like Yahoo, which came before it.
Usefulness:
The third factor is usefulness. Content can be relevant and authoritative, but if it’s not useful, Google won’t want to position it at the top of the search results.
Google has publicly said there’s a distinction between higher-quality and valuable content. For example, let’s say that you search for a vegan diet on Google. The first result that you click on.
Result A is written by the world’s foremost expert on the vegan diet. Because the page has so much quality content, lots of people have linked to it. However, the content is completely unorganized and full of jargon that most normal people don’t understand.
Contrast that result with another result, result B. This result was written by someone relatively new to the vegan diet, and their website doesn’t have nearly as many links pointing to it. However, their content is organized into distinct sections, making it easier to read. And it’s written in a way that anyone can understand.
Well, that page is going to rank highly on the usefulness scale. Even though result B doesn’t have as much trust or authority as result A, it will still generally perform well in Google. It may even rank higher than result A.
Google measures a page’s usefulness largely based on user experience signals—that is, how users interact with the search results. If Google sees that people really like a specific search result, it will get a significant ranking boost.
I will show you how to optimize for all three ranking factors through Technical Kalyan, a leading SEO blog website, through various related blogs.
So, to quickly recap, in this lesson, you learned a little about the top three ranking factors that Google uses to rank websites.
Now it’s your turn to optimize your website by considering these three points.
Let me know your thoughts in the comment below.
To learn other SEO-related blogs, you can visit our website blog section.
Thanks for reading, Keep learning.
