This is John Locke from Lockedown Design.
Today I want to talk to you for just a couple minutes about the things that can influence
your rankings.
Many business owners are interested in finding out what things go into the Google rankings
because they want to know what things they can influence to make their site rank higher.
We turn to a lot of tool to analyze things, and there's a lot of tools out there that
will tell you certain things.
There's at least 200 factors that Google takes into consideration in their algorithm that
determine where you're going to get placed on a daily basis.
Now, that number's probably low.
There's probably, actually, more than 200, but the three that they have identified in
the recent past as having a great amount of influence are the content on your site, the
links that go back to your site, meaning your backlink profile, the sites that are linking
into your site, and also something they call RankBrain, which is basically artificial intelligence.
Now, how RankBrain works is they use human quality guideline search raters.
They basically tell them to go out and do some searches and look at sites and evaluate
them.
They use this information that the human search raters look at in the sites, and they write
algorithms to try and mimic what human searchers are finding.
They're trying to write algorithms that duplicate what human beings would choose.
This RankBrain, this artificial intelligence is still in early stages.
It's probably at the intelligence level of a young child at this point, if you want to
use an analogy.
But, basically, what I want to focus on today are things that people get obsessed over that,
maybe, they make a little bit of difference and things that will make a bigger difference
in your rankings.
If you're going to focus on one factor alone to make your SEO go up, to make your rankings
go up, I would say focus on content first.
The content on your site is going to be the most influential thing you can put on your
site, and I would say have both educational and informational content as well as sales
pages if you want to rank.
Having just sales pages is not going to answer your customers' questions, so having both
information and sales pages will help go as deep as you can and create as much content
as you possibly can that answers customer questions that they might have prior to sales
and after sales.
The second thing that I would concentrate a lot on is getting relevant backlinks.
A lot of people in the past, they did SEO by just getting links from any old site, and
the most amount of links would usually win a result.
Nowadays, it's a lot more nuanced, and what you have to do is find relevant links from
sites that are closely related to yours.
If you're not doing link outreach or you're not having someone do link outreach for you
and link building, that's probably something that you should focus on.
Now, there are a lot of other factors in SEO: the way that your site looks, how user friendly
it is, how mobile friendly it is, the site speed, how fast it loads, Schema markup.
All of these things I would worry about once you get those two things in position.
They do influence SEO.
There are many, many things that add up into the ball of SEO.
The thing to remember: SEO is about incremental gains.
It's about improving what you can all the time and always looking for a way to improve
your site.
Doing all these little things, making sure that you have 301 redirects in place, making
sure you don't have any 404 pages, making sure your site loads fast and is mobile friendly.
All these things are a factor.
Making sure you have https instead of http.
All these things matter, but, above all, having content that answers the searcher's intent
and making sure that you have a robust, solidly built backlink profile of sites that are closely
related to yours and that are going to drive traffic, and this is the important part, links
that are going to drive traffic to your site.
If I would add anything else to that, I would say it's important to look like a brand, always
be building your brand.
The more that you work on that, being known in your industry, building out your brand.
Part of that is having great content, which is thought leadership.
These things are all important.
Just remember, SEO is not just a couple easy tick boxes.
You should be looking at the things that are difficult to do and the things that are hard
to scale.
The things that bigger brands do are things that you should be looking at doing as well.
When I say that, I mean thought leadership, which is content, and I mean building out
a robust backlink profile and looking like a brand.
Do all those things, have a nice looking site that loads fast.
You should be in good shape.
Always be working on that.
If you have any follow-up questions, you can always find me at my site, which is lockedowndesign.com.