We have earlier explained the importance of boosting your organic SEO ranking here. In today's post, we will dig deeper into one of the most important factors for reaching a high ranking - the page quality factors.
What is Page Quality?
Page quality refers to the overall quality of your website's different pages. It is in SEO language called an On-page factor meaning that it is an internal factor that you have the power to optimize and control. What determines a good quality page by Google is based on many factors, some of these can be found in the 172 pages long report called the ”search quality evaluation guidelines' '. This report was released in 2015 and has since then been updated regularly by Google. You can read the full report here. A more easy way of understanding Google's page quality factors is to read a summarization of the 6 most important page factors here:
Step 1. Purpose
Google will assess the quality rating based on what they believe is the purpose of your website so you want to make sure to be ranked in the right category. Clearly define the purpose of your page by defining the following:
What is the purpose of having the page?
In order to create a clearly defined page, you need to start at the base with an understanding of what role you want this page to fill for your startup. For example, is the purpose to inform, to sell, or to collect sign-ups?
Who is your persona?
As a startup business you most likely already have created personas you want to target. When creating your pages you need to clearly define the purpose of them visiting your page. For example; are they there for buying running shoes or to read about your startup's story?
What will you help your audience with?
Google claims that a high-quality page should always aim to help people, stating that ”A high-quality page should have a beneficial purpose and achieve that purpose well” (Google, 2021). Therefore, make sure to identify what it is that you want to help your persona with.
Will your persona understand the purpose?
It is not enough to define the purpose, you also need to make sure that it is clearly communicated to your persona and that they understand the purpose from the main content of the landing page. Make sure that each page has a specific purpose and topic and avoid too much-mixed content.
Do the Title tags and meta description communicate the purpose?
The titles should be relevant to the page's purpose and be cohesive to the content of the page. Make sure to set the right expectation and lead the right traffic to your page by clearly communicating what it is about.
Step 2. High quality content
EAT is short for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness and is according to the platform one of the most important factors when rating the quality of a page (Google, 2021). These factors should be implemented in the content of your startup's pages.
Expertise: Google ranks expertise highly, and therefore you want to take on a role as an expert of your startup and chosen industry. Furthermore, you need to define what role of an expert you will undertake and make sure that you have enough expertise to enable the page to reach its purpose. The best way of proving your expertise is by putting a lot of time and effort in the content you create. It is the one piece of advice that is repeated constantly both by Google and SEO experts; great content equals good rankings. Google will identify content that is well-written, well thought, original, unique, and based on expertise.
Authoritativeness: In order to create authoritativeness for your startup's page, you need to have a good online reputation. This could be achieved through positive customer reviews, shares on social media, or a Wikipedia page about your startup. It can also be created largely through inbound links from other high-quality sites, which we will explain more in detail further down in this article.
Trustworthiness: Page trustworthiness can be accomplished by implementing the following:
- Add location to your website
- Clear information about who is responsible for the website
- Clear and satisfying customer service information
- Positive reputation and reviews
- Multiple images of a product
- In-depth information about products
- Get an Https certificate
Step 3. Usability
An important ranking factor as well as an essential factor for increasing your conversion rate and getting your target to actually take action on your page is to offer a great user experience.
Good usability can be implemented by:
- Website design
- Easy navigation from the landing page
- Clear CTA´s (call to action) meaning that your persona should easily find the ”next action” from the page. Such as ”book here” or ”sign up here”.
- If your startup is an e-commerce company, make sure that it is easy to locate products, shipping information, shopping cart, etc.
Step 4. Technical Factors
Users have low patience and if something is not working, or taking too long - the user experience will decrease and therefore so will the SERP ranking. Here are some important technical factors to consider:
Site speed: Google ranks pages with a high-speed higher. You can check your site speed for websites here and mobile here.
Mobile friendlyIn 2015 mobiles became more commonly used for googling than desktops (Digital Marketing Institute) and it is, therefore, an important ranking factor for Google. Having a responsive design and mobile-friendly website is in many ways essential.
No technical issues
This basically means to keep the website ”tidy” and make sure that there are no spam links and no broken links. You should also make sure that all pages are indexable.
TOOLTIPS! Control that you have clean and indexable pages by doing a wide site audit. There is a great free tool for this called Screaming Frog. You can download it here.
Thank you for reading this article and do not forget to leave a comment if there is anything you would like to add on the topic.
This article was written by Elin Jonsson on March 25, 2022.
#startups #seo #pagequality #digitalmarketing
References
Chaffey, D, and Ellis-Chadwick, F. (2019) ”Digital Marketing - Strategy, implementation and Practice” 7th end. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited
Google, 2021 ”Search quality evaluator guidelines”
Available at: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterhub.com/sv//searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf Assessed on: 14 February 2022
Chaffey, D (2022) ”Search engine marketing statistics 2022”, Smart Insights.
Available at: https://www.smartinsights.com/search-engine-marketing/search-engine-statistics/ Accessed on: 15 February 2022
Colehan, A (2016) ”E-commerce koi benchmarks 2016” Wolfgang Digital.
Available at: https://www.wolfgangdigital.com/uploads/general/eComKPI2016-Public2.pdf Accessed on: 15 February 2022
Digital Marketing institute ”Technical Optimization”
Available at: https://digitalmarketinginstitute.com/resources/lessons/seo-search-engine-optimization_technical-optimization_3hcl Accessed on: 15 February 2022
I wish I could jump into a time machine and take this article back with me when I originally started making content. Very valuable. Page quality is of course so important and easily overlooked. I now have a perception of my content where I look at it from the eyes of a user and ask myself how they see it. There as some websites I see today that do not work properly due to bad usability which greatly hinders the quality of the content. The interface on many can be very poor and not modern. A page I seen recently greatly reminded me of the time before Facebook and Instagram where we all had to use MSN, Myspace and Bebo to communicate. Interface design popular and trustworthy then but not so much now. A clear purpose as you identified is important too. What service is this page providing. Some companies failed with providing the user with this and ruins their pages chances of significant growth! Great article!
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