SEO Ranking Factors - Episode 127

This is Grumpy SEO Guy, episode 127, what is a ranking factor? You're listening to Grumpy SEO Guy, the SEO podcast that doesn't waste your time with nonsense that doesn't work. I'm the Grumpy SEO Guy, and I'm sharing with you the strategies that have helped me successfully run my SEO agency for the last 14 years. In this podcast, I'll be sharing my knowledge and experience, discussing tips and strategies, and trying to help you cut through the confusion that permeates this industry. If you listen to this podcast, you will know more about SEO than 99% of people on the planet. Ready? Let's get started. I'm the Grumpy SEO Guy. Let me tell you why I'm grumpy today. I'm grumpy today because people are confused about even the concept of a ranking factor. And I feel like they don't understand what ranking factors are and why they're important. So that's what we're going to talk about. Before we do that, some reminders. New episodes come out on Wednesday, 9am, Central Standard Time. That's for those of you listening to the podcast. If you're listening on YouTube, it's going to be maybe a few hours after that. If you leave a comment on YouTube, I try to reply on Wednesday, but sometimes it won't be until Thursday. If you really like the podcast, please try to subscribe. It would really help us out. If you really like the podcast and want to support us on Patreon, you can do so at Patreon.com/grumpyseoguy. If you have a question, you can email me at [email protected]. If you have a question, you can also post it on the Grumpy SEO Guy subreddit, which is reddit.com/r/grumpyseoguy. And if you have a really confusing question and you want to book a Zoom advisory call, you can email me at the email address I told you. And we can talk about getting that set up. Okay, on with the episode. But before we do that, my lawyer tells me that I have to say this right now. A quick disclaimer before we get started, everything I say here is based on my experience and opinion from 14 years in the industry. I don't officially know how Google or any other search engines work. Everything I say here is hypothetical and based on my experience. This podcast does not constitute advice or services. What worked for me may or may not work for you. Okay, back to the show. So in this episode, we're going to talk about ranking factors, okay? Because we're going to talk about why you need to focus on them and we're going to talk about what it means, because I think people don't even know what it means. So look, a ranking factor is anything that the search engine uses to know where to rank you. Okay, so for example, if something is a ranking factor, we're going to talk more about this later. If something is a ranking factor, then changing that thing will change your position. So maybe now is a good time to, you know, to talk about really quickly, again, the purpose of SEO. Okay, the purpose of SEO is to get websites to the top of the search engines. Okay, that is the purpose of SEO. The purpose of SEO is not web design. The purpose of SEO is not content writing. The purpose of SEO is not conversion optimization or anything else. The purpose of SEO is to get websites to the top of the search engines. Okay, so if something has an effect on whether or not you go to the top of the search engines or lower in the search engines, that is a ranking factor. If something does not have an influence on whether or not you go higher or lower in the search engines, it is not a ranking factor. Okay, so let's talk about some examples of this. But remember, and I know I just said it, but I feel like really a lot of people miss this point. The purpose of SEO is to get to the top of the search engines. Okay, the reason you get hired to do SEO is to get a client to the top of the search engines. Okay, the reason we get hired to do SEO is to get clients to the top of the search engines. So the things that we do are things that have a chance of taking a website to the top of the search engines. Okay, it's so simple. I'm not sure why people miss that point, but a lot of what people do is not even, it's not even SEO because it has no effect on whether or not they go to the top of the search engines. So let me kind of talk about part of the reason I'm making this episode. So I recently read a post on an SEO website, and somebody was asking. I think they were, they're asking something like, oh, my impressions fell. I'm not going to say who it was. I don't remember the numbers and I'm not going to quote it exactly. But somebody, and I see this question all the time, by the way, they said, oh, my impressions fell from whatever to some, you know, some smaller number, whatever. Let's just make a number. I don't know, whatever. It doesn't matter. You know, what should I do to fix the problem or something like that? And before we even get into this question, let's stop and explain this for a minute. What are impressions? Okay. An impression is a time that your website shows up in the results. It has nothing to do with if anybody clicks on you or not. It has to do with if you show up or not. So let me give you an example. Let's say you're on the first page. Okay. And let's say, you know, a hundred people search for your keywords and you're going to show up because you're on the first page. You're going to show up for each of those hundred people. Okay. That's 100 impressions has zero to do with if anybody clicks on you or not. That is impressions is just how many times did you appear in the results? Okay. That's all it means. So if your impression, now immediately, hopefully you guys already understand what the problem might be here. If your impressions are dropping, well, actually it could be one of two things. If your impressions are dropping, it means maybe your rank dropped and you're not on that page anymore. If you're not on page one, if you're on page two, you're not going to get as many impressions as if you're on page one. Are you? So if your impressions are dropping, maybe your rank is dropping. Wait a minute. There's another option. And by the