When you hear the word SEO, the first word that probably comes to your mind is "keywords." Getting your content (keywords, LSI, and originality) right is very crucial. But did you know, getting content right is not enough to reach that top spot?

Google rankings work on very elaborate algorithms that consider more than 200 ranking factors. If you are looking to climb the ladder to the top spot on the SERP (Search Engine Result Pages), you need to optimize your site for factors other than content as well. The good news is that you don't need to get all 200+ ranking factors right.

We've made a small guide on the top 5 crucial ranking factors and how you can get them with Draftbox with zero efforts:

Page speed (Core Web Vitals)

In 2018, Google officially made Page Speed one of the ranking factors for mobile searches. Page Speed has been a ranking factor for Desktop queries since 2010. With mobile search queries dominating organic search statistics, page speed becomes a very crucial factor. Historically, it has been seen that slower pages have a higher bounce rate and lower average time.

When real users have a slow experience on mobile, they're much less likely to find what they are looking for or purchase from you in the future. For many sites, this equates to a huge missed opportunity, especially when more than half of the visits are abandoned if a mobile page takes over 3 seconds to load.

- Google Developers Blog

How Draftbox can help with the page speed?

Under the hood, Draftbox builds your blog using the most popular static site generator (SSG) called Gatsby to increase your site performance by 10x. On top of that, Draftbox has optimized its theme for core web vitals defined by Google to improve page speed and Lighthouse score.

Mobile-Friendliness (Responsive & accessible)

Google made Mobile-friendliness a ranking factor back in 2015. With more than 70% of search queries originating from mobile, mobile-friendliness becomes crucial for site owners to optimize for mobile. As people moved from searching on the desktop to mobile, Google introduced the mobile-first index in July 2019. Mobile-first indexing means Google predominantly uses the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking.

How Draftbox can help with the mobile-friendliness?

It takes less than a second for a mobile user to reach an opinion about your website, and Draftbox will ensure that you leave the first good impression. Along with responsive web design and clean layout, faster page load ensures a better experience for your users, even on mobile networks. AMP pages help increase visibility in organic search results on mobile.

Metadata, Authorship and Rich Snippet

Associating your content with the author/publication can boost credibility. Adding appropriate metadata, Facebook Graph, and Twitter Card data makes your content crawler friendly and linkable. Rich results are experiences on Google surfaces, such as Search, that go beyond the standard blue link. Rich results can include carousels, images, or other non-textual elements. Rich results not only increases the likelihood of higher SEO rank, but it makes your content appear more appealing and trustworthy to searchers.

How Draftbox can help with metadata, authorship & rich snippet?

Draftbox auto-generates metadata, rich social cards, structured data(JSON-LD), sitemap, and descriptive text for links and images.

Secure Site (HTTPS)

HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) is an internet communication protocol that protects the integrity and confidentiality of data between the user's computer and the site. Users expect a secure and private online experience when using a website.

In 2014, Google confirmed that HTTPS is one of the lightweight ranking factors. Over time, starting from 2016, they have started labeling sites without HTTPS as "Not secure" with the warning icon. Showing a "Not secure" sign on your site harms your user experience. The user might think that your site is hacked or compromised. This can lead to a higher bounce rate and reduced credibility of your site.

How Draftbox can help with secure site?

With help of Netlify, Draftbox publishes a secure site for your content and images. You don’t need to buy and setup SSL anymore!

User Experience (RankBrain)

Consider a scenario where your user lands on your site, and she is met with intrusive popup ads, modals, and push notification popups. This can easily frustrate any user who has come to read your content. We don't have a concrete way to understand how Google measures user satisfaction. General factors that one should optimize for are Click-Through Rate(CTR), Average time on page, and bounce rate.

In short, you should optimize to put well-researched, well-organized content on your site, and remove unwanted distractions.

How Draftbox can help with RankBrain?

Draftbox prefetches resources of other pages after the current page has loaded. This mechanism provides smoother and faster navigation among internal pages, which results in a considerable reduction in bounce rate and an increase in CTR and time-spent.

In short,

You focus on crafting compelling, optimized content, and, we take care of the rest:

• Page speed (Core Web Vitals)
• Mobile-friendliness (Responsive & accessible)
• Metadata, authorship & rich snippets
• Secure site (HTTPS)
• User experience (RankBrain)

Happy blogging!