The ever-changing Google search algorithm means that you constantly need to tweak your SEO strategies to rank higher on the search engine results pages (SERPs).

With over 200 ranking factors to consider, it can get tough to keep up. What makes it even trickier is that not doing so can cause your website to get downranked. 

But are there some ranking factors that matter more than others?

Yes.

In this post, we examine the factors that you should pay more attention to if you want to improve your website’s rankings on Google.

Let’s dive in.

Important Google Ranking Factors

Here are the most important ranking factors for Google that you should know.

1. Page Experience

In 2020, Google announced that page experience signals would affect rankings come 2021.

But what are page experience signals?

They perceive a user’s experience as they interact with web pages. This means optimizing for the user experience factors across devices and browsers and meeting user expectations.

But which factors does this include?

• Core Web Vitals: These quantify vital aspects of a visitor’s experience which include website load time, interactivity, and content stability during loading.
• Mobile-friendliness: How easily can users use your site on any mobile device?
• Safe browsing: Your page has no malicious content.
• HTTPS: Visitors can safely visit and use your site.
• Non-intrusive interstitials: Your site has no pop-ups that prevent the user from accessing the main content.

Image via Google

So how do you optimize for this ranking factor?

If you’re still in the beginning stages of creating your website, ensure that it adheres to all the page experience factors before launching.

If you already have a website, conduct an audit, adapt to the new changes, and double down on your optimization efforts.

2. Quality Content

Content on your website should help users, increase the time they spend on your pages, and lower bounce rates. It should also meet their needs, help them solve pain points, and appear on platforms they frequent.

Sounds tough to achieve, right?

It’s not.

With carefully considered and strategic content plans, you can inform, engage, delight, and support your audiences. Having such a plan also allows you to create every piece of content with the following factors in mind:

• Search intent: What is the purpose behind the search?
• Keyword research: What phrases do they use during a search?
• Voice search: How do they speak when they search using voice assistants?
• Rich snippets: Can people easily access your information, and does it offer practical solutions?
• Visuals: Do you have visuals that can make it easy to understand or consume your content?
• Length: Does your content give an in-depth look at topics your audiences need answers to?

3. Backlinks

Backlinks, in a way, give your website a vote of confidence. They send signals to Google that your content is trustworthy and authoritative. That’s why getting backlinks from high-quality sites can boost your rankings.

However, not every link to your site can help you boost rankings. Your backlinks should only be from relevant and high authority sites.

But how can you get quality backlinks?

Start by auditing your backlinks using either Google Search Console or other analytics tools and root out any spammy links that may be affecting your link profile. 

You can then look for high-authority websites in your niche and approach them for guest posting opportunities. Alternatively, you could also look for broken links on such websites and create relevant content so that you can pitch the webmaster and ask them to replace that link with yours.

Some of your readers might be happy to link to your resource if they find it useful too.

4. Google My Business

To rank for local searches, it’s critical to optimize your GMB (Google My Business) listing.

But how?

Well, here is a refresher on how to optimize your GMB page:

First, confirm if you have a page or create one. Then add basic details to the profile and verify your ownership.

Once verified, head over to your GMB dashboard and complete your profile by adding all the information a customer may need when searching for your business on Google. This includes your business description, hours of operation, images, product categories, business address, phone number, etc.

But why go through all this?

Having a GMB page increases your visibility. It makes it easy for your target audience to find you on Google Maps and through Knowledge Graph, and also when they conduct “near me” searches.

What’s more?

It’s also an excellent place to engage with your audience. You can stay in touch with them by replying to their questions and reviews.

5. Page Speed

With mobile-first indexing is set to officially kick off in March 2021, speed, especially on mobile devices, becomes crucial. 

So, if your website is heavy or loads slowly on mobiles, it’s likely that your website will be on the receiving end of this update.

So, what’s the best way to optimize the loading speed?

