Why Google?
Simply Google is “the most used search engine on the World Wide Web across all platforms, with 92.62% market share as of June 2019” – Wikipedia.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.
SEO goal: increasing the quality of traffic and quantity of traffic to your website through search engines.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a service offered free by Google to track and report your website traffic.
Google Analytics is free. You will need a Google Gmail account to signup.
You or your website designer need to add a Google Analytics tracking code to your website.
You will need a privacy policy on your website to comply with current privacy laws and Google’s terms of service.
Types of Traffic
Traffic sources tracked by Google Analytics:
1. Direct: user types your website address into their browser, links from a bookmark, links from email marketing, or links from online documents (pdf, word, etc.). If Google analytics doesn’t recognize the traffic source (HTTPS explained in this article) then it will also classify it as direct traffic.
2. Social: traffic coming from Social media such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
3. Organic Search: People who found you though a search on Google by entering search terms or a string of text.
4. Referral: visitors who clicked a link to your site from another website.
Google's Ranking System
Google’s ranking system is made of a series of algorithms. These are the key factors that determine which results are returned for your search query:
1. Words of your query
2. Relevance
3. Usability of pages
4. Expertise of sources
5. Your location and settings
Keywords
People used to enter fragmented terms in search queries. Due to the rise in mobile and voice searches people now often enter questions as full sentences.
Now Google analyzes phrases instead of just keywords.
Google is looking for the user’s intent.
“Today, it’s more important that your webpage addresses the problem a searcher intended to solve than simply carries the keyword the searcher used.” – Rachel Leist
You will get punished for overusing keywords (keyword stuffing) in your page. Google Penguin Filter is now apart of the core algorithm.
Quality
“Search algorithms also aim to prioritize the most reliable sources available.” – Google. Google is looking for pages that demonstrate E-A-T on a given topic:
Expertise
Authoritativeness
Trustworthiness
To learn more about E-A-T in our “SEO for 2020 – recent google algorithm updates” article.
Usability
Google ranks pages upon whether they are easy to use, and will promote useable over less useable pages.
1. Does the site appear correctly in different browsers?
2. Is the site designed for all device types and sizes?
3. The speed of your page load, especially for mobile devices on a poor connection.
Conclusion
The algorithms used by Google for search engine rankings are continually evolving. It’s useful to keep in mind that it’s important for Google’s success to send users to quality websites. Part of that determination is measured by mobile first website indexing, page load time, bounce rate, time on page, page views per visit, and how far a person scrolls down the page. You can learn more about these metrics by setting up and studying the Google Analytics for your website property.
Other factors are regularly added to the algorithms such as the 2018 Medic update ranking expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. You can read more about three recent important Google algorithm releases, including the Medic update, in our “SEO for 2020 – recent google algorithm updates” article.
If you are going to invest time and money into a website it’s important you understand these concepts or hire a web designer that does.
