With the tremendous increase in businesses going social, it's challenging to stand out from the crowd and gain free organic traffic where everyone pays for traffic.

Google has thousands of  SEO ranking factors, but following these mentioned ranking factors in 2021 will skyrocket your traffic as well as your search results.

So, keep an eye on these SEO ranking factors in 2021 to stay competitive.

Top 6 SEO ranking factors

Content 

Content is the primary SEO factor to be considered while deciding the rank of any website.

Gone are the days when Google used to analyse your page based on how many times you have used keywords. Now, it majorly focuses on-page content and checks if your keyword is present in your URL, Title tag, Image ALT text, H1 tag, Description tag, etc. which you all are aware of.

Now, apart from checking content the search engine also checks your context.

Google's primary focus is to show the best search results to its users, and the best result isn't content stuffed with keywords.

The best content is not that is filled with keywords but content that covers the entire topic in depth.

Pages with in-depth content cover the entire topic in detail and provide all related information in one place.

Google searchers get the most relevant information all in one place without running to other websites.

If you follow an optimised content creation process for your website, and if it has in-depth information, you will get more traffic and your ranking will increase. 

How to write great content:

Writing great content is an art. Knowing how important is content to your page ranking, follow these steps to optimize your content.

• Start with getting information on what is trending in your industry and select your topic. You can use buzzsumo.com to know the popular topic in your niche. It will also help you in getting backlinks from other sites and also will boost your page rank.
  
• Create content that is fresh, unique, and valuable
  
• Create video and design infographic as a part of your content
  
• Try to use case studies and real-life examples
  
• Add LSI keywords to your content
  
• Make sure your blog follows a proper structure, has H1, and H2 tags,  numbered/bulleted list for a proper organisation

What are LSI keywords?

LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords are words and phrases that are relevant to your topic.

LSI helps Google and other search engines to study and compare relationships between different terms and concepts. These LSI keywords improve website traffic and create more visibility and ultimately, higher rankings in search results.

How to find LSI keywords? 

You can find LSI keywords by just typing your target keywords into Google or any search engine.

The highlighted words and phrases in your search result descriptions are your relevant LSI. Those words are closely related and expansion of your original keywords.

Second, Google your target keyword. Then check out the “Searches related to…” section at the bottom of the search results.

For example - type Keto diet

Source: Google

Look at the end of the page; the highlighted words are your LSI keywords. Select keywords relevant to your content.

 Source: Google

Third, you can use Google keyword planner for LSI keywords.

You can also use a tool - LSI Keyword Generator  to get LSI keywords by just entering your target keywords and hitting the button "Generate."

Enter these LSI keywords in your content and allow it to get discovered by search engines.

Structure of the website

Having a properly structured and well-planned website is an important facet of SEO. Ensure having a website with a separate page defining the reason for being, that is, why this website exist.

Place different products/services/offerings under different sections and have sub-sections underneath. This makes the website look neat and easy for Google to crawl and index those pages.

You should have a sitemap of your website ready in WordPress. This lets Google know all the pages and index them accordingly.

Source: Yoast

Alternatively, you can also assist Google in navigating and indexing your web pages with the help of a robots.txt file. This file helps Google bots know which pages to crawl and which not to.  

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)

Web page speed is also going to play a crucial role in determining your page rank. Apart from the content and the website loading speed, Google now considers how mobile-friendly your content is.

AMP is one of the top SEO ranking factors which is going to impact your rankings in 2021.

In simple words - AMP( Accelerated Mobile Pages) is a Google product, for a better and faster mobile browsing experience.

AMP focuses on minimizing the page loading time to very few seconds, making customers browse information faster on their mobile phones.

Make your content consistent across mobile phones and desktops by embedding AMP in it. 

Video and other visual content

Youtube is the world's 2nd largest search engine and is getting bigger day by day. From a survey report, people spend more than 60% of their time on Youtube.

It's an easy way to attract more traffic to your page. Ensure having video-optimised content on your website.

You should also start embedding videos in your blog post to get more traffic and leads.

The SEO-optimised video makes your content gets seen by your customers quickly. It also increases your CTR which is also a significant SEO ranking factor.

Google Owns Youtube, which gives a greater reason for it to rank video optimised content higher on Google search engines. It has also started to show videos when you do an image search.

For example -

When I searched for Youtube WordPress, the first four results were of youtube videos.

 For best results embed video to your content and make sure it is unique and is yours. Also, insert this video into your website to get more views depending on your traffic.

Other visual content including infographics, memes, gifs, bar charts and graphs, presentations, and images, is playing a significant role in SEO ranking factors.

There is a high growth in including visual content on your website, and it seems to grow more in 2021.

Visual marketing has become an essential part of the content. Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram are playing a major role in making visual content more famous.

Content with embedded images and infographics has a higher CTR than content without any visuals.

Embedded images also help you in getting backlinks from other sites.

Core Web Vitals

Google has come up with a novel concept of “Core Web Vitals” for a website, which speaks about a URL’s performance vis a vis these 3 core website metrics: 

Loading (LCP - Largest Contentful Paint)- the total loading time taken by the heaviest content item on the web page, such as a video or an image.

Interactivity (FID - First Input Delay)- It includes the time calculated between the user's very first click on any multimedia element of the website and the website's response time to that click.

Visual Stability (CLS - Cumulative Layout Shift) - the sum total of all individual layout shifts occurring on the website, in the entire life span of the website. A cumulative score of 0 means there is no layout shift, which is good news with regard to the user experience. It means that while the user was active on the website surfing through different elements and pages, there were no layout shifts.

Ensure optimising your website URL for all of the above for a better ranking on Google search results

Backlinks 

Including backlinks was an important SEO ranking factor back in 2017 but is getting even more attention in 2021.

It's not new that Google has started giving importance to social signals, but links are what give more power to your content.

Social signals are easy to get, but real links from authorised sites give you a greater boost. It is the way Google comes to know that your website exists and hence crawls it for indexing purposes. This way, your website attracts organic traffic. 

Google calculates the value of the link and gives the score accordingly. 

Your domain's SERP rank largely depends on the number of backlinks it has.

Source: MonsterInsights

If you have got a link from an unauthorised website with a low page rank, it's possible that your page rank may slip to a lower position or won't rank.

So, before getting any link from another website, ensure that the site has a authorised domain, by using tools like Check Moz, SEMrush, Moz.com, etc.

Pro Tip:

You can also focus on low-volume SERPs, where there is less keyword-based competition, which makes it easier to attract some attention to your content and gain those precious backlinks.

You should check your backlink profile by considering the number of direct website visits, referring domains, referring IPs, backlinks, and follow-backlinks.

Doing this would ensure that you are telling Google that your website is trustworthy so that it ends up ranking higher on the search engine results page.

Wrap Up

Hope this post will help you in getting your ranking graph bar up.

Keep these factors in mind while creating your content, and watch your site ranking soar high.

Looking to boost the SEO game for your website? Get in touch with Fractional CMO, now!