The following are tactics you can use to ensure your site loads fast:

• Choose a website hosting platform optimized for speed.
• Enable GZIP compression.
• Enable browser caching.
• Have your JavaScript and CSS files minified.
• Upload media files only after optimizing them.

Ready to Rock Your SEO This Year?

Getting your website to rank may seem like a challenging undertaking. However, taking care of the issues mentioned above can have a significant impact on your rankings.

Offer users exceptional experiences, create content that offers solutions, and prove to Google that you are an authority on the topic. Also, make sure that you work on your page speed and create and optimize your GMB listing for the best results.

Do you have additional questions about any of the ranking factors mentioned above? Get in touch. We can offer customized solutions that can help you boost your rankings.

As you can see in the screenshot below, the popularity of affiliate marketing has risen steadily during the last decade.

Image via Statista

Given that it can be a great source of passive income, it’s popularity shouldn’t really come as a surprise.

For brands, partnering with the right affiliates can help them reach a larger audience and promote their products to bigger and new audiences. 

For you, for each sale made via your affiliate link or promo code, you can earn a commission.

Without putting in extra effort, you can boost your income via affiliate marketing. However, to get the maximum ROI, you need to be strategic in your approach.

In this post, let’s take a look at how you can optimize your affiliate marketing campaign.

4 Effective Tips to Optimize Your Affiliate Marketing Campaigns

With the right mix of planning and strategizing, it’s possible to increase your profitability and get more out of your affiliate marketing campaigns. 

Here is what you can do to boost the ROI of your affiliate marketing campaigns:

1. Define Clear Goals For Your Affiliate Marketing Campaign

Have you tried getting somewhere without entering the final destination in your GPS? 

It can be confusing and tough. Similarly, if you start working on your affiliate marketing campaign without a clear vision and goals, it can be difficult to achieve them. 

So, the first step towards optimizing your campaign is goal setting. 

Consider what you would like to achieve in a defined time frame. Take into account your skills and resources, and make sure you set realistic goals.

Also, don’t confuse goals with wishes. Your goals are more concrete. They are time-bound and provide specific details about what you’d like to achieve.

Here are some goals that can impact your affiliate marketing campaign’s profitability:

• Increase your content’s impression count in X months by Y% 
• Increase the conversion rate of your affiliate marketing campaign by X% in Y months

As you can see, these goals are all measurable. They make it easy for you to track them and ascertain whether you were able to achieve them. 

If you are opting for native advertising, it’s all the more important to define these metrics beforehand. Why? Because measuring the performance of native ads isn’t exactly a cakewalk.

2. Compare Different Affiliate Programs

Amazon Associates, CJ Affiliate, PeerFly, and more — there are a lot of different programs for affiliate marketing out there. They make it super easy for anyone out there to get affiliate links. 

While you have a lot of options available, not all of them might be worth your time and energy. Before you sign up for an affiliate program, invest time in filtering out your choices so that you choose the right ones for you.

For the vetting process, it’s important to have a clear understanding of who your target audience is and what they might like. Additionally, make sure your the affiliate products are relevant to your audience.

Image via Amazon Associates

A common mistake that many affiliate marketers do is to pick the affiliate programs that offer the highest commission rates. But the first thing you should check out is audience compatibility. 

If the audience of the program isn’t related to your target audience, you’ll have a hard time generating any income.

On the other hand, a network that offers low commission but has a target audience related to your brand can still help you boost your revenue.

3. Check All Your Traffic Source Options

On the front of traffic sources, there is a lot of campaign optimization that is possible. The good news is that it’s also easy to work on it. On the flip side, what you can do depends on your traffic sources.

Some of them allow you to purchase traffic on the basis of the type of device used while others are more specific. They will only provide desktop or mobile traffic. 

You can also add custom variables and then pass the relevant data to your affiliate program. For instance, some sources enable you to send information like the placement type from where your traffic comes. Without setting it up on the side of the traffic source, you can’t get it done.

