Google Ranking Factors 2019 [Resources] – A Kenyan Guide

google-ranking-factors-2019

Given the amount of information available on the Web, it would be almost impossible to find what you need if they were not sorted. Google’s ranking systems are designed for that. They sort the hundreds and billions of search index web pages for the most useful and relevant results in fraction of a second, and they present them so that you find what you’re looking for faster.

For a search query in Kenya, there are thousands or even millions of web pages that contain potentially relevant information. How does Google.co.ke knows which results you propose in the search results? The process starts even before you enter your query in the Google search bar.

Helping user find what they want on the internet, that’s what Google’s search engine works. SEO in Kenya combines a set of techniques to improve the visibility of a web page in Google Kenya search results, positioning it at the top of the page of the results in the search engines according to particular keywords. But to do that you should know common technical SEO mistakes that most of the SEO’s in Kenya make.

Search engine simply understands the user intent and refine the best results that match the user’s query & shows it in their SERP. How simple is that, isn’t it?

Discover How Google Search Really Works?

how google search works

Google Crawlers Regularly Crawl Websites

Google Kenya stores all the web pages it knows in its index (database specific to google kenya). Google regularly performs a process of searching for new pages or updated pages to add, called exploration by the crawler (automated software that explores web pages and indexes them)

Google Use Search Algorithm & Ranking System

Google’s ranking systems sort the hundreds of billions of web pages in the search index to provide useful and relevant results. These systems rely on various Google algorithms that analyze the search and determine what information should be displayed.
To return useful information available on the Internet, Google uses search algorithms in different ways:

Understanding User Intent

Understanding the search query is essential. This is why Google analyzes the meaning of the terms that the user entered in order to identify pages that correspond to them.

Google uses techniques such as:

Interpretation of spelling errors

Automatic processing of natural language

The synonym management system

The analysis of the kind of information sought (opinions, photos, schedules and more)

Google Search Algorithms Determine Content & User Query

Google then searches for web pages containing information that matches the search query. Its algorithms analyze the number of times these keywords appear on a page and their location within the page (in titles, subtitles or body text).
In addition to keywords, algorithms look for clues to measure the degree of match between potential search results and the user’s query.

For example, when searching for the term “dogs,” you certainly do not want the results to return a page containing hundreds of occurrences of the word “dogs”.

The page should not only take up the terms of your request: it must offer you the desired answer. That’s why Google search algorithms determine whether pages include relevant content or not.

Search Engine Page Rank Algorithm & Implementation

For a query, there are thousands of web pages that contain potentially relevant information. In order to offer the best of them first, Google uses algorithms to evaluate their usefulness.

Google algorithms analyze hundreds of factors, some important of them are:

the content refresh level

the number of occurrences of the search terms

the ergonomics of the page

Taking into account the context

From search parameters from the location to the search history of the user.

All this information allows Google to propose the most relevant and useful results at the moment.

Google Search Engine Algorithm Work

Before presenting the results, Google evaluates the link between all the relevant information it has found. As the web evolutions, Google adapts the filing systems in order to return the results of better quality.

Without being able to say exactly on the operation of the famous SEO algorithm, we have concocted an article that highlights the most important positioning criteria in the eyes of Google.

Below are the key google ranking factors in 2019 that determine the results returned for your query:

search engine ranking factors you need to know

Content marketing is the means by which you will share value-added content for your audience. This will allow you to attract readers to your site if you are working on an inbound marketing strategy to convert your audience.

In short, it’s all about writing articles, key messages, trendy information, that will be of great value to web users and readers of your website. You will then create sharing scenarios on social networks and offer your audience white papers to engage your site which helps you in promoting your products or services.

The relevance of your content will be judged here as the possibility of obtaining a clear and precise answer through a content, following a request entered on Google.

It is also a question of soliciting the participation of your readers according to the contents which you will offer them:

Comments on your articles

Answers to a survey

Subscriptions to your posts on the blog and more

Thus, you will have a community of users who will read you regularly and who will be faithful to your website

All this so that they become the ambassadors of your brand and they talk about you on their social networks, offline networks (friends, family, acquaintances, etc.) or on other websites.

Search Engine Ranking Factors 2019

Well-optimized sites gain more and more traffic over a period of time, understanding that means more leads and sales. Without SEO, searchers or visitors won’t manage to find your websites, and all your hard work will certainly be for absolutely nothing.

SEO On Page is the set of techniques that must be implemented so that search engines (GOOGLE) reward your site more than other websites with the same keywords.

