Like most people, you probably use search engines on a regular basis. If you’re a business owner, you likely want your website to appear at or near the top of search engine results. What you may not know is how search engines rank websites in results. 

You do have some control over your website’s ranking through search engine optimization or SEO. However, there are factors that search engines consider when ranking websites. You should be aware of these to improve your search engine ranking and SEO strategy. 

Here are four factors that search engines consider when ranking websites:

1. Discovery

Your search engine optimization strategy is centered around helping both potential visitors to your website, and search engines find it online. While people use keywords to search for your website, search engine bots discover it by “crawling.” It discovers your web page and takes note of all of the content on it.

2. Relevance

Once a search engine bot discovers your website, it indexes it. To do this, it decides how relevant the content you’ve created is to search queries using keywords. These keywords are ones you’ve chosen and included within your content. 

One way to improve your ranking is to create high-quality content on topics you want to be known for in your industry. You can do this by keeping a blog. A blog provides search engine bots with plenty of content to crawl and readers of your blog with information that answers their questions. 

3. Authority

Once they crawl and index your website’s content, search engine bots rank your content in search results based on your SEO authority. By authority, we mean that you’ve built credibility through backlinks and other factors search engines consider when ranking sites in results.

How do you determine authority?

When determining if your content has authority, ask yourself the following questions:

• Do others talk about your content a lot on other platforms like social media?
• Is your content referred to a lot on other websites?
• Do other authors cite your content in other works?

If you can answer “yes” to any of these questions, your content has just the amount of authority it needs to rank in search engines. However, this doesn’t mean you can ignore the other factors.

For example, if your content is relevant but not authoritative, then it has a lower chance of ranking. If your website can’t be discovered in the first place, it has no chance of ranking at all.

4. Core Vitals

One important factor in SEO that has earned a lot of attention recently is a site’s core vitals. You may want high-quality images and videos on your site. However, you may not realize how that impacts your SEO rankings if those images drop your site’s page speed and core vitals.

What are the core vitals of a website?

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

Whether a page, article, or image, the largest contentful paint is the largest content you have on your site. Directly related to page loading speed, it measures the time it takes to load the largest content on your website. Ideally, this should take two seconds or less. 

First Input Delay (FID)

The FID measures the time it takes for your website to respond to a viewer’s clicks. Responsiveness and interactivity are essential to your website’s SEO. This is where the first input delay comes into place as those using your website expect it to be quick to respond to actions they take on it. 

Cumulative Layout Shift

Good websites have stable pages even when a user moves from one page to another. Cumulative layout shift measures how stable every element of your website is. It makes sure functions do not move to a different place while the page loads while preventing users from clicking the wrong button.

Fortunately, these core vitals aren’t difficult to test for. You can easily run a report using Google’s Search Console. This report gives you insights on how to improve your core vitals and your website’s performance as a whole. 

Want to Improve Your Search Engine Ranking?

Being found by both people and search engine bots on search engines is the key to your website’s success. Considering what goes into ranking websites on search engines, you may be wondering how to improve your ranking. If so, we can help. Contact Links Web Design for a free consultation today! 

Links Web Design is a Search Engine Marketing Agency in Bangor, ME, and Fruitland Park, FL.