Also, if you can block or pause some traffic types in your traffic source, do that. You can then make a report which can help you evaluate the kind of traffic that matters.

Let’s say, you have a pop-up campaign for desktops and mobile devices. If you want, you can pause your traffic source based on its incoming source (desktop or mobile) and the network connection. 

4. Analyze Your Test Results

Test your campaign and wait till you collect a significant amount of data. Once you have it, check your numbers and assess whether you need to change your tactic. 

To optimize your campaign, you may want to leverage landing page CRO or change the offer to cut out a sweeter deal for your target audience. Sometimes, your landing page might work well on desktop, but may not show the same results on mobile devices. 

You can also optimize your campaigns based on different types of browsers, ISPs, OS versions, and other such factors.

Remember that adapting your strategy to the response that you get is the key to optimize your affiliate marketing strategy.

Pro Tip: Use specialized tools to analyze your affiliate marketing campaigns.

Ready to Optimize Your Affiliate Campaign for Profitability?

Affiliate marketing offers a ton of opportunities to earn passive income. If you’re planning to create an affiliate marketing campaign, make sure you optimize it well. That way, you can get the most out of your efforts.

From the onset, you should be clear about what you want to achieve. Clear realistic goals will help you stay focused. It will also help you determine the KPIs that are important to measure the success of your campaign.

For optimization, you can focus on the traffic sources, landing pages, as well as the offers that you give to your target audience. Lastly, you should test your campaigns and change your strategy as required.

Do you have any questions about optimizing your affiliate marketing campaigns? Please mention them in the comments section. 

However, it can be challenging to measure their performance and justify the expenditure of hosting them. 

At the same time, you can’t ignore the metrics since they reveal how well your events performed and how you can improve them. And, they help you figure out which channels and promotion tactics work well with your target audience. Plus, they reveal the topics, hosts, and interactivities that resonate best with and engage attendees.

All in all, the insights that metrics provide can help risk-proof your digital events.

But which metrics should you measure?

Read on.

6 Metrics That You Should Be Tracking for Your Digital Events

Your event goals may vary, but there are some universal metrics that you must monitor. They help you gauge and compare, in hard numbers, the performance of your events.

These metrics include:

1. Click-Through Rate (CTR)

CTR is one of the most important metrics to measure.

Why so?

Because the CTR:

• Helps you plan your targeting.
• Identifies the channels and content that are getting maximum engagement.
• Highlights if your call-to-action (CTA) is compelling or needs improvement.

An unsatisfactory CTR means there is a fault in your content, channel, CTA, or targeting. Before your future events, you can dry-run with variations until you achieve the desired CTR numbers.

Related: How I Increased My Adsense CTR by 400% in 3 Weeks with Adngin

2. Registrant Count

The next metric you need to measure is the registrant count. It is the headcount of people who register through your event landing pages.

Why does it matter?

For all of these reasons:

• It shows if your landing page design and copy are resonating with the audience.
• It indicates if your promotional campaigns are driving traffic or not.
• It is required for calculating the registrant-to-attendee conversion numbers.

If your registrant count is lower than expected, this suggests that either your promotional campaign or your landing page are ineffective. You can experiment with different landing page designs and more resultful outreach methods to engage more attendees. 

3. Registrant-To-Attendee Conversion Rate

Measuring the registrant-to-attendee conversion rate should be next on your list. To get this number, divide the number of registrants by the number of attendees. Then, multiply the answer by 100.

But why does this metric matter?

The registrant-to-attendee conversion rate:

• Shows how many registrants attended the event.
• Consolidates the viewership of live and on-demand events.
• Indicates if your audience is genuinely interested in the topic.
• Helps you understand if your email reminders were well-planned or not.

Not all registrants will attend your event. A high registrant-to-attendee conversion percentage shows that most people who signed up were genuinely interested in your event. It also indicates that the email reminders you sent to attendees were well planned and successful.

What’s more?