It is natural that if we are talking about “Web Design with WordPress”, our keywords are “WordPress web design”, but there are many other keywords that you can use to position your content. By that means you should use LSI keywords to give value to your content.

The use of LSI keywords can bring your old content into the light as well as improve the ranking and search results of your content. Its good to generate LSI keywords for a quality content strategy because that’s what Google loves.

To rank a page on a focus keyword, it is necessary that we use that keyword in the title of the page, in its URL, in the title and the subtitles of the text, in the text, in the names of the images, in their alternative texts.

Of course, over time Google’s algorithm has been improved with new SEO factors, so it has to be done more and more subtly. But the basic of SEO on page remained the same.

Off Page Link Building & Ranking in Search Engines

Off-page SEO simply tells Google and other search engines what other people think of your websites? For example, if you’ve received valuable links pointing to your web pages, search engines will assume that you’ve got great content – the kind of content that provides value to users by solving their query.

If your site or brand name mentioned on another high authority sites with the hyperlink, it will give value to your website within the eyes of search engine & thus it will improvise your search engine ranking too.

Good quality of Link building is quite difficult to obtain but by doing a little research and some efforts you can win this game and earn quality backlinks. You should learn the basics of quality link Building, because that matters more than quantity of link building.

Understand that Google Penguin, as well as other search engine algorithm, didn’t target or value websites that have loads of incoming links. Rather they give value to website’s that has quality backlinks. You must always use white-hat link-building techniques to boost your off-page optimization.

DimeHub is the perfect place to get professional SEO services in Kenya in order to perform well in organic search. The goal of DimeHub Kenya is to get a website to top ranks on popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing etc.

Brand Building Through Social Media Strategies

Social media works extremely well for a variety of reasons. Whether it’s social selling, content marketing or customer support, social networking provides you the ideal opportunity to reach your target audience and build your brand. Social Media Marketing (SMM) is the most powerful tool for digital marketing in the modern age.

As social media marketers, it’s very easy to concentrate on the content you share and grow your business followers. But take a second to analyze the connection between social media along with your brand first. Prioritize social media efforts will allow you to get in touch with your target audience, be a bit more strategic with the efforts and get better results.

Social networks have become very important for any online marketing strategy. Good social media marketing will greatly impact your positioning on social networks and will help you to create an affinity audience for your brand or business .

Your website generates branding and followers which will be helpful in the promotion of products or your services in Kenya.

Publicizing your own content (blog, news, events, etc.) on social networks helps generate brand awareness. Your ability to support any of these actions comes from your brand’s authority — and one of the best ways to build a brand is through the improvised use of social media.

How Does Paid Advertising Impact SEO

It’s not a bad idea to work with Google Adwords and Facebook Ads primarily when it comes to getting quick results. PPC advertisement in Kenya is among the fastest ways to increase website traffic and lead generation; you pay each time a visitor clicks on your advert.

Both apps have online paid advertising options that will not help you improve your search engine rankings, but will help you achieve other goals.

As you can see, getting a good position in the search engines and being able to appear in the top 10 is not enough. Your strategy must be comprehensive and well coordinated.

Optimize Google Search Engine Results Page

Many webmasters are trying to rank their pages as high as possible, forget about how their pages are presented in Google.

Yet being well positioned is not enough if your direct competitors have a more attractive presentation than yours. The minimum is that the title of your page and its URL are optimized, as its description (thanks to the meta description tag).

Definition: SERP stands for “Search Engine Result Page” Search Engine Result Page or how the results are displayed on the pages of Google’s engine.

But you can provide even more information, to allow Google to better showcase your site. And the search engine offers more and more possibilities in this area.

It includes images in the results pages, as well as videos, star ratings, addresses on Google Maps, and product listings with Google Shopping.

Looking after the presentation of your pages can earn you as much as winning 2 or 3 places for a very competitive keyword which requires very less effort (there are only a few tags to add on your page). You would be wrong to deprive yourself of it.

Improve Your Website Speed for Higher Search Engine Ranking

optimize your website for speed test
Since at least 2010, it is known that Google rewards the fastest sites with higher rankings. Google even has its own very accessible system for measuring and improving the speed of a website (Google Page Speed ​​Insights). It’s always relevant to bet that speed is important for Google.

47% of consumers expect websites to load in two seconds or less, and 40% will leave a page that takes three or more seconds. This means that if your site takes more time to load pages, you probably will lose almost half of your visitors before they even arrive on your site.

The better solution to this problem is Page Speed Insights tool. Enter a URL to test the page load time, analyze it. Be the first to know when your site is slower and it needs to optimize for better speed. Remember, websites having faster load time, have a better chance to get clicked = high CTR.

