Most website owners know about the main factors that can affect their site’s visibility on search engines. Depending on who you ask, you’ll hear things like inbound links, meta tags and descriptions, or unique content being mentioned. But there are many other factors you need to worry about. Not knowing about them could lead to you making mistakes or not maximizing your site’s potential. The worst part is that some of these things may only take you a few minutes to fix. Here are some SEO ranking factors many people don’t know about.

Implied Links or Brand Mentions

A lot of people assume that only active links to their site can boost their SEO, but implied links can boost SEO as well. Implied links can come in many forms, but most of them will be direct mentions of your brand, which is why people will stress the importance of having the name of your business mentioned on high-quality sources for SEO. The challenge here is getting your name mentioned naturally, but it’s possible if you’re creative. 

One great way to generate organic brand mentions is by holding some sort of event. You could hold an event that would be open to the public or a corporate festival with only your employees and a few guests. A nice corporate festival could get you mentioned on local business blogs or even in a local newspaper, and this can be very valuable in terms of SEO.

You have to make sure that the festival gets talked about for the right reasons, however. This is why you should consider hiring a professional team to organise the event. Companies like Yurtel can create corporate festivals that will blow away your participants. Many of them will then be compelled to talk about it on social media. From then on, it’s only a matter of time before your event and brand start spreading.

Site Encryption

Some people assume that only sites that collect payment information or handle highly sensitive data should get SSL encryption. But you should know that Google and other search engines privilege sites with an HTTPS prefix. So, if you haven’t considered getting a security certificate and making the switch to HTTPS, you should do it right now.

Site Speed

Site speed is also a factor that affects how high your site will be in search engine results. This is one of the latest ranking factors that were introduced by Google, and one that makes perfect sense from a user’s perspective. If you haven’t checked your site’s performance lately, or ever, there’s a strong chance that you could make some adjustments right now.

If you’re using heavy PNG images on your website, then these will have a significant effect on page loading time, so you’ll either have to compress them or use a lighter format like WebP or JPEG. Heavy animations should be removed too, so replace flash animations with HTML5 ones if you have any on your site.

You should also check what’s going on with your web server. If you are using a shared hosting service, then you need to switch to a dedicated option immediately. This is because the performance on your site could be influenced by traffic on the other sites you’re sharing your server with. We’re not saying that you should set up your own server room, but you should at least move to a virtual private server.

Another thing you could do is clean up your code. The tidier your site’s code is, the faster it will load, but most people don’t know when they have clunky code since their site looks perfectly normal. The only way to know if your site’s code is optimised is to use a testing tool or have it reviewed by a programmer. So, if you have any performance concerns, we suggest you have your site audited if you don’t know how to do it on your own.

User-Friendliness

The quality of your site’s user experience can also have a direct impact on how high it will rank. Site speed is one of the main aspects of user experience, but things like logical and clean navigation, lack of broken links, and relevant content, among others, are also part of it. So, look at your engagement metrics and see what they tell you. If you have very high bounce rates, or people visit a few pages and don’t convert, then you might have to make changes. 

So, if you didn’t know about any of these ranking factors and have never done anything to improve on them with your website, you might need to examine them more in detail. Thankfully, many of these things can be fixed easily and fast, so start looking at ways you could improve right now.