way, this option can additionally be true. What if monthly searches decreased? If monthly searches decreased, you're not going to get as many impressions. Are you? It doesn't matter where you rank. So by the way, if your position drops, that is an SEO problem. If monthly searches decreased, that is not an SEO problem. Anyways, and so, and we're going to get back to what the response was and why it was not really a great response in a minute. But first, impressions is kind of, it's kind of like traffic, right? And I say that in the sense of, obviously the definition is different. Traffic is the number of visitors you get to your website. Impressions is the number of times your website exists in the search results. Okay. Anyways, look, so I say it's kind of like traffic because people seem to, people don't understand where traffic comes from. Maybe I shouldn't say it that way. People don't understand what traffic has to do with SEO because the other most common, not the most common question, but one of the most common questions I see is my traffic fell. What do I do? But they don't understand why their traffic fell. Luckily, we have an episode called four reasons your traffic decreases or something like that. I'll put a link to it in the description, which by the way answers the question. Oh, it's, I just remembered it's a two part episode. It answers the question and tells you how to determine what the cause is. Okay. Anyways, so, but you're okay. So really quickly, traffic is a function of two things. Your position, meaning what position you rank in and monthly search volume. So here's an example. If you're in the first position, okay, the first position gets about 30% of the visitors. Okay. So what does that mean? That means for the, for the number of monthly searches for your keyword. If you were in the first position, you get 30% of those visitors. Okay. So if there are 10,000 searches for a term and you are in the first position, you will get about 30% of those or 3000 visitors. Okay. If there's 10,000 searches, you will get 30% of those, which is about 3000 visitors. If you are in the first position. So if your traffic falls and again, maybe you guys already know the answer to this because I've kind of just given you the answer. But if your traffic falls means one of two things happened or both of them, but one, it means monthly visit. It means monthly searches decreased in which case, even if your SEO stays the same, you're going to get fewer traffic. You're going to get fewer visitors because monthly searches fell. Okay. If it dropped to 2000, if it dropped from 10,000 to 2000, okay, your visitors are going to drop from 3000 to 600. No, that's not right. Is that right? 100% of 200, 600. Yes. So there you go. That's one reason that your traffic can decrease. The other reason is because your rank drops. Okay. If you're in position one and then you're not in position one anymore, you're not going to get as many visitors. Number one position gets the most visitors and it decreases mostly as the, as the rank goes down. So if you're in position one and then you're in position three, you're going to get less traffic because you're in position three. Instead of position one, assuming monthly search volume stays the same. I mean, monthly search volume could go up by a lot and then you might get more traffic even if your position falls, but you get the point. Possibly. So anyways, look. So the question that I always, and we're going to get back to this in a minute. The question that I always ask when somebody has this problem or when somebody has this question is what, what are your SERPs? SERPs, S-E-R-P, search engine results, pages. It means what is your rank? What are your SERPs? And like usually if they're not even tracking their SERPs and I don't know why because that is the main thing you have to do in SEO. If you're not tracking your SERPs, you can't tell anything about anything because you don't know if you're being successful. You don't know if you're getting results. You don't know anything about anything. If you're not tracking your SERPs, you're literally doing SEO wrong. Okay. So if you're not tracking your SERPs, you're, you're literally clueless about what you're doing with SEO. So, um, you should start monitoring your SERPs. And there are many tools that do this. We use one called SERPFox, SERPFox, S-E-R-P-F-O-X.com. Verse 10 keywords are free. I think I'm not sure. Anyways, start tracking your SERPs. So anyways, look, um, so obviously, you know, well, it doesn't matter. You probably know how to answer that question now. But anyways, so here's why I'm making this episode because this person, one of the responses was like, well, you should focus on your E-E-A-T because whatever. I kind of stopped reading right then. Not really, I did read the whole response, but it was unhelpful. So look, E-E-A-T, right? Experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness. Okay. Now let me, let me be extremely clear about this. All right. And then I'm going to provide sources. Well, one source. E-E-A-T does not make a difference at all in where you rank. Okay. Or put differently, it is not a ranking factor. Now, if people are still listening to this episode because all the SEO influencers talk about E-E-A-T and they charge you money for E-E-A-T audits and for E-E-A-T content and all these other things that, by the way, are unable to help you at all because E-E-A-T is not a ranking factor. Okay. Here's what I have to tell you about that. I'm going to provide a link in the description to Google's own website where they say E-E-A-T is not a ranking factor. Okay. So in this document, I want you to scroll down to the end because it's almost, it's almost, it's pretty far down this thing. And it's got a question and answer or it's got a list of like classifications and stuff. And it says in bold, thinking E-E-A-T is a ranking factor. Okay. And hold on. Before we get to what the answer is, Google's answer, I just want, in case that you're searching for it in this document, it says E-E-A-T. Okay. So you need to put the