But this was confirmed only recently, in April 2018, when Google announced that it was using real data from Chrome users to see how fast a page was loading (as opposed to running software tests), a new indicator of the importance of the speed of a page for Google.

However, a very comprehensive study of thousands of search terms and websites shows that the speed of a site’s backend infrastructure is the only important part of the speed/rank equation and that the front end loading time (speed which the site is loading for users) had absolutely no effect on rankings.

So, the key element of this survey is to improve the loading time of the front end as well as the hosting of your site.

Also Read60+ Best Digital Marketing Tools for Small Businesses In Kenya

Ideal Content Length for Higher Search Rankings

Since a site that loads quickly is obviously good for usability, it’s not stupid to do everything to improve the speed of a site for the front as well as the back end.

Number of words Perhaps the most controversial topic about usability and ranking in Google is the number of words a page should contain to rank better. The list below illustrates some of the differences on this topic:

Forbes suggests that the number of words should be 600/700.

HubSpost found that the best-performing items are 2,250 to 2,500 words.

Whiteboard Marketing recommends a minimum of 300 words.

Backlinko has analyzed 1 million Google search results and found that the average of the first Google page contains 1,890 words.

MOZ also analyzed 1 million articles and found that nearly 85% of them did not attract shares on social networks and inbound links. The shared or linked contents contained on average 1000 words.

Ideal Content Length for Higher Search Rankings
However, these studies should be considered with caution. Rand Fishkin by Moz Compares These Studies to “Big Hits” and think that they are too simple to make judgments actionable and do not take into account the type of keywords, traffic or sectors analyzed.
Moreover, anyone with even basic knowledge about statistics knows the average margins of error.

For example, an article that averages 2,000 words can actually be calculated from a series of 20 articles each containing 200 words and an article with 38,000 words, which gives an average that does not really represent the nature of Series.

Domain Authority is Important

A controversial ranking factor. Although conjectures about the influence of domain authority on rankings are still debated, for years Google has not provided clear evidence one way or another.

However, it is possible to assume that Google wants to offer users the best possible experience, leading them to websites that are considered the most relevant and reliable. What does domain authority have to do with that? This measurement is based on multiple SEO factors (for example, many qualitative links), all with the aim of identifying reputable websites.

Therefore, a higher authority domain generally corresponds to higher rankings, although this is not a rule. Domains with a good track record in service for several years have earned their right to be ranked.

Domain Authority has a very significant role to perform in your website’s positioning on search engines. In case you have decreased DA, you’ll have to face significant losses of both low web traffic & down rank in searches. Therefore, It is extremely important to obtain good domain authority.

Dwell Time as a SEO Ranking Factor

The Dwell time is similar to the bounce rate but with an extra step: it measures how long the person stays on a website after clicking on a search result and then takes into consideration whether that user returns to the search results page for another option.

As its name describes it, this metric measures how long a user remains to Dwell on a specific result and if he then decides to consider another result from the same search.

We can deduce that a longer dwell time might suggest a more relevant result for Google and a shorter dwell might suggest oppositely. Remember, a dwell time is only valid if the user returns to the original search to click on another result.

We can see how much the dwell time differs from the bounce rate and how it solves the scenario. If a user clicks on a search result and does not return to the Google page to check the other results, then a “no dwelling” will appear and Google could still rank that page in the first results, even if its bounce rate is high and that the time spent on the page is low.

Improvise Your Local Search Ranking in Kenya

local seo in kenya
Several factors related to your Google My Business listing will have a big impact on your local SEO rankings. If you do not do anything else, you should visit Google My Business to claim and complete your business listing.

Determine your NAP (name, address, phone number). It is important that this is consistent on the web. The NAP you use here should be the same as the one on your website and other business listings.

Correct setting and verification of your Google My Business listing will help your local prospects to find you.

Fact: 97% of consumers use the Internet to search for local products and services.

And with 140 billion local searches in 2018 (a figure that has grown rapidly), many prospects might be looking for what you offer. Imagine if they found you!

The results of the search engines are influenced by criteria that evolve regularly in an effort to answer increasingly relevant to the user. The geographic context is an element which has gained importance and must be carried out into consideration by companies & organizations which have a delimited catchment area on a sector. Local SEO in Kenya involves setting up an SEO strategy to provide visibility in accordance with geographical criteria.

Improve Voice Search Rankings

voice search optimization strategies to boost your seo
Voice research drastically facilitates the user experience – and by 2020, half of the online searches will be done with voice search.

