In the course of my work as a digital marketing consultant, I’ve occasionally come across some clients who erroneously thought that anything and everything they did to their websites or around the web had an impact on their rankings.
Here are 10 common non-ranking factors that confuse people the most:
- Your website’s age – Many people think that older websites rank higher. The truth is Google only cares that you have useful, relevant information that helps your site visitors.
- The tech used to build or power your site. – Some site owners worry that Google will give them a hard time depending on whether they use React or Node or even HTML on their sites. This isn’t true.
- The number of likes, retweets, shares etc. you rack up. –While getting your content shared or liked is great, it doesn’t directly affect your search ranking unless those same people do other activities that result in lots of browser and search activity.
- Your use (or not) of Google services and apps. –I’ve had clients who worried that not using any of Google’s apps or services e.g. Gmail, Google Docs would affect how the search engine ranked them. Truthfully, it has zero impact.
- Your bounce rate or time on site. – How long visitors stay on your site doesn’t necessarily affect your Google web search results. You should be fine as long as visitors get what they’re looking for on your site.
- Your hosting options. –Having shared or solo hosting shouldn’t hurt your search ranking so long as it doesn’t affect your uptime or load speed.
- The special characters you use as separators in the title element. –Some prefer using a hyphen, others go for a pipe bar but this is more of a preference issue and has no effect on your site ranking.
- Having (or not having) a knowledge panel along with your search results. –As it turns out, having that knowledge panel on the right of search results (often appears when people search for your business) has no impact on whether your site ranks highly or not. It just helps your customers discover and contact your business.
- Use of meta robots tags and other defaults that Google already assumes. –You might want to add some meta robot tags to specify that Google can crawl everything but this doesn’t affect your search ranking especially if it’s for things that Google automatically assumes and does by default.
- Using H1, H2, H3 tags for headlines.– Some religiously stick to using H1 or H2 for headlines and others don’t but it helps to know Google doesn’t give higher authority or preference to this. However, using these tags makes it easier for crawlers to understand your page’s content structure.
I have years of experience in digital marketing and can help clear up your confusion on what helps your site rank highly on search engines. Schedule a consultation today and let’s take your business to the next level.