dashes in if you're trying to find it in here, if you're doing, if you're doing like a search on it. But if not, because I don't want you to search for E-E-A-T and it's not there. And you're like, you lie, grumpy SEO guy, it's not there. They literally put dashes in it just, just, just so you know. Okay. Like that's how the format is just, just so you're aware of that. Okay. So look, thinking E-E-A-T is a ranking factor. And then the answer says, no, it's not. Okay. E-E-A-T is not a ranking factor. So people that are making you pay them money to do an E-E-A-T audit are scamming you. People that are making you pay them money to do E-E-A-T changes on your website are scamming you. People that are telling you to even care about E-E-A-T at all are making you focus on something that isn't important because E-E-A-T is not a ranking factor. What is the purpose of SEO to get to the top of the search engines? So we should focus on ranking factors, things that will or have the possibility to get you to the top of the search engines. E-E-A-T will not get you to the top of the search engines. Okay. And Google's own website mentions this. So you, I don't care if you believe me. Hopefully you maybe put a little bit more trust in what they say than what I say. I don't know. But anyway, let's talk about some other things that are not ranking factors. Okay. Ready? Site loading speed. Okay. Everybody says site loading speed is a ranking factor. As if your website is not ranking and then you make it load faster and suddenly it will rank higher. No. Well, let me actually change that answer for a minute because if your website is really taking a while to load. Yes. Okay. Like if it's taking, don't quote me on this, but if your homepage takes 30 seconds to load. Okay. Um, you probably might have some problems with that, but you also will have other problems because nobody's going to wait 30 seconds for your page to load. Okay. But here's the thing. If your website takes, you know, three seconds to load and then you spend a lot of time changing it. So it takes only two seconds to load. It's probably not going to do anything. Okay. And by the way, if site loading speed was a ranking factor, everybody would just make, they would just make HTML pages in notepad that would load very quickly. And then they would rank at the top of the search engines. But I noticed, hold on, I noticed that people aren't doing that. Hmm. Maybe it's cause site loading speed isn't a ranking factor unless you're taking a very long time to load. Okay. How about dwell time? Everybody likes to talk about dwell time as a ranking factor. Now, let me explain what dwell time is. Dwell time is how long people spend on your site. Okay. Now this concept kind of makes sense that it might be a ranking factor, but we have another episode where we talk about why it's not a ranking factor. And I want to cover that again really quickly here. Um, because I think that maybe if you understand this concept, it will help you understand other SEO concepts. Okay. So dwell time is how long people spend on your site. And it makes sense that that could be something that might affect your rank, right? Cause besides making money, what, what does a search engine try to do? It tries to give you good quality results. So you keep using that search engine, right? So it could be said that the longer people spend on your site, the better quality your content is, right? Because if the content was bad, people would leave. And if it's good, they would stay. Okay. But wait a minute. What if your website is so well written and so well organized that as soon as somebody gets to the website, they find exactly what they're looking for and they can leave. Would you say that's good content? Yeah. That sounds like good content to me. But wait a minute. That would be a low dwell time. Now, conversely, what if there is a website that was such a massive pile of garbage that it took you a long time to find what you were looking for? Okay. And then you finally found it after minutes of looking for it. That would be a big dwell time, wouldn't it? But is that good quality content or is that a bad website? That's a bad website. So there we have an example of low dwell time on good quality content on a helpful, great website and high dwell time on a bad quality website. Dwell time cannot possibly be a ranking factor. Okay. What about website design? People think that website design is a ranking factor. Nope. Are you telling me that like, if you put like your content on the left and your menu on the right, that's somehow worth like more value than if you have like your menu on the left and your content on the right? Like, no, come on. Well, I actually think I read an argument once in favor of one of those versus the other, but I don't think, I don't think it was based on actual or legitimate data. So we're going to ignore that for now. But anyways, here's my point though. If, if website design mattered, okay, people would figure out what the ideal website design is. And then everybody would use exactly the same website design because that would provide you the highest SEO value. Nobody does that because it's not a ranking factor. Okay. So somebody's going to be like, maybe it is. And they just haven't discovered the best website design yet. Okay. Okay. You, you let me know if you determine it. Okay. So anyways, um, website design, not a rain factor. User experience. No, same thing. I don't even know how you would check that. But user experience. User, user experience is an opinion anyway. So it can't possibly be a ranking factor. Right. Like you might think a website is good. Someone else might think it's bad. Who's right. Okay. So let's talk about things that are ranking factors. Now, as you know, hopefully from listening to other episodes, there are four main things. Now, I think technically there's like 200. Okay. But we only, you know, bother with like these four basically, and I'm kind of blending some of them together right here, but that's okay. I think if you, um, take this mindset that I'm going to present you, it