Cutting Through the Noise for SEO Effectiveness

There are over 200 clear ranking factors you could and should be looking at when it comes to SEO and improving your website’s rankings within the major search engines. That’s a lot. Don’t get us wrong, in highly competitive industries you need to be dealing with as many of these factors as you can handle to ensure success but, there is another way. 

These 200+ ranking factors are not all created equal. Some of them carry considerably more weight than others when it comes to assisting with your ascent up the SERPs. As such, you would be wise to focus on the hard-hitting elements first, rather than allowing yourself to be overwhelmed by the volume of tasks. 

Here are some of the more significant factors you should be investing time and resources in tackling first:

Load time has been a big factor for a while, and it will always be something that carries a lot of weight. Google and other search engines focus on directing their users to sites which can promise a good user experience. In this day and age, a slow load time is just unacceptable and SEO aside, it will significantly damage your website’s performance in the long term. You can speed up your page load times by reducing image size and keeping unnecessary functionality to a minimum. You should also invest in decent servers with faster speeds and better security. This might sound like it will take a good chunk of your budget but, the reality is that slow to load pages have high bounce rates as users become ever more impatient. A slower page which sees your visitors leave because they don’t want to wait around for it to load could be much costlier to your business in the long run.

In 2018 Google and most other engines switched to prioritise websites which perform well on mobile as a preference. This is due to more than 50% of all web browsing now taking place on mobile devices. If you don’t have a website which is designed to support and cater for mobile browsing as best possible, then you’re going to suffer in the rankings. Get on it!

Content has always been a very powerful and significant part of what it takes to rank well. The issue is that it seems to be one of the most common areas for businesses to under invest and neglect. Your content needs to be plentiful, regularly updated and unique to your website as much as possible. Underestimate the power of investing in good, consistent content for your website at your peril. Be sure that your content is helpful, detailed and serves a purpose. If it’s written by an expert, all the better!