Usability, technical and links. These are the actors that Google use in determining whether or not your website will rank high in their search results. Watch this video as David Jenyns further explains these three factors, and shares some tips on how to improve your website’s google ranking.

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Video Transcript: So you need to make sure you get that right, get the right foundations. Everything starts to work from that.

The three circles that I first want to touch on, you need to fix these three circles. I’ll draw them here because this illustrates the point. I’ll use different colours, a good point for teaching. This is our usability circle, then we’ve got our technical circle and then we have our links circle. What happens just in here, this is where all the magic happens. This is where you get good rankings. Once all these three things work together, that’s when things start to come alive.

If you think about it, it’s almost like a multiplier effect. Google is calculating for each one of these areas, and giving your website a score. So if you get a very low score on one of these things, it’s going to undermine everything else. Previously when people thought, I’ve got a problem here with my site, I’m just going to send a whole bunch of other links to it, you might have some usability issues which might be related to Panda and they’ve given you a bad quality score. It’s pulling everything down.

Step one, SEO is much, much wider than it ever used to be. It is everything from the usability and how people are engaging, through to your site, to technically how easy is it for Google to get around the website and crawl it and understand it and how quickly is it loading. But it is also your links as well. I have seen negative SEO happen. We’re working with a client who is based out of the States, he’s in a very competitive space. He’s in the stock market niche space and he has had the effect of negative SEO. He’s received a manual penalty for links to his website that he didn’t build.

Google has put it back now on to the website owner and the Webmaster to clean up your own profile. That’s just what you have to do, that’s just the way that it is now. Whether you did it or someone else did it, you have to fix it up because it could be holding everything else back.

There are three main areas that we need to fix: usability, technical and links. It’s a little bit like this points system. We’ve got the points here and it is a multiplier effect. We just need to go through and start to clean up what’s going on in your site. Sometimes people will call up and they’ll say, why is it that this smaller competitor is outranking me? Sometimes it’s really frustrating. You use something like Market Samurai and you do your analysis and you look at the old technicals on a website and think, by rights I should be outranking them. I’ve got an older site here, I’ve got tons more back links, I’ve got a huge index count. But the reason you’re getting beaten by competitors or why you’re getting outranked is that you’re weak in one of those areas and it’s holding you back.

So you have to address this first because you might be looking at the SEO things, but SEO is so much more now. That’s why we need to do that analysis. Also, the other reason you sometimes get outranked by smaller competitors has to do with localization. This is now a really big thing. Google’s big push with Google Now and things like that is they want to understand everything you’re doing on Google. Then they want to serve the best and most relevant information to you at that point in time.

Google now, if you haven’t seen it, gets access to your Google calendar, then it knows you’re Crown Casino and you’ve got an appointment over in Greensborough in an hour. It knows, based on the traffic, that you should head off now, otherwise you’re not going to make it on time. If you’re connected into the Google Now, it says: you better get going now, otherwise, you’re going to be late for your meeting. That is where they’re going.

Think about what it is they’re trying to do: serve the relevant info at the right time. That means we’re going to see more and more based on localization. If you’re in an industry and you just type in electrician, or something like that into Google and you just paste just the root keyword, you get phrases that come up based o your geographic location. So if you wrote in electrician, but all the results seem to be tailored for Melbourne and it comes up with the maps, that’s when you know Google has selected that one as a geographic location phrase. In that case, they will skew the results based on factors like what are some of the reviews they’ve seen on Yelp. That is an influencing factor inside Google Local and so on.

Rankings in organic google search results are influenced by several factors. Learn how you can take control and improve on these certain areas using Authority Content Marketing System.