will maybe help you or maybe not. I don't know. Anyways, you probably know what these four are already. One, avoid penalties. Two, have content. It doesn't have to be good. It doesn't have to be bad. It just needs to be on your site. Three, have relevancy. Four, have authority. Okay. Those are the ranking factors that you need to worry about. Okay. So that's what you need to do. So let me, let me give you another example just to kind of like, um, I don't know if this is going to make any sense or not. Let's say for example, you're like a running coach. All right. So we're not talking about SEO for a minute. Say you're like a, you're a, you're a, um, the, the leader of like a running team. Right. And your job is to like get everybody to run as fast as possible. Okay. So let's create a term here and call it running factors, right? Or things, things that help. Okay. Let me take a step back. What's the purpose of, of being in a race to win the race? How do you win the race by having the fastest time? Okay. Just like the purpose of SEO, right? What's the purpose of a race? Okay. So you could say that anything that helps you run faster is a running factor. It sounds silly, but whatever. And anything that has no effect on how fast you run is not a running factor. Okay. So what would be examples of things that would be running factors? Nutrition. Yes. Um, training. Yes. Um, recovery. Yeah. Those are, those sound to me like running factors. Like if you, if you have those correct, you will probably get faster. Right. What are things that are not running factors? How about what color socks you wear? It's probably not a running factor. Right. I don't, I don't, I can't think of, you get the point though, right? Like, so when people are like EEAT, that's like telling somebody that's, that's a non-issue. Like it's not going to help them. You know, what, what if, what, I hope, I hope this analogy is clear. Like, I'm going to return to describing SEO right now, but like you get the point when somebody's like, when, when people post questions and they're like, you know, I'm having this issue, how do I fix it? Right. And people are like, you know, like dwell time, EEAT. Like, no, those are not ranking factors. Those are not ranking factors. And I hope people aren't paying money for this advice, honestly, because like, well, I'm sure they are. So if you're, if you're doing SEO, you need to concentrate on ranking factors. What will make a difference in my rank? That is a ranking factor. Okay. So things like most of the stuff that people talk about are not even ranking factors. Like it's, it's very interesting if you, if you read like the forums, okay. So I, I, I don't, I don't want to like quantify the percentage, but a large percentage of the things that people are talking about aren't even ranking factors and honestly have no place on an SEO forum outside of saying, Hey, don't focus on these things because they're not ranking factors. I don't know how else to say it. Like I'm not, I'm not really sure. But anyway, um, if you're doing SEO, focus on ranking factors. Does this thing have an effect on the rank of the website? If the answer is yes, you should focus on it. If the answer is no, you should not focus on it. Okay. Um, avoiding penalties, having content, having relevancy and having authority are giant ranking factors. Okay. People are going to disagree with that because I don't know, I truly, I truly don't know why people disagree with that because those are the things that work. I guess they want to sell you something or I don't, I'm just, I'm really not certain, but I'm going to be honest with you. Those are the four things that, what, what, why do you think I mentioned those all the time? Because those are the four most important things. And if you forget them on this episode, that's fine. Cause we're probably going to mention them again, just like we mentioned them on the other episodes. Let me say them again for you. Don't get a penalty. Highest priority. Have content. By the way, this is in order. Don't get a penalty. Highest priority. Have content on your site. Second highest priority, not because it matters about the quality, but because you need content to have a website and to create relevancy three, have relevancy so that there is a topic of your website. Okay. By the way, listen to, um, the episode right before this one, um, I will put a link in the description. It talks about relevancy authority and how this, and how the algorithm ranks you. Okay. And authority. Okay. And, and authority is after you have the first three things, authority is the next most important thing, but it's also going to be a big deal because once you have those three things, you need as much authority as possible. Okay. So you don't want to get authority without those other things, but there's a good chance rank in your website. We'll use a lot of time and effort getting authority anyways, authority comes from backlinks in case you were uncertain. So anyways, um, I hope this episode was helpful. Let me know if you have any questions. Thanks for listening. Don't forget to subscribe. And if you enjoy this podcast, please leave a review. It would really help the show out. I hope this episode was helpful. If you have any questions or want to suggest a subject for a future episode, you can contact me on Reddit. My username is grumpy SEO guy. You can visit the grumpy SEO guy subreddit or you can email me at [email protected]. If you email me, please either whitelist my email address or check your junk folders because I've been told that my replies are going into the junk folder and it's probably because we're talking about things like SEO and backlinks. And I think those words will classify an email as spam. And if you want to support the podcast because it's the best source of SEO information on the planet and it's free, you can do so at patreon.com/grumpyseoguy. And I will talk to you later. You're listening to Grumpy SEO Guy, the SEO podcast that doesn't waste your time with nonsense that doesn't work. Join us next Wednesday for another episode.