Search engine optimization (SEO) is a technique by which you can increase your ranking on search engines. An SEO-based website has higher visibility, incorporating keywords to help match a website’s content with user search intent. As a result, it adds value to your web content, allowing users to find the correct information they’ve been searching for.

In this blog, we talk about factors affecting SEO ranking and some free tools to help you track, monitor and improve your position on the search engine results pages (SERPs).

What Is a SERPs Ranking?

Every website indexed in a search engine is assigned a ‘rank.’ The higher this rank is, the closer to the first page of the SERPs the site will be. By implementing SEO, all webmasters strive to rank high enough so that their website shows up as close to the top of the first page of the SERPs as possible.

Some Factors That Affect Ranking

While only search engines and the people behind them know all the factors used to rank a site, third parties can still hazard an educated guess.

A few factors that have been identified and confirmed to affect SERPs are: 

• Quality of backlinks
• Site speed
• Internal linking
• Quality of content
• User experience
• And quite a few more

 Let’s look into these factors and see how they affect SERP ranking:

1. Quality Backlinks

Moz has created a rank prediction score dubbed Domain Authority (DA). Search engines do not use authority as a ranking factor; however, it has been observed that websites that rank high in the SERPs also have high authority.

When a site gets a backlink from another site that has high authority, it signals to the search engine that this site is trustworthy. Keep in mind that the quality of backlinks is the most crucial factor, not the quantity.

2. Site Speed and User Experience

These two factors have been discussed together because they influence the same thing. A website’s loading speed is important. According to a study, we can gauge its importance because 2 seconds is the threshold beyond which most people will leave the site if it’s not loaded, and 40 percent of people will wait for 3 seconds before leaving.

User experience means how hard or easy it is for an average visitor to navigate your site. It also includes page loading times and overall responsiveness. If visitors have difficulty finding the stuff they need, they will leave your site.

This brings us to our unifying point: “leaving the site.” In SEO, if a visitor leaves the website without interacting with it, that is called a “bounce.” A high bounce rate reduces a site’s SERPs ranking, while a low bounce rate raises it.

3. Internal Linking

A website needs to have good internal linking. Search engines use bots/spiders to crawl a website and add it to their index. If a website has poor internal linking, those bots will find it difficult to navigate the site. This data will then be shared with the search engine, lowering the rank of that site. Not to mention poor internal linking may increase the bounce rate as well. So that makes two reasons why internal linking needs to be very good.

4. Content Quality

Websites rank for keywords; those keywords are used in various places on the site. The most prominent use of keywords is found in the site content. If the content is not good enough, it will make visitors turn away (increasing the bounce rate).

When search engines see this, they lower the site’s rank for that keyword. So, content quality needs to be perfect to make sure that there is minimal bouncing.

SEO Tools

There are many tools on the internet that help you to increase the traffic to your content. These tools include paraphrasers and SEO checkers.

You can analyze the domain score, spam score and links of your webpage. These tools give smart suggestions that help you increase your website’s responsive time and visibility.

Some of the SEO tools that can help you a lot are as follows:

1. DA PA Checker

As we know, DA is the score that search engines give to web pages. This score indicates what position a website can be ranked.

After getting the score, you can compare it with websites with high DA/PA scores. In this way, you can make changes to your website’s content or overall interface to increase its on-page and off-page ranking.

This SEO checker is free to use and its interface is very user-friendly. To use it, simply paste the URL of the website into the DA checker to get your results. You can check the score of 20 websites in a single check, and can also exclude the same domain and URL from its setting.

After getting the domain authority score, you can add backlinks to your website through its backlink-generating tool. This will add value to your website and boost its SEO ranking.

Through its domain age checker, you can check the domain age and its expiry. In addition, it provides the exact date of its formation and its authority expiration. Similarly, this tool can check spam score, Google index and domain IP.

2. Paraphrasing Tool

Paraphraser has remained an essential tool for achieving a high SEO ranking. This tool is also a rephraser that can increase your website’s domain authority. This rewriter can turn your basic webpage content into professionally written and SEO-based content.

This software has three modes, i.e., fluency, standard and creative, all of which add keywords while paraphrasing. Keywords are the words directly linked to your topic and have high search volumes that help gain a high domain score.

To use this tool, you need to upload your file or paste your material. In the free version, you can paraphrase 500 words in a single attempt and 1,500 in the premium version.

This is a multilingual tool, meaning it can help you to paraphrase in different languages. Due to its AI technology, semantic paraphrasing is implemented, changing complex terms and complicated sentences into small, easily understood ones.

This innovative content writing tool helps in SEO optimization. Due to its unique features, you can write blog posts, social media content, website content and articles. It is also a bundled tool that can summarize your text and remove plagiarism from it.

3. Seobility

This tool is used to check the SEO protocols of your website. It runs an audit on all the parts of the website and gives tips on how to increase the traffic to your website.

All you have to do is enter the URL of the website to get a detailed result. The free audit checks your page structure, on-page content, meta information and other configurations. All the factors are indicated in the form of percentages.

It thoroughly studies your meta description and problematic content. Several external and internal links are also provided, along with the file size and word count.

You can also check your page quality. In page quality, you can get information about the text of a page, which can be long or short.

In addition, you can check the backlinks and social media visibility of your website. Domain score and authority are also provided. With every problem, tips are given to solve it. For example it can give you suggestions for reducing enter links or suggest keywords that can better your score.

4. Semrush

This SEO optimization tool can be used to check website content, meta-description and backlinks using its SEO toolkit. Its main feature is keyword identification.

It provides a list of keywords with search volumes and traffic. Adding these keywords to web content and its meta-description can increase its domain score.

For content marketing, it suggests all topics that can engage your audience. It also gives you a score that helps you identify your content reach.

For market research, it provides data about your competitors’ websites. The strategies adopted by competitors are also provided so that you can adopt a similar pathway and increase the reach of your website.

It also suggests different advertising methods and techniques you can use to strengthen your social media presence. By posting content regularly and optimizing ads, you can increase your website traffic and boost engagement.

Conclusion

SEO has found its application in almost every field. With SEO, you can make your website visible to a larger audience.

Regular SEO audits are necessary for websites to help you to identify any website flaws and quality keywords. Not to mention, SEO audits provide the score and tips you need to improve your page quality and overall website performance.