If the event is paid, the registrant-to-attendee ratio helps you put a figure on the dollars you earned from it. If the turnout ratio is too low, you might need to revamp your drip campaigns.

4. Average Viewing Time

Another important metric for digital events is the average viewing time. To calculate this number, divide the cumulative viewing time of all participants by the number of participants.

Analyzing average viewing time helps you to:

• Figure out if your event was well-received and engaging.
• Determine the right duration for future events.
• Understand the engagement level of the audience.

A low average viewing time indicates high drop-offs. This could be a result of uninteresting content, too-long events, or ineffective formats or hosts. You will need to do a post-mortem analysis of causal agents and rectify them in future events.

5. Engagement Rate

There may be many attendees who remain logged in throughout the event, but with little active participation. The engagement rate metric identifies the most active participants and the most engaging activities. 

What does that mean for you?

If you find certain interactivities produce a phenomenal response, you can repeat them in your next events. Your sales teams can hyper-target deeply-engaged attendees with relevant follow-up content and offers. 

Related: 5 Tips to Help You Boost Engagement on Social Media

6. Return on Investment (ROI)

Last but not least, keep track of the event ROI. 

But how?

Calculate the profit by deducting investment from revenue. Then, divide the profit by cost, and multiply by 100 to find the ROI in percentage.

That’s it, folks!

These six metrics can help you measure the outcome of your digital events. If you need more information on metric measurement, check out this infographic by FLOW:

Why so?

They lack the requisite budget and technical skills. Owing to these constraints, SEO is often an afterthought for startups. They are often so involved in coping with competition and establishing their brands that they forget to reap SEO benefits.

Topping the SERPs (search engine results pages) is arguably one of the best ways to drive web traffic and build brand authority. After all, 75.1% of all clicks for a Google query go to the top three search results. The click-through rate (CTR) increases by 30.8% if you move up one spot on the SERPs.

If your startup is languishing at the bottom of the SERPs, you can’t hope to stand out among the big players in your niche. Only 0.78% of searchers move past page one on Google.

Don’t get me wrong. I understand that startups can’t invest much in SEO. The SEO strategies that work for bigger businesses are not a viable option for you. That’s why you need to stick to the SEO fundamentals. 

This means understanding what matters most for search engines (key ranking factors) and focusing on those. 

Sound good?

Then, here are some low-cost, quick-return SEO tips that every startup owner needs to know.

4 SEO Tips that Every Startup Needs to Leverage

Yo get the best results, SEO should be tackled during the foundational stages of brand building. But this does not mean your SEO strategy can’t be refined during later stages. 

But how?

Just master these four startup friendly SEO hacks.

1. Invest in a Fast Hosting Provider 

After Google’s Penguin update, ranks are governed mainly by the user experiences (UX) of website visitors. Page speed is one of the top factors that determine your site’s UX. 

Nothing frustrates click-happy users more than sluggish websites. Slow-to-load websites give a poor first impression and have high bounce rates.

Need evidence?

A Portent study found that with each additional second of load time, the website conversion rate falls by 4.42%. According to the research, websites that load between 0-4seconds have the highest transaction rates. 

Image via Portent 

If your website achieves the ideal load time, it can retain visitors longer and prevent them from going to competitors. You deliver value at a glance, which means instant gratification for visitors. 

Couple that with valuable content, and your website’s dwell time skyrockets. To Google, all this indicates that your website is providing a great UX and deserves a better rank.

Page weight or the total Kilobytes transferred (images and everything else) is not a drag on page load anymore. Most developers have learned to “minify” their code using GZIP compression. 

Then what?

Invest in quality hosting providers like Hostinger and Bluehost that leverage cutting-edge technology to compress your site content. Using clever tricks like asynchronous Javascript loading and image resizing, they minimize your load delay. 

If you prefer a more hands-on approach, use Google PageSpeed Insights to audit your site. The tool identifies lazy-loading elements and offers improvement suggestions.

