Businesses tend to struggle following more than 200 Google ranking signals, to enhance their online presence. We have heard quite a bit about meta titles, link building and other basic factors to achieve rankings. But there are some equally crucial, yet overlooked SEO nuggets to explore. Let’s find out about them and learn how they can help you prevent organic disaster, and give you an edge over your competitors.
1.Bounce Rate And On-Site Stay
Since we pursue for traffic and rankings, we can easily lose sight of things that count the most for our business – Engagement. Attracting people to the webpage is accomplishing half the target. Other, rather significant task is, enabling them to take actions you desired. If you’re getting millions of viewers without sales, the whole concept of traffic will be meaningless. Moreover, it won’t last for long because Google takes into account high bounce rate and time, and takes necessary action.
This means, if the visitors often return back to search page of Google soon after they clicked through to your site, they’re actually devaluing your page and ranking. According to Marc Purtell, Google’s algorithm gives high importance to the bounce rate in determining engagement. Steven Levy pointed out that engineers at Google include bounce rate as one of the major signals of website quality.
This is a strong indication that majority of search optimization is based on effective communication and digital marketing. Here, traditional marketing techniques are equally responsible for success of your online business. You can reduce bounce rate on your site with the help of the following:
- Effective sales funnel
- Engaging calls to action
- High level copywriting
2.Google’s “Rank Transition Phase”
Google has been continuously updating and evolving its algorithm. This is to ensure that users get high quality results, and those who manipulate their rankings should be less visible. You can see how Penguin and Panda have been covered; now they’ve launched another with the name “Pigeon”. But there’s something very few people know about Google.
Google may present temporarily inaccurate rankings – “rank transition phase”, to catch manipulators. The function offers confusing indications in response of any spamming activities. It takes into account how spammers react to such changes, in order to discover manipulated documents.
So, if your website undergoes rank transition phase and you remove or modify anything that was used for manipulation, it alerts the algorithm that you actually played some tricks. As a result, you will have to face penalties.
This indicates the level of complexity of Google’s algorithm. So, instead of trying to challenge Google use dedicated and honest SEO company in Toronto if you want to sustain your local business
3.Online Shopper’s Protection
SSL implementation is considered to be a minor ranking factor, but it may become an a major one in future. Google maintains a history of guiding webmasters towards a specific direction before it drops a hammer. So, it is possible that SSL may become the big change tomorrow. The reason is, SSL needs to use Google Merchant Center to run a Shopping Campaign which indicates Google takes this issue seriously.
By implementing SSL you can collect personal information from customers. More importantly, you will be able to process transactions through your site. Moreover, SSL helps increase conversions and protects your organic rankings.
Conclusion
Businesses need sustainability and they can only get it with the help of consistent and honest practices, and modern tools of customer engagement. With powerful content, adherence to search engine guidelines and implementing modern tools, you can improve and maintain your rankings on Google.