Due to its prolific use, search engines like Google put more emphasis on optimizing voice search. Indeed we can note that voice search is democratized for different uses:

The speed of loading a site in voice search is faster.

Google promotes short loading times of a site.

This is all the more true in voice search and it remains today a factor of classification unavoidable. Indeed, users want to get an answer as quickly as possible. As a result, any company that aspires to rank in voice search must verify that its site is loading quickly.

The answers you offer to your users should be brief and concise. The average answer given during a voice search is around 30 words. So be sure to make your answers become systematically short and accurate.

In addition, Google Voice search recommends that you write content that is simple to read and easy to understand.

Finally, positioning yourself in the featured snippets, on the 0 position, also benefits the ranking of your site during voice search.

Mobile-first Indexing

preparing your website for google mobile first index
Since 2016, the web giant has clearly announced that it favors, in the search results, websites with a mobile-friendly display.

To be concrete, this means that if your competitors have a mobile-friendly site and you do not, they are likely to overtake you, no matter what other SEO efforts you deploy next.

Indeed, if your site is not mobile friendly, Google will continue to establish its ranking based on the Desktop version. The 2 indexes should coexist for a period of about 5 years before leaving a clear place in the Mobile Index.

But when we know how much Google likes to surprise us, so it is better to take quick necessary steps to make your site mobile friendly. You must do this to satisfy your potential mobile customers who are still struggling to navigate your site.

One of the key directives expressed by Google concerns the content and the main markup of the site which must be identical on both versions, Desktop and Mobile. The goal is to provide a consistent user experience on these two devices. If this is not the case, then your site may be significantly impacted.

Optimize Your Website for Mobile first Index:

You can visit Google Search Console, here you can add and verify the mobile version of the website.

Verify the data with the help of Structured Data Testing Tool to make sure that same structured markup exists on your desktop and mobile site.

You have to make sure that your mobile site is accessible to Googlebot with the help of the txt testing tool.

The most important thing is to test your page speed using PageSpeed Insights. If your page is loading slow, use an auditing tool to find and fix uncompressed content, page errors, and other elements that might be slowing down your website.

Understand No Follow Links and Search Ranking

The purpose of the nofollow attribute is to inform the search engines that the owner of the site where the link is located does not want to be associated with the landing page. The nofollow attribute is often used for backlinks that have been purchased and for links to profile pages or blog comments. These links have not been “earned”, so they are not credited.

Within a site, the nofollow attribute is used to tell the search engines not to follow a link and not to assign a value to it. Product filters are a good example of using the nofollow attribute for internal links. The filtered product pages are not interesting for search engines.

A link with the nofollow attribute conveys less authority. Note, however, that this does not instantly make links with the nofollow attribute useless. Millions of sites have it. It’s normal to have some of these, they are part of the normal baggage about links.

Https as a Ranking Signal for Search Engines

Security is a top priority for Google & its trying to make the Internet safer more broadly. An important part of that is ensuring that websites people access from Google are secure. For instance, Google has created resources that will help webmasters prevent and resolve security breaches upon their sites. Now a growing number of webmasters adopting HTTPS.

For such reasons, Google is running tests considering whether sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in search ranking algorithms. Search engines considering HTTPS as a ranking signal. In the meantime, it’s just a very lightweight signal — affecting fewer than 1% of worldwide queries, and carrying less weight compared to other signals for instance high-quality content — while webmasters have given time to switch to HTTPS.

But as time passes, search engines plan to strengthen it, because search engines would like to encourage websites which are switching from HTTP to HTTPS in order to keep everyone safe on the internet.

Reasons Your Website Should Be on Https:

SSL Certificates serve to ensure your website security

It improves search engine ranking for your website

Your website’s customer consider you as a trustworthy brand

SSL certification greatly improves the speed of the website

The user experience becomes better on HTTPS websites

It helps to encrypt vulnerable information

And now that you know better the positioning criteria?

Overall, after this analysis, we note that content and backlinks are ranking factors valid for all sites, regardless of theme of the website.
If you have to concentrate your efforts on two points in particular: these are these two! Then comes accessibility with responsive particular or purely technical performance as accessibility or loading time of the site.

Also Read10 Top Web Design Trends in Kenya For 2019 You Can’t Ignore

5 Top Resources for Google Ranking Factors

Needless to say, Google is popular, and marketing professionals looking to get good results on organic search results. To achieve this, they need to know what factors Google takes into account when classifying content.

With as much effort as we put in optimizing the content for the search engines, we would think that we would already know exactly what the Google ranking algorithm considers when it crawls the pages on the Internet.

