Top 10 factors that could affect your SEO rankings on Google in 2020

Factors that affect SEO rankings could be a long list, an SEO expert can really keep writing about them till infinity. But still, quite a few are a myth, still tested, failed, tried and applied to improve your SEO rankings on the search engines.

So, we’re going to take a different approach. Rather than listing 200+ ranking factors, we’ll talk about the top ten promising factors that we think most deserve your attention in 2020.

Let’s take a quick look at the topmost pointers that will help you to give you a different approach towards SEO, where we are not going to talk about myths but the facts that would definitely boost your SEO Rankings. 

1. Table of Contents

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   Quality content

Quantity plus quality of the content is the key to rank on Google. Now don’t get confused here, long content does not mean quality content. Google desperately wants to help it’s users to land on the right information. That’s what Google as a search engine wants to serve. All you have to do is make sure the content that you write has all the right information which Google wants to show to its users as they are reaching with keywords. If you work it out in this manner this will not only help Google and its users but also it is good for your own website.

2. Mobile-friendliness

This is 2016 and internet surfing has just taken away by the number of people searching on mobile more than on the desktop with a storm. If you are reading this article from your phone sitting on the train, just take a look around you to see how many people are actually using their phone, this is a smartphone century. Ok surely they all must not be actively browsing the internet, some would be texting, taking selfies to upload it on social media, but if they get stuck with whatever they are trying to do, what they do?

Right, they Google it on their phone, about how to do it? Or similar questions, that’s how they land up on blogs or other helpful websites. And of course while traveling some might be in hustle so while they Google it, the website masters must make sure their users don’t face any challenges while surfing through their phones. And if you think it doesn’t really matter then you must know that recently Google launched a mobile-first indexing strategy, which means that Google will rank first on the basis of the mobile version of the website and then desktop.

So go and fix your mobile version, right after you complete reading this entire article. Also do take help from Google’s Mobile-friendly test just to make sure you are not missing out on your mobile audience over your desktop users.

3. Page Speed 

Since we started doing SEO, page speed has always been one of the most important factors. All Google wants is to give its user a lightweight fast loading experience to its users, and you can’t ignore it, otherwise, you might not reach the top if you fail to do so. There was an official announcement in July 2018 from Google about a search engine algorithm for mobile page speed which could penalize if you ignore the page speed. Also, there is an amazing testing tool from Google itself that will help you to test your page loading speed.

4. Keyword Frequency

To investigate the mystery of search engine algorithms one needs to think like the crawlers responsible to rank websites on SERP. These Google bots check for sentences and words used often within the content to understand what this content is about and how will this help its searchers.

Say you have a post with a 1000 word article about the latest mobile phones and the word “Samsung Mobiles” occurs 50 times. Here the keyword density would be 5% for the phrase “Samsung Mobiles”.

Based on the keyword density search engines try to understand or assume, that the page is about a specific topic.

The keyword density is calculated using the formula:

Formula for keyword density is: Keyword Density = (Nkr / Tkn) x 100

Nkr is the total number of times a keyword repeats in the article, and Tkn is the total number of words that Google’s bot crawls and understands on the entire page.

Let’s try this with an example, if your article has 500-word count and there is a keyword repeated say 15 times, then the keyword density is calculated as 3. 

This is how it works:

Keyword density = (Nkr / Tkn) x 100 = (15 / 500) x 100 = 0.03 x 100 = 3

Always use the latent semantic technique to repeat the keywords, make sure the keyword density is close to 1.5 to 3.5%. 

Note for aspiring bloggers: Don’t just try to stuff keywords in the sentences, you will make it as real and easy to understand for the crawlers as well the readers. This is a highly responsible task and not any tom, dick and harry can do it. Only if you are serious about blogging, you will take up this challenge. So a piece of sincere advice would be, do blogging only if you are passionate about it. Else don’t waste your time stuffing keywords simply to monetize and earn. 

5. Create Rich Cards

Schema structure is definitely useful but now we also have rich cards to structure the web page on Google. Google wants to give it’s users more appealing information visually. A search result that is easy to understand and overall giving a fine search experience on mobiles too. This is how Google plans to surpass desktops over mobile to share information that benefits the searchers in 2020.

More than rich snippets and schema structure, rich cards help to enhance the Google search appearance. This will indirectly help you to boost your SEO rankings.

6. Meta Description

Just like the title tag, the meta description tag tells a lot about the page. Thus Google wants its user to understand a bit through preview or excerpt of what the webpage talks about. Keep it persuasive, that lets users develop that mindset to click on your website link in the search results. Make it stand out and informative at the same time. 

All Google wants is to highlight information that is easy to understand to the searchers on the SERP. Make sure the meta description is written in the most efficient way.  

7. Don’t miss H tags

The heading tags are what make the content in order, which makes Google fall in love with your content. The H tags start from H1 to H6. These heading tags make it clear for the readers and of course Google. Readers get a better idea about the paragraphs with the headings and subheadings, dividing the article into sections and subsections. 

8. Keyword Cannibalization

The more pages you target with a keyword would give you better rankings on Google. If you think this is how it works, you need to fix this right now. If you have more than one-page ranking for the same keyword it leads to “Keyword Cannibalization”. It is nothing but you are competing with your own pages to rank on the SERP.

Make sure you figure out those pages and fix them to avoid keyword cannibalization. 

9. Image To Text Ratio

To your surprise, media is directly proportional to the amount of text in your content. Readers share articles that have the right amount of media, which indirectly increases your website traffic.

As per a recent study, readers love to share articles that have Content with 100 words and 1 image. They might ignore content with lesser images and vice versa.

Bombarding your readers with a lot of text is like boring them. This could lead to an increase in the bounce rate of the website as well. You cannot put too much text with lesser images. Simply post images with few words when it comes to SEO rankings. This is the key to increase the number of readers, to make it look attractive. This will also make them share it across to other readers.

10. SSL / HTTPS

It is the most crucial part of keeping up the SEO rankings score in 2020. This helps in building trust with the readers. There is a free SSL company named “Let’s Encrypt SSL”, which has become the source of SSL for most of the blogs nowadays. 

A secured site has a Secure Sockets Layer(SSL) certificate which provides your website URL with Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure(HTTPS) designation.

Thank you for reading this article. Please comment down below your thoughts. Also let us know how did you find the article, which will help encourage us to keep writing more.

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