Page Not ranking well or ranking went down on Google!
Have you ever experienced any of your web page that was ranking well in Google went down recently? or your newly created page/content is not ranking well on Google? This might be because your competitors have longer and quality content than yours. Google has its own ways to identify better content and promote it in the search results.
Content is the King!
I know this is true when it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Google values content more with its recent updates to search algorithm ‘RankBrain’ and ‘Fred’. I have noticed this when we were doing seo audit for a client at DigitalSoupMedia and i will tell you how longer and quality contents out perform short contents and how you can optimise the content in favor of Google search ranking.
A few months ago we partnered with a client who owns a website that is in a highly competitive niche which required great effort in terms of marketing. Up on our analysis we noticed that the pages with lengthy content are ranking for most of the related keywords. Later i found this to be an agreed fact by many experts in the SEO world. I found an article by Brian Dean of Backlinko which is a case study about factors affecting Ranking in Search. One of the main finding was that longer content tends to rank higher on Google search results and the average content length was 1890 words.
A page (internal landing page) of our clients website which existed for more than an year, the content was short and not of great quality. Despite creating many supporting contents and promoting the page in relevant websites, it was not ranking anywhere within 100th position in Google search. After analysing the competitors website, we found that the top ranking web pages were more of case study than promotional material and of good quality.
The content was improved and the result was great!
The page started showing up in searches for several keywords in Google. The page showed around 40th position in Google search results for the targeted keywords. Compared to where it was previously this is a huge change. This happened within 2 weeks of replacing the old content with the new one.
We did research on what the people were looking for who comes searching for the targeted keywords and other related keywords. We then tried to answer most of these questions in different sections of the content and thus we have a long content created.
The content was organized and presented in a way that it has most relevant content on top and the less important content below it under multiple subheadings. So the visitors can find the answers on the top and continue reading the other relevant subjects below it.
It is important for a visitor be able to navigate to different sections of the longer content in case he needs only read that portion of the content. For this, place hash tag links at beginning of article and inside article at apt places to navigate to a specific section.
It is found that Google likes pages with media in it. And there is high chance you could rank better in search rankings than the pages without media. So make sure you include at least one image or video in your article page. Also make sure to give appropriate ‘alt’ text.
The title and meta description tag are important to Search engine, since these two are what gets displayed in search results. Make sure that these tags are relevant to the keywords people are searching through so that they will click through to your page. If they don’t find your title and meta description relevant to what you are searching for they will skip away. So time spend optimising these tags are worth it.
This is an important thing to arrange the content in a way that it will keep the readers interesting and continue reading your content. If you place less important content which most of visitors are not interested in, there is high chance that they will move away from your page. To prevent this you can do a quick research on what the target audience are interested in and what they will come looking for in your content page. Then place the super important things on top and less important stuff below it.
Google considers external links as the pages that your content in the page is related to. So if you are writing about something place links that are relevant to this page and worthwhile placing as reference.
Google search is determined to deliver quality content to their users. So in order to pick the best contents they hired a group of people to manually review thousands of pages related to search results. Then Google developed a machine learning program to get the review done almost same as the human reviews done. So if your content is not of the quality or irrelevant your page will go down in search results.
This is an important signal that tells Google that your web page is relevant to what people are searching for. If your page get more click throughs than the ones on your top, you will be automatically get promoted to the pages ranking above you. This is mostly determined by Title and Meta description that i mentioned above in Improvements we did section.
This is another signal that tells your web page’s content is what people are looking for. If visitors bounce back from your page quite a lot then your web page might move down on ranking in the search results. The session duration also is a factor if visitors spend more time on your web page that means it is more relevant to the search and Google will sure increase the ranking for that page.
This is the most important factor which Google considers when weighing where to place your web page for search results. But beware Google also check the quality of the domain and page the back links are coming from. So your website pages will get value only if they are linked from quality and authoritative domain website pages.
Getting shared on social media like facebook, twitter linkedin etc. The social signals also include social bookmarking websites like pinterest, stumbleupon. Even though less weightage is given by Google to the social signals, it might get more weightage in future. Moreover Bing gives very high weightage to social signals. So you better get started with Social media promotions if you haven’t already. ;)
So what are you waiting for? Go and check if all these are done right on your web pages and take action today itself to fix this and get a better ranking in Google.
