Factors You Didn’t Expect to Affect Your SEO (But They Do)

Invariably, if someone mentions the term “search engine optimization,” most people’s first thoughts will go to keywords. That isn’t wrong – keywords are a major cornerstone of SEO and they’re an important way to allow search engines to categorize your page correctly and get it in front of the right searchers. But SEO is far more complex than keywords alone.

At McCauley Marketing Services, our SEO specialists have been helping our clients climb to the top of search engine results pages, or SERPs, since the early days of the web. We’re consistently studying the latest in SEO and the ways Google’s algorithm and other search engines’ algorithms are evolving, so we can say from experience that there are many more factors impacting SEO than you probably realize. Take a look at a few of these important factors that impact your SEO more than you might expect.

User Experience

Much of search engine optimization makes more sense when you look at it from Google’s perspective. Google wants to provide its “customers” (searchers) with the best experience possible, and that includes sending those searchers pages that will give them the information they want in a smooth and satisfying way. Of course, this means that Google will give higher rankings to pages that will provide their audience with a good user experience (UX).

For that reason, your site’s UX can help or hurt your search engine optimization. Your site needs to be efficient and easy to navigate. Also, because the majority of Google’s traffic comes from mobile devices, your site needs to be mobile-friendly and have a strong mobile user experience.

Your Pages’ Loading Speed

There aren’t many issues that are more annoying than a slow website, especially now that lightning-fast loading is commonplace, so everyone is used to pages that load quickly. That will affect Google’s users, so they’ll rank pages higher if they load more efficiently.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that a fast website will make up for low-quality content or vice versa, and it doesn’t mean that the fastest-loading site will be ranked first each time. It does mean, though, that if your site loads slowly enough to impact the user experience, it will drop you lower in the rankings than other pages that have similar content and load quickly.

The Structure and Writing Fluency of Your Content

Keywords are used as triggers to help Google figure out what a site’s content is about. While that’s still important, Google’s algorithm is getting more and more intelligent every year, and it’s reached the point of differentiating well-written web content from the poorly written content. If your content is written in a way that is engaging and natural, Google recognizes that it will be more enjoyable for users to read, so it boosts your page in the rankings.

The structure of your content can help you in a similar way. A giant block of text is tiresome and most readers won’t sift through it all. Content that is broken up with subheadings and smaller, more manageable paragraphs will be more desirable for readers and, as a result, more desirable for Google.

Site Security

Cybersecurity is always in the backs of users’ minds, and Google wants to make sure as many users as possible can have a comfortably safe experience. This is why certain aspects of cybersecurity will affect your Google SERP rankings.

Primarily, you need to have a valid SSL certificate and your site needs to be on HTTPS instead of HTTP. If you don’t meet these basic security benchmarks, your pages will probably be ranked lower than competing sites that do fit those criteria.

Improving Your SEO, One Piece at a Time

Strong search engine optimization comes from combining a collection of practices and strategies, all of which make your site easier for Google to categorize and provide a better experience for your users. This takes time and in-depth expertise in SEO. We have mentioned a few here, but there are countless more. To get your search engine optimization on track, call McCauley Marketing Services and schedule a meeting with our team. Follow us as well on Facebook and Instagram for more marketing tips.