Many people seem to take their site management cues from what they see others focusing on. While that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re wrong, it can mean they’re spending their energy in the wrong places. For a long time after Google let it be known how important they were for rankings, links were the thing to chase (they still are, for most folks). Content quality became the watchword after Google said it was better to earn links than to build them. Mobile responsiveness became an issue after Google started stressing its importance (particularly when they said it could provide ranking benefits). Site speed became the objectif du jour after they said a slower site could rank lower.
Just about anything that can affect rankings (and more than a few things that don’t) has had its day in the sun at some point. The valid concerns continue to be valid -“ the others continue to be tail-chasing exercises. And a lot of serious practitioners continue trying to educate site-owners on which continue to be head-bangers.
Ranking has Changed
The thing that many people don’t seem to understand is that the impact of individual factors has diminished. That’s just simple math. If you start with, say, 200 factors and don’t allow for any weighting of those factors against each other, then each one would be 1/200th of the total ranking equation. Add another 50 factors to the pile and now each one would be worth only 1/250th of the total. Math, folks.
Sure, weighting can change – and often does -which could conceivably allow a factor to have the same importance as before (or even greater), even after adding more factors to the mix. But I think that would apply only rarely. Essentially, what this means is that in order to accomplish what you could gain several years ago for a site’s rankings, you now have to have a broader focus – go after more factors.
The Promised Spoiler
My philosophy is to go after all of them – or at least as many as are practical and likely to be beneficial for your site. Since you’re likely to see smaller gains with individual wins, you need more small wins to get the prize, right? There’s not much to be gained by having killer content if your page takes 20 seconds to load – who’s likely to stick around long enough to ever read it?
So when you see a lot of chatter amongst SEOs and marketers regarding page-load speed, hreflang, mobile-first or some other factor they’re all chasing, consider what’s most important for your site. What will give you the most benefit and what will have little or no value? What will work best in conjunction with other factors? (Hint: Many things work better in conjunction with other things.) Then build your plan. But don’t waste your time on just one… ranking factors no longer work in a vacuum – you need to address several, if not all, of them.
The key, of course, is to learn which factors will give you the biggest bang for your buck.