Ranking Factors: Onsite

Slight adjustments to your business website can give you a major boost in +. On-page signals like the presence of a name, address, and phone number (NAP), having keywords in titles, and domain authority play a major role in your website’s ranking on search engine result pages (SERPs).

Search engine optimization (SEO) occurs in an organic ecosystem. Each piece of code on your website ties in, either directly or indirectly, to your website’s performance and how you will ultimately rank on search engines like Google and Bing.

Whether you’re building a website from the ground up or refreshing your company’s website with the latest best practices for SEO, there are a number of things you can do to boost your local marketing performance.

Top Onsite Ranking Factors

The onsite ranking factors that matter most for brands are:

1. Content

The content on a page is what matters most when it comes to search results. From an SEO perspective, good content supplies a demand (serves a purpose for website visitors) and is linkable. Good content is also optimized with the right title tags and header tags, along with smart internal linking.

As a best practice, the purpose of the web page should be stated in the title tag, the URL, the content of the page, and the image alt text.

2. Technical Structure

Technical structure impacts user engagement and keyword rankings. Technical structure is so important for onsite ranking that it’s considered the foundation of SEO.

To make sure your website is indexed, you need to let search engine crawlers have access to the links in your sitemap. The practice of interlinking is very important, and you should make sure that your website has a sitemap that’s been submitted through the Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

Clean URLs are important from a ranking perspective, as well. For the best chances of boosting your search engine ranking, you should run a crawl of your website to uncover any problematic status codes and fix any links to broken or redirected pages.

Schema markup is critical as well. Schema markup is code that identifies the meaning of your content and helps search engines return informative results. Schema markup helps search engines use your content to create rich snippets and provides answers to voice search queries.

3. Interlinking

Interlinking impacts crawlability, user experience (UX), content, and link building. As your business grows, your website will probably grow too, and maintaining a consistent and solid interlinking structure can become difficult. As a best practice, you should plan on periodically conducting crawls to find any orphaned pages that are not being indexed and you should use links strategically within content to pass along webpage authority.

4. Mobile Responsiveness

When it comes to onsite factors, maintaining a website that is responsive and performs well on mobile devices is one of the most important things a brand can do. Google’s mobile first index has become its primary ranking index. When implementing a responsive website design, focus on mobile usability and fast page load. Also keep in mind the dimensions of smartphone device screens and other considerations for users on mobile devices. Some website publishers will want to make use of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) code that can cause Google to feature your content on its own specialized AMP pages, which often rank at the top in mobile search.

5. Page Speed

Site speed, as well as the speed of individual pages you want to rank for, are important ranking signals. Speed alone may not help your site outrank the competition, but slow page loads will impact both ranking and the degree to which Google and other search engines crawl content across multiple pages on your site. Pages that aren’t indexed have no chance to rank in search. Slow page speeds can also dramatically affect user behavior — users will bounce more quickly and convert less often when pages are frustratingly slow.

Because the factors that influence onsite ranking can be very complex, most businesses now are choosing to work with companies like SOCi to enhance their websites with the latest SEO techniques.