Google Maps SEO: 12 Strategies to Get Found Locally

They don’t want to mess around with rankings based on a factor that has no real relevance. This applies to any social media agency working with small businesses. This helps build trust and authority, both of which boost your ranking. See what Google has to say and what you need to know for your SEO strategy.

Resolve Duplicate Content Issues

• Therefore, some of these ranking factors may lose or increase their importance.
• As ranking signals become more complex and reliant on user-submitted information, it makes sense that behavioral signals are made more important as they cannot be nearly as easily manipulated.
• What was once so important to rankings now plays a much smaller role.
• You can tell search engine crawlers things like «do not index this page in search results» or «don’t pass any link equity to any on-page links».

User experience (UX) signals encompass a range of factors that indicate how users interact with and perceive a website. They play a crucial role in SEO as they provide search engines with insights into the quality and relevance of a site’s content. It isn’t enough to “have a blog” if you aren’t using it to converse with customers. How your business is seen on social media has become one of the fastest-growing ranking factors since 2015. They should be; if they aren’t, you need an SEO service provider to whip your social into shape.

Understand Google’s Ranking Factors for SEO

High-quality and original content play an important role in Google’s ranking algorithm. Besides the relevancy signals mentioned above, Google also uses a special algorithm when evaluating the content relevance – RankBrain. Imo if the text around the image is relevant, leaving the alt attributes blank is sorta ok. Search engines would absolutely have less data from where they can infer what the image is about so at least in some cases that might have significant impact on Google Images traffic.

It’s better to NoIndex these pages and gate them behind a login form rather than place them in your robots.txt file. As part of your on-page SEO process, you should check your site’s responsiveness using a tool like Google Lighthouse. Accessible in Chrome DevTools, as a Node module or from the command line, it runs a series of audits against a page and then generates a report. In other words, responsiveness is necessary for any website that values its search ranking.

Ensure that your site is responsive, with easy navigation, fast load times, and content optimized for smaller screens. Test every element for mobile compatibility to make your mobile design seamless and user-friendly. Focus on improving your Core Web Vitals, which measure loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability.

These range from content quality and backlinks to technical SEO and user experience. Search engines value user experience (UX) and reward websites that provide a positive experience. Understanding Google ranking factors is crucial for optimizing your website and improving your search engine visibility. By focusing on the most important factors, you can attract more organic traffic and achieve higher rankings.

Gaining backlinks is always great, and Google gives you more credibility, especially if these links are coming from authoritative domains. Few years ago, auto-generated content was very common along webmasters. Nowadays, things have changed dramatically, and websites that have such content are quickly penalized by Google Panda. Never insert links to adult or gambling websites, unless your website is from the same niche.

No matter how optimized your webpage is, if your content is not valuable, then you can’t expect higher rankings. Some website owners may be tempted to optimize for every ranking SEO Anomaly factor when it comes to getting higher rankings. It dominates other search engines like Bing and Yahoo, with more than 8.5 billion searches each day.

Naturally, all of this data is still relevant, but there has been a shift in what goals to focus on. Search behavior has changed, and search engines are showing your content in many different ways. You need to focus on the overall perception of your brand and being present in the right places.