There is a lot of smoke around the possibilities of Google ranking sites based on their website reputation. With the ever-changing Google algorithm, it is getting increasingly challenging for the SEOs to get good SERP (Search Engine Result Page) ranking. This increases the speculation as to what are Google’s quality ranking factors.
Do they rank website just like they rank AdWords?
While Google never accepts many things about how they rank sites on SERP, the issue of 164-page quality rating guideline handbook clears the sky.
Let’s find out what exactly is website reputation and how can you boost your ranking, keeping the golden quality ranking factors in mind.
What is website reputation?
The trending yet speculated term signifies the respectability of the website among the users. Website reputation revolves around many factors like the click-through rate, pogo stick rate, bounce rate, and deep click rate. This is accompanied by the user’s review of your website on various platforms.
Other quality ranking factors include the amount of organic traffic driven to your site, direct traffic, time spent on various web pages, personalization, and website compatibility on different devices.
Google tracks all of these factors about your site to rank you. So, your SERP reputation depends a lot on how you do a thorough user study and frame your content accordingly. Bringing about personalization is a crucial factor. This is because as per estimates, 40% of the users end up purchasing from sites which are personalized and user-centric.
Website Reputation and SERP Ranking
Let’s take a look at how quality ranking factors affect Website reputation.
It’s no rocket-science, to be frank. It is all about what digital experience you are able to craft and how relevant your content is to your target users.
So, if you have a good click-through rate, deep click rate, direct traffic, website compatibility, etc., your Website reputation will be positive.
The case differs when you have a high bounce rate, pogo stick rate (Back to SERP rate within 5 seconds of click-through) and bad user reviews. In this case, your Website reputation gets a negative marking, which affects your SERP reputation and hampers your ranking and visibility.
A lower bounce rate, however, is considered positive because it signifies the users got the information they were looking for on the landing page.
How website reputation is evaluated?
Though none of the SEOs are sure about how exactly Google scores pages or the role of quality evaluators in all this but here is what we anticipate and follow to boost our SERP ranking. We assume that the rating process pays acute emphasis on the quality of individual webpages. Each webpage is analyzed and evaluated on the basis of the above-mentioned criteria and allotted individual scorings.
This individual scoring of all webpages is then pushed into the quality analysis server which does all the cross-mapping to generate aggregate scores. The final scores are considered as website quality score which can either boost or lower your SERP rankings.
So, if you have web pages that rank well and have positive quality factors in favour along with web pages that don’t perform well. In this case, the bad performing pages will have a negative impact on your overall or aggregate score. So, you need to put due emphasis on the quality of all the web pages on your site rather than a selected few.
Let’s find out ways through which you can do this and boost your website reputation.
How do you get a good SERP reputation?
Well, driving organic traffic to your site does seem like a tough thing these days. All thanks to Google’s ever-changing layouts and algorithms. We can’t blame them for creating an exceptional user experience. But, we sure can leave a positive digital mark by keeping the assumed quality ranking factors in mind.
Add more higher-performing pages
Do your site’s introspection and jot down all the pages that are performing well and the pages that are not. You can do this by seeing your site’s performing stats. Now you know what the users like, so use this data to create similar pages.
Optimize the high performing pages
Don’t forget the well-performing pages just because they are performing good. Gaining a positive website reputation is a continuous process. You need to indulge in constant user intent & keyword research, maybe evaluate your competitor’s site but keep on optimizing.
Improve the quality score of existing pages
Once you have your website’s performance stat, you know what well-performing pages look like. So, make a comparative study, and optimize the content, improve the navigation, usability and experience, load time, compatibility of existing pages. Ensure that you do everything to hold your user’s attention and solve their problem.
Remove low performing pages.
Low performing pages have a terrible impact on the over-all SERP reputation of your site. Track down all such rotten eggs that have low organic traffic or have a pogo stick rate. You might feel that such pages are driving at least some traffic, but believe us, they will only harm your overall website reputation.
Get your brand reviewed in different places
Other ways to optimize your website reputation is by having your users speak about you on different platforms. One of Google ranking factors includes how trending are you in the showbiz and what people are talking about you. If they see users appreciate your offerings and you have a positive in other quality ranking factors, then you can get an extra star.
Conclusion
Website reputation plays a significant role in getting you a good SERP ranking. It’s more about matching Google’s standards to be listed on top of SERP and supporting them serve the users better. The worldwide web is a universe of thousands of online players. This calls for a mechanism to filter the best and relevant ones for the users.
With the introduction of Google’s Hummingbird and RankBrain, it is prudent and practical to understand such evaluation criteria and ponder your content around it. So, keep an open tab on such updates and keep on evolving.
