Google SEO is what we focus on the most, because Google has an overwhelming majority in the search engine space.
Google Search Engine Ranking Factors
Google ranking factors include:
- Keyword usage – areas such as Title Tags, URLs, heading tags, etc.
- Internal linking – the volume, anchors and relevance of your linking inbetween pages on your own website.
- Inbound linking – the relevance, authority, and anchor text of links from other websites to your website.
- User Experience signals – metrics like bounce rate, click through rate, conversions and dwell time, can have an impact on your rankings.
- Schema.org – this can affect what type of result is shown in Google results.
Google Algorithm Updates
Google regularly updates their algorithm to make results more relevant, and to stop SEO’s from manipulating search results.
Some of the recent updates include:
- Google Panda Update: Panda was all about content quality, and aimed to remove low quality and duplicate content pages from the search results. It is often a sitewide penalty. It can be as a result of the content on linking pages.
- Google Penguin Update: Penguin is all about inbound links from poor quality websites, and the over use of certain anchor text.
- Google Medic Update: the Medic update was all about EAT (authoritativeness, expertise and trust) mainly for high impact industries (known as “your money or your life”).
- Google BERT Update: BERT is a natural language processing engine that Google uses to understand queries using the sentences around them.
Monitoring Google SEO Results
The best way to monitor Google SEO results is to use Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools).
You can monitor the clicks, search impressions, average click through rate, and the average position; of your website on a page by page, country by country, by device, and by query basis
You can monitor this by 7 days, 28 days, 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, 18 months, or a custom range in that bracket. You can also compare past and present results.