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Many factors go into determining a website’s ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). Today, we will discuss five lesser-known factors that could affect your website’s SEO rankings. These factors are important to keep in mind when optimizing your website for search engines because they could just affect performance.
User Experience
This might be an unknown SEO ranking factor for now, but it’s about to become a huge ranking signal. Earlier in 2022, Google announced that it would be using a new algorithm called the “Page Experience Update” which takes into account factors like load time, interactivity, and visual stability. In other words, Google will be looking at how users experience your website when they land on it.
So, if you want your website to perform well in SEO rankings, you need to make sure that it provides a good user experience. This means having a fast load time, being easy to navigate, and having interesting and relevant content.
Social Signals
Similarly to how backlinks act as a signal of trust, social signals can act as a signal of popularity. In other words, if your website is being shared a lot on social media, Google will take that as a sign that it is popular and relevant. What’s more, you could just get punished if your social media accounts are inactive.
The better the presence on your social channels, the more likely you are to improve SEO rankings. Make sure to post high-quality, shareable content, and be active on all the important channels for your audience (the platforms on which they are present). While it was previously the case that posting once in a blue moon was better than no channel at all, it’s time to rethink this strategy.
Page Authority
While the jury is still out on whether author authority plays a role in SEO rankings, there’s no doubt that page authority does. This metric, which is mainly determined by the number and quality of inbound links to a given page, signals to Google that a certain page is important and should be given a higher ranking.
To improve page authority, focus on link building. As the USA’s leading SEO agency will tell you, the more high-quality inbound links you have pointing to your website, the better your chances of ranking high in search results. Yet, you can also pay attention to the other factors that affect page authority, such as the number of social interactions, the amount of time spent on a page, and so on.
Old (Outdated) Content
As a business, you’ve probably come a long way since you first launched your website. And as time goes on, your website will continue to change and evolve; this is why it’s important to keep your content fresh, relevant, and up-to-date. If you have lots of stale content on your website, it’s going to reflect poorly on your business and could even hurt your SEO rankings.
One way to do this is to regularly update your blog with new articles. As well as helping to improve your SEO, it will also give your readers something new and interesting to read. But this doesn’t mean that your old content should just accumulate dust in the background. Every so often, it’s a good idea to go through your website and freshen up any old articles and delete any that no longer apply.
HTTPS
Lastly, we want to finish on something very simple that you might not have thought about before – your website’s security. Google has stated that they prefer websites that use the Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS). This simply means that your website is using a secure socket layer (SSL) to encrypt any data that is being transferred. If you’re not secure, your higher risk than other websites means that Google will prioritize others.
