May 3, 2017

Did you know that many SEO experts believe Google uses over 200 factors when determining where a website ranks in their search engine? It’s true!

Most people who have done research on search engine optimization probably already know some of the main factors. I spoke of several of them in my presentation at the University of Windsor – EPICentre back in March.

Well-known SEO Factors include:

• Attaining quality backlinks
• Content creation
• Optimizing META information
• Sharing content on social media

While these factors continue to remain some of the most important factors in SEO today, there are several other small factors that people often miss or undervalue. These small factors are the ones that differentiate the websites that appear on the first page of results vs. the websites that show up on every other page.

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of users who navigate to a website and then “bounce” or leave the website after viewing only one page. It is believed that having a low bounce rate is very beneficial to how a website ranks on search engines. Search engines use bounce rate as an identifier of the quality of content on a website as it relates to its keywords.

If a user visits a website and visits multiple pages, that user must have found the website for which they were searching. If a user visits a website and leaves after a few seconds, that user didn’t find the website for which they were searching and returned to their initial results. The ideal bounce rate is 0% but in reality that isn’t possible. Try to shoot for a bounce rate between 15-35%.

Pro Tip: Find your website bounce rate within Google Analytics under Audience > Overview.

Load Time

Having a website that loads slowly due to unnecessarily complicated programming code, scripts or poor server load times can be a huge detriment to a website’s search engine rankings. When Google sends a user to a website via their search, the last thing they want is for that user to have to wait 5+ seconds for the website to load. Often times users will quickly return to the search results and move on to the next listing.

Hosting a website on a dedicated server with no bandwidth sharing is recommended, as is minimizing scripts and using rich-text instead of images when possible. The ideal load time for a website is between 5-10 seconds on a desktop device and 7-12 seconds on a mobile network.

Pro Tip: Test how quickly your website loads by visiting this website.

Bullets and Numbered Lists

Sounds trivial right? Why on earth would the search engines care if the content on a website uses bullets and numbered lists? And yet, they do! Bullets and numbered lists are easily readable not only for the users reading the content but also for the search engines. Same goes for the use of separate headings for various sections of articles (similar to what I’ve done in this particular blog post).

When appropriate, a website should use bullets and numbered lists when structuring content, especially on pages that have 200-400+ words. They help break up the content for readers, making them more user-friendly and easy to digest.

Pro Tip: Use as much formatting as possible when writing blogs. Headers, blockquotes, different font weights and font styles will all help identify the important content from the not so important content.

User Reviews

While it’s not an exact science, often times websites which receive positive user reviews (either within Google Reviews or another review website like Yelp), rank higher in search engines than websites which receive no reviews at all. Google has noted in the past that it is taking user reviews into consideration when ranking websites. How much consideration – only they know.

Take ownership of online reviews by registering accounts on all major websites that include user reviews. Respond to all reviews in a polite and professional manner regardless of the nature of the review and encourage clients and customers to leave reviews at some point during the sales process.

Pro Tip: Registering your business with Google My Business allows you to answer all reviews left for your business on Google.