Google Website Ranking Explained

All you need to know about Google ranking. How it works and what you can do to get your website ranking higher for better results and smooth business growth.

Have you been wondering why your business website isn't ranking on the first page of the search engines, where you hoped it would?

Well, since Google’s inception in 1998 businesses have been vying with each other to try to get to the top of the search results and SEO specialists have more or less figured out the science to this cyber mystery. (Check out this Google SEO guide to learn more too - it's designed for beginners).

Since Google dominates all other search engines with over 5 billion searches per day, it definitely matters how well you rank on this particular search engine. In this blog we hope to shed some light on the essentials of Google rankings. We’ll do our best to explain in simple terms so you can apply some of these insights to your own business and get ranking higher in no time.

HOW THE GOOGLE ALGORITHM WORKS

An algorithm is a set of rules or processes that a computer must follow. It’s put in place by computer programmers and can be highly sophisticated, as is the case with Google algorithms.

When someone types a search term in the Google search bar, Google's web crawlers will scan the entire web for information that is relevant to the search and rank them according to the algorithm. You may have noticed that if you misspell a word, Google will still return relevant results. This means that the algorithm is smart enough to understand your user intent.

Google algorithms also take into account your searching context and search history to determine your search results. For example if you type in ‘disability provider’, the algorithm will return results in your geographic location without you having to enter it.

WHAT ARE GOOGLE'S RANKING FACTORS?

Google algorithms give each search result a score based on what is known as Google's "ranking factors" to determine which websites rank well and which don't. There are more than 200 ranking factors and Google doesn't make these publicly known, but SEO specialists have been able to gain some insight into this after years of research. Here are ten ranking factors that are considered to be among the most important.

✔ Website security (ie. an SSL certificate)

✔ High quality content

✔ Length of content

✔ Page loading speed

✔ Domain authority

✔ Mobile friendly website

✔ Keyword optimisation

✔ Clear, easy-to-follow structure

✔ Quality backlinks

✔ User experience

PAGE QUALITY

The quality of your website refers to several things, including the quality of the content, keyword optimisation and the structure. Google ranks the most reliable sources higher, so ensure that your content is well researched, informative and includes quality links to other reliable sources. (Again, if you're a 2Brownies client, we've already taken care of this).

Structure is important so that web crawlers can easily go through your page to pick up the relevant keywords, so make it as clear and logical as possible.