If you’re not familiar with the factors that influence your sites’ search rankings, you could be pushing your business further down the list of Google’s search results without even realizing it.
If your website falls under one of (or all of) the following four categories, it’s time to consider some digital marketing improvements if you want your website to rank higher in search results.
Duplicate Content
Let’s first start with the most important factor of any website: content.
If there’s one thing that Google loves, it’s fresh, new and unique content. Google is going to assume that the content you’re sharing on your website is unique and original to your business, not just scraped or borrowed from some other site. Having the same content as another website confuses search engines because they won’t know whose information is more important. In turn, Google has a hard time determining who should be placed higher in search rankings.
Trust us when we say that we understand how time-consuming and tedious it can be to find the time to develop thorough, keyword-rich content, but it is crucial for a successful digital marketing strategy. Copying and pasting or simply rewording existing content from another source is going to do your business more harm than it will good, so find the time to develop unique content to make your brand stand out.
Besides, you don’t want to promote your business to be the same as some other place. You should be highlighting certain things that make your brand different from your competitors. By using your brands’ unique voice in your content, the writing process will come naturally.
Slow Page Speed
Ranking higher in Google search results means so much more than simply delivering the most relevant results to searchers based solely on quality content. Google also focuses on delivering the best experience possible.
I think we can all speak from experience when I say that when a website loads slowly, you’re likely to get frustrated and leave the website. This is exactly what Google doesn’t want you to do. That’s why your chances of ranking higher in search results also rely on the speed at which your site loads.
In 2010, Google began incorporating site speed as a factor for search rankings. Luckily for digital marketers, there are a plethora of helpful tools that easily measure site speed. Some of these tools even point out specific problem areas that may need to be addressed.
Missing an SSL Certificate
Recently, Google has implemented their latest step toward making everyone’s online experience more secure through the use of SSL Certificates. Wondering what an SSL Certificate is, aren’t you?
SSL Certificates bind together domain names, organizational identity and location. By installing the SSL Certificate onto your web server, you automatically initiate a more secure session within browsers.
The more simplistic way to break that down simply means that instead of your website saying http://www., it should read https://www., which stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure. Google marks websites with HTTPS as “Not Secure,” which immediately will deter visitors from browsing your website.
So, if your website is not secured with HTTPS yet, now is the time to start reconsidering things…
Lacking Mobile-Friendly, Responsive Design
As the marketing efforts continue to shift to the digital world, it is essential that your website is mobile-friendly. People are increasingly using mobile devices, such as smartphones, tablets and iPads as their primary access point for the Internet.
Google has even come out and said that they plan to actively demote websites that are not mobile-friendly and strongly recommends that websites begin using Responsive Website Design (RWD).
RWD is the approach that suggests the design and development of a website should be done with the user in mind, meaning your website should readily adapt and respond to a user’s behavior and environment based on screen size, orientation and platform it is being viewed on.
