If you are in the online marketing and SEO it is important to know about Search Engine Positioning. Even if you are running an online business understanding the Search engine positioning can be beneficial for your business too.

Why?

According to Internet live stats, we can see the number of daily searches on Google – 3.5 billion. It is huge no doubt!

So if you are positioned in the optimum places in the search results for your targeted keywords related to your business you can gain a substantial amount of online traffic which can directly bring you a lead(customer) or sale online.

 What is Search Engine Positioning Really Means?

It is nothing but the is the rank of a piece of content of your website /business in the search results.

For an example when I searched the term “Europe” in Google, it returned me the following results (The Google search ranking is specified as 1,2,3)

This may be the non-paid organic results or may the PPC (Pay per click) ads results it does not matter.

Not necessarily it has to be a website, but anything related to your business. It may be your Google My Business Listing or any other online business listing which can connect your customers to you.

In SEO world we call it SERP(Search Engine Results Pages ).

The higher you rank in SERP the better you are positioned in the Search Engines.

According to Advanced WEB RANKINGS, websites occupying the top 3 positions in the search engines, always get the maximum attention from the visitors.

Image Credit:Advanced WEB RANKINGS

Perhaps if you can grab the first position in the search results it can nearly grab you 30% CTR  alone. This is significant for any type of business. The CTR rate declines for the 2nd and 3rd position and so on. The lower you rank in the search results, the lower your visibility is.

How Far Down the Search Engine Results Page Will Most People Go?

According to Moz ,page one delivers an overwhelming CTR of 71% compared to 6% page two and three combined.

So there is a very little chance to get a click if you do not rank in the first page in the Search engines.

It is this simple!

How Can You Improve Your Search Engine Positioning?

Firstly I will not confuse you and want to clear the fact that improving the search ranking or even achieving any search ranking is not easy. But it is not impossible!

The tricks and tips which used to work 5 to 7 years back are not effective these days. Google has become a lot smarter and intelligent. They have a world class team complemented with a highly sophisticated mechanism to ensure the search quality.

The ideology is simple!

If users love your content then Google will also love you. Google is pressing more about the “user intent” and if you want to optimize for Google please your users first.

Gone are the days when stuffing a lot of keywords here and there can make the job done for you.

According to Backlinko, Google evaluates roughly about 200 signals for the search ranking.

Google now puts 100% of their efforts to satisfy their users.

If you examine the list minutely you can find many factors like mobile usability, Helpful “Supplementary Content”, Multimedia etc are important signals that directly impacts the ranking. But the main approach is entirely moved to user-centric characteristics that matter.

Backlinks Still matter

Many people think backlinks are dead. But it is not the case. Strong and relevant backlinks are still the backbone of the web and it directly impacts the search positioning in any case.

Linkless mentions

Linkless mentions are new but surely gaining the momentum. If your brand is mentioned just with your names then it also works almost like a link. Google is slowly treating them as a strong authority to rank your pages.

No-follow Links are  No Waste

Many believe that the only links that are counted towards any Serch Engine Optimization strategy are do-follow links as they directly pass the link juice and authority to the destination website.

For example, if you can get a no-follow link from Wikipedia, is it worth enough? The answer is Yes. It is a thousand times stronger than any other do-follow link from an average domain. People trust Wikipedia. So when they found you there they strongly believe that you have some authority to be there.

Content-Length Matters

If you have to choose any one factor for search engine rankings than content should be the main focus.Because no matter how well you have done your SEO, no matter how well you have designed the website if a user comes to your website and doesn’t found what he is looking for then you are bound to fail.

So producing high-quality content is always important.

When it comes to content it is not enough to produce content but you have to produce long-form content also.

According to a study from Backlinko, the average Google first page result contains 1,890 words.

So if you are writing content then make sure to write more words. If you can write a high-quality long-form content once a month, it will bring you greater results than many short chunks of articles.

Page Loading Speed

No-one likes slow loading pages. So make sure your website loads fast and the load time should remain under 3 seconds. If it takes more than that, users will surely bounce from your website. This will trigger the red flag to the search engines and may negatively hurt your search rankings.

My suggestion is to use a responsive theme. Enable image compression, HTML compression for your website. Use external CSS as much as possible. This will make your webpage lightweight and helps to load a lot faster.

Maintain the site freshness

Google loves fresh content. Though Google recently denied the ‘publishing frequency’  a ranking factor, it is always recommended to have a blog in your website where you can post fresh content.

It makes your users come back to your website again and again and send a strong positive signal to Google which will result in higher rankings.

Mobile Optimized

Having a mobile optimized site is a must these days as Google now prefers mobile-friendly websites in their search results. Google is also penalizing being not, mobile website. With the introduction of Mobile First Indexing and AMP(Accelerated Mobile Pages), mobile is more important than ever.

SSL Certificate

Google is very serious about security. Google has made SSL certificates a small ranking factor. Though not highly effective as backlinks but websites with SSL enjoys a small ranking boost from Google.

Last Words:

Hope you have enjoyed our post about ‘search engine positioning’.I hope the above tips will help you to achieve good search engine rankings.SEO is changing and more likely a place similar to the stock market where nothing is constant.

So if you find some other ways to improve the search rankings please let us know in the comment box below!

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