But we do not, and we can not, mainly because Google has never publicly included all the factors it takes into account when classifying content.

According to the Top 5 Google ranking factor resources, there are factors related to the domain, on-page, off-page, and numerous SEO technical factors that contribute to your website falling on the search engine results pages (SERP) of Google for the various keywords related to your industry.

Here are the top 5 resources for Google ranking factors:

Northcutt: Google Ranking Factors

northcutt-ranking-factors
Corey Northcutt’s company presents the most useful source of ranking factors.

The main problem with lists of the most popular ranking factors is that the concreteness of the factor may be questionable and opinionated.

This is a very useful tool with a scientific approach that allows you to filter down to the level of evidence corroborating every factor from a patent filed to the wild speculation by Google itself, the ultimate confirmation.

Edit Agency: Ranking Factors

edit-agency-Ranking-Factors

Edit Agency (merged with Branded3) started with the study of Moz’s ranking factors in 2015 and is based on its own internal team.
They polled with questions similar to what Moz has asked in the survey, but they also took into account some of the testimonials from clients based on their previous work experience.

Some of the most lucid quotations from their findings:

“If your page is irrelevant to the query, but mostly does not meet the user’s intent, you don’t rank.”

“When you put a page live, the question you should ask yourself is: ‘how to be assured that the searcher won’t click the back button?’ You know more about your business and services than anyone else and now it’s time to prove this to the users.”

“We are absolutely convinced that links are the most important ranking factor. But building links are not easy, it’s a very difficult task. The hardest part is to get people to link with you. It is difficult to determine the exact value of an individual link.”

The two parts of their own research that we truly appreciate the most are those easiest things to implement and the 10 things they believe are not important for ranking:

edit-easy-confident-ranking
These two elements are exciting and different from what have not seen in most articles of seo ranking factors

Moz Ranking Factors 2015

moz-ranking-factors
It’s old in the world of SEO but Moz’s given ranking factors have been one of the pillars of the SEO industry. There are so many factors in the list have not changed.

Unlike the studies conducted in previous years, they execute a correlation study on “17,600 Google keyword research results.” Their work for the scientific approach to correlation is appreciated.

In addition to the keyword correlation study, they also conducted a survey of 150 SEO professionals.

moz-survey

We would approach the results of this survey with a little more caution because they depend a lot on the minds of the participants to be correct.

Roger Montti SEJ Posts

roger-montii-sej

Roger Montii’s Martini Buster is one of the first blogs we came across during our search for ranking factors.

We have been so fascinated by some of his algorithm findings and have added many sites to bookmark.

In fact, his 200 ranking signals were found to be more effective than ever before. His post determined us to think differently over the interaction of all the signals and which ones to really prioritize in recent years.

Montii continued his obsession right here on Search Engine Journal. It is one of the more prolific posters on the updates of Google’s ranking factors which made it our recent favorite article from Montti.

These important factors and quotes by Montti were Google Discusses Ranking Factors:

“If you look at the search engine results pages, you’ll find that the top-ranked sites do not always have the most links, so what is it?”

This indicates that ranking for Google is not based on making a list of ranking factors, it is actually based on creating a web page that corresponds to that list.”

Montti explains the importance of thinking about the user and their goals, rather than trying to tick the box and say that you have reached a ranking factor.

It’s a strong reminder that Google is a machine learning to constantly test user satisfaction, and it’s no longer operates in this simplified ranking factor model.

Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors

periodic-table-seo
This resource by Search Engine Land is one of the best ways to visually see how the ranking factors for positively and negatively affecting one another.

Although it was last updated in 2017, it still covers a high percentage of known factors and is a great resource for new SEO trainees or non-SEO marketing teams to understand the complex combination of factors.

It also highlights some of the more negative factors such as cloaking and keyword stuffing.

Also Read🥇How To Find The Best Digital Marketing Agency in Kenya?

Summery

The 4 determining ranking factors of Google at the present time:

The quality and relevance of the content, both in substance and in form,

The relevance of backlinks,

The authority of a page and by extension of its domain, which are intimately linked to their link profile,

Ranking factors with content, technique and UX.

However, keep in mind that these positioning criteria are not fixed. Their nature and importance vary constantly. As always in SEO, what was true yesterday is not true today and probably will not be tomorrow!

Now you have all the cards in hand to better understand how Google’s ranking algorithm work and identify the main criteria that influence the positioning of your site on the SERP!

Now it’s up to you to play: all you have to do is work on your SEO accordingly! If you lack the time or technical skills to carry out your project, our SEO agency in kenya can help you achieve your goals and earn you positions in the SERPs.

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