2. Start a Blog and Create Quality Content

Content is at the very core of SEO. Quality content that satisfies user intent gets a lot of traction and elevates your rank organically. If your content gets tons of engagement, your small business can edge into the SERPs. 

Of course, apart from creating stellar content, you also need to publish it on the right channels and promote it aggressively.

There are many SEO benefits of content marketing. 

Like what?

Linking your content to high-DA (domain authority) websites in your niche indicates topical authority and builds your backlink profile. This is a good sign for both Google and consumers. 

If your content is share-worthy , your brand can make a mark on social media. Your startup can enter the big leagues if your posts impress influential social media users. 

If big-time influencers and industry leaders engage with your content, you earn a competitive edge. This again improves your standings on the SERPs.

Last but not least, you can repurpose successful content without too much additional expenditure. This way, you can cater to varied audiences and rank on different platforms. 

In short, with a one-time investment in crafting content, you keep drawing organic traffic.

Blogs, in particular, have proven SEO benefits.

Don’t believe me?

“Successful” bloggers (those earning > $50K yearly) tend to prioritize SEO. While crafting content, they are 4.3x more likely to research keywords than their less-affluent peers.

Image via GrowthBadger

So, jump on the blog bandwagon if you haven’t already. To maximize your blogging returns, follow these best practices:

• Prepare a content strategy with well-defined goals and metrics. If SEO is a priority, track target keywords and SERP positioning.
• Write with your audience in mind. Dig into your CRM system, subscriber list, and follower profiles to understand your audience better. Create detailed buyer personas.
• Once your content is ready, distribute it adequately. If your website draws little traffic, leverage the reach of syndication websites like Mention.
• Publish regularly if you want to build steady readership. 

3. Choose the Right Keywords and Optimize for Them

While selecting keywords to target, opt for long-tail keywords that contain three or more words. 

For example, if you are writing about weight loss tips, target keywords like “best tips for weight loss” or “how to lose weight quickly.” These are easier to rank for than shorter keywords like “weight loss” and “weight loss tips.”

Why so?

Three reasons:

• Fewer people target long-tail keywords, which means lower competition and more opportunities to rank.
• They closely match the actual search queries people type or speak into Google. They attract high-intent, qualified traffic.
• They are cheaper to bid for in pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. By targeting them, you can stretch your advertising budget.

Image via Instapage

In a nutshell, you can justify your SEO investment by leveraging longer keywords.

To dig into the exact language your audience is using in search queries, you can use search-listening tools like AskThePublic.

Image via AnswerThePublic

Include the keywords in your page copy, URLs, meta descriptions, headlines, and image file names. But don’t force them in if they don’t fit naturally in the content flow. 

Long keywords fit best in long-form content. So, don’t restrict yourself to short, snappy posts, especially if you want to draw Google traffic.

4. Leverage Local SEO Techniques

If your startup caters to local audiences, you need to nail local SEO.

Confused?

Let me explain with an example.

A searcher looking for “movie theater in Seattle” will likely see three search results in a separate box, above the organic results. This is called the “Google snack pack.”  

Results in the snack pack are Google My Business (GMB) listings. If you create a great GMB listing for your startup, you can figure in the Google snack pack and improve your CTR. 

Local searchers have high conversion potential. This means local SEO can boost your conversions as well. That’s why ecommerce startups should pay special attention to optimizing their GMB listings.

Want a pro tip?

To tie your SEO efforts with conversions, integrate SEO with omni-channel marketing. 

When all your touch-points – emails, websites, post-sales messaging, and push notifications – are optimized, you can improve your organic ranking and sales. You can use tools to streamline your marketing efforts end-to-end.

Ready to Do SEO like a Pro?

SEO tools and tactics for startups should be light on the pocket and easy to implement. That perfectly describes the tips and tools mentioned in this post. As your revenue and budget expand, you can try more advanced SEO methods like paid guest posting on prominent websites.

Do you need more help with your SEO? Leave your requests in the comments below. I’ll get back to you soon.