In the modern day, almost all types of businesses rely on online sales, some rely solely on it. Online marketing for businesses is directly linked with how search engines like Google perceive them or rank them in their search results. Everyone working with or interested in search engine optimization (SEO) knows the importance of search rankings and their impact on sales and profit for businesses of various kinds. However this is easy said than done. To achieve top spots in Google’s search rankings at times can be as hard as it can be because of the boosted competition in the modern day.

Once good ranking are achieved, businesses really feel the difference in terms of how many potential customers and actual customers they can reach out to. Here are a few irreversible rules for boosting Google’s search for businesses.

1: Website’s Speed

One major search engine ranks defining factor on Google’s SERPs is the website under consideration’s speed. Google’s algorithms weights each contributing factor differently when it comes to site speed. Quick local loading times is one thing, you have to optimize your website in the international arena for best results as well.

Tools like Google’s Page Speed tool work perfectly to analyze the speed and give you an idea of where your website’s speed is at. In case the website is not loading quickly enough, implement CDN (content-delivery network) to load pages quicker across the world. AWS Cloud Front by Amazon works great as well. Load times can be significantly improved with page and browser cashing tools like W3 Total Cache. Google’s AMP can speed up mobile page loading times as well.

2: User Interface and Experience

The user interface and experience are of great concern for Google. This is not even new at all, many algorithms in recent times focused on high quality user interface and experience for the users. Some good methods of improving user experience include limiting ads usage above website’s fold (meaning the area that is visible without having to scroll down on the page), making navigation and jumping quickly to important sections easier and faster and staying away from tactics like sneaky redirects, content cloaking or others.

The main point is that Google’s algorithms focus on how easy the website is to scroll for users and what important information can they gain without having to spend much time thinking on where to find it.

3: Domain Authority

Domain Authority also called importance of the domain is not simple at all and needs to be addressed in all SEO implementations. The complexity needs to be analyzed deeply because some blogs or pages have low domain authority but still do pretty well on Google’s SERPs.

The thing to always keep in mind is that it is not always important that how many links go into a domain but their quality is often more important. The worst part is that this just can’t be put right overnight but domain authority is generated over time. The quality of the inbound links should be focused on rather than their quantity. Quantity might yield short-term results but for long-term better results quality is prime. Short term results don’t get the website anywhere in SEO. Be patient and keep working on the quality of links to improve domain authority.

4: Quality of the Content

Ask any SEO Expert and they will tell you how important content quality is. It is considered to be the “backbone of SEO” for a reason. How well the content is written, often translates to how well the site is ranked. Grammar or spelling errors can really destroy the quality of the content in the eyes of Google’s crawlers. Unique, new, relevant and correct content gets appreciated by all the search engines the most. A few years ago, the quality could be compromised and exchanged with quantity, but as if right now, the main focus from Google is on quality.

5: Length of the Content

Although above we have mentioned on the importance of quality, the length is important to some extent as well. A good article should always contain 2000 words or above in order to get the point across successfully. Only when the domain authority is high, you can get away with shorter content, but when lengthy content is combined with high domain authority, basically a golden chance of ranking high is awarded.

Most outlandish content can also range up to 10,000 words or even more but the middle range or around 2000 words is perfect for most scenarios.

6: Focus on Keywords

The other most important factor in content and SEO are the keywords. Any good SEO company will guide you to finalize the most suitable keywords for your website. Higher number of keywords can range in several hundreds however there is no recommended number on their quantity. This is mostly a quality related thing and the quality of keywords will decide how often your website will get hits from users searching in Google.

7: Presence of Multimedia

Modern audience rate the presence of informative and easy to gobble multimedia presence on webpages. This means that video or slides based content should be present on each webpage preferably in order to make viewers understand the point much easily. This gets boosted more by Google looking for ways to improve understanding of the non-written content such as videos and audios and most definitely images.

8: Engagement and Depth of the Content

Turning our heads back to the content quality again, it should be really engaging for the audience in a way that whoever starts on it should not think about leaving it without finishing the whole article or page’s content. This can be achieved when the content is deep and has well thought out constructive information in it. Try to pre-structure content before attempting to write it in a way that it is constructive and has a clear top down structure going on.

9: Mobile Friendliness

There is no denying that mobile is huge in the modern day. Smartphone searches have long trumped laptop searches and all the webpages should be made mobile friendly in order for Google to rank them higher. There should be a separate mobile friendly page that displays all the relevant information in correct places and loads it quickly as well. Google rates this highly when awarding ranking points to pages and websites.

10: Add Relevant References to the Content

The content should never be completely reference or citing free. All great content is researched somewhere from some already written webpages or websites. This doesn’t mean that there should be a referenced link in every line or even every paragraph. One article should have about 4 to 5 references in it and that is all it takes to research a solid topic of content as well. Additionally, when there are references in the content, Google’s spiders consider it as authentic and well-researched content and rank it much higher in the rankings as well.