AnalyticsSEO/SEM/ASO

5 factors that influence your website positioning

What is SEO and why is everyone obsessed with it? SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the process of positioning in search engines organically (without paying for increased visibility).

A professional in this area is responsible for using various techniques and strategies to gradually make your brand more visible and rank among the top 10 results on Google for keyword searches that define and align with your sector, product, or service.

Why invest in positioning yourself?

Do you remember the last time you checked the second page of Google search results in the past year? How about two years ago? You could probably count them on one hand; some people wouldn’t even need to count. This is the main reason why you should invest time and money in giving visibility to your brand.

If you are not on the first page of search results, the chances of someone finding you are reduced by more than half. If this happens, it means that you do not exist on the Internet.

How do I get started?

Okay, now you know what SEO is and why it is so important, but now comes the best part: How do I optimize my website? We recommend starting by analyzing and improving the following five factors:

1. On-Page SEO
2. Off-Page SEO
3. Indexing
4. Loading speed
5. Mobile

We will explain each of the points below.

On-Page SEO

These are all the points in the code and visible content of the website from which Google extracts information related to the theme of your page and the keywords it will use to display in searches.

Therefore, it is very important to dedicate time to researching and analyzing what users are searching for in your sector to utilize those keywords that will help them find your website.

These keywords should be incorporated from the URL to the content you publish. We recommend some tools that can help you define your universe of keywords to work with them naturally:

• LSI graph: https://lsigraph.com/
• Google Trends: https://trends.google.es/trends/
• Semrush: https://es.semrush.com/
• Ubbersuggest: https://ubersuggest.io/

To optimize this factor, we should consider the metadata, duplicate content, headers, text, image names, etc.

Off-Page SEO 

It refers to all the content created externally to your page that links back to it. And you may ask, how can I control something that is not on my website?
You can improve this factor by creating a link-building strategy. In this strategy, you should consider two essential points:

• Internal links: As its name implies, it refers to the links that are part of your website. The more links that are interconnected within your website, the more importance Google will give it.
  You can achieve this by having a blog where you expand on information about your services or products and everything related to your sector, linking, for example, several articles to your product pages or connecting the content of your articles to each other.

•  Backlinks: We refer to the links from your website that customers, blogs, or other websites share when they mention you.
  Word of mouth has always worked well since time immemorial. Initially, it will require a bit of networking and connecting with people who may be interested in writing about you and referencing you as part of their content.

You can also take advantage of social media to create a community around what you offer and drive this traffic to your website. This way, you will have control over part of what is said about your website and, at the same time, receive direct feedback from your followers, who can be potential recommenders in the future. You must be very careful with these strategies, as if done excessively, it may be detected as spam.

Indexing

It is the process that Google uses to crawl your website, obtaining internal links, new content, and updated information to add to its index (hence the term indexing) that it will later use to display your site among the search results for one (or more) of the keywords related to your page.

How can you optimize this factor? You can do it in various ways.

1. Create sitemaps for your website to make it easier for Google to crawl. Sitemaps.xml can be created using online tools (you can consult an expert to see which one they recommend) and serve to collect all the links of a website into a single file.
2. Avoid duplicate content or URLs within your website.
3. Organize the information and content by categories. Display them through menus and submenus or dropdowns to have a solid structure of internal links.
4. Check with your IT department or a professional to ensure that your website pages are indexed.
   
   

Loading speed

It may seem that a website’s speed has nothing to do with Google, but the truth is that it sees it as a negative factor, as it harms the user experience on your page, and therefore, if it is not optimized, it will not be given relevance compared to other pages.

You can check if your website’s speed is optimal by analyzing it at the following link:https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

To speed up the loading time of your website, it is recommended that you:

• Optimize the CSS, JS, or HTML files to prevent the server from consuming more resources due to their size and slowing down the loading of the website.

• Consult with a professional who can check the GZIP compression of the website to make it faster and verify the browser cache settings.

• Reduce the file size of the images you display.

• Confirm the location of the server. Google views it more favorably if the IP address associated with the web hosting is linked to the geographic location of your service.
  
  

Mobile

Although last but not least, you should optimize and ensure a mobile version. While Google does not penalize you for not having an adapted mobile version, if it is not responsive, it will affect user usability.

Here are the things you should consider:

• Easy and smooth navigation.
• Accessible buttons, links, and menus.
• Layout adjusted to the user’s device.
• Optimal loading time. In the Page Speed link, you can also see if the mobile version of your website meets the standards.

Remember that all these factors have their own parameters, and while you should follow them closely to avoid penalties, it is also very important to think about the user. All these points are designed to provide higher quality content at a digital level, so you can use them to your advantage as long as they are not intrusive or repetitive for your users.