Keep in mind that these are the most important factors for ranking in organic search. Ranking in the map pack relies primarily on reviews and citations.

Producing content that ranks well isn’t just about including the right keywords (though that helps). It’s more about producing content that is easy to understand, helpful, and relevant to readers.

The types of content that tend to perform the best, are longer and more comprehensive. In fact, the average length of top-rated content tends to be around 2,000 words.

If you think about your own Internet use, this makes sense. In our lives, we typically start coming through blog posts when we want an answer to a question. We prefer complete, well-written answers to very brief discussions of a topic.

Ultimately, Google shows user pages that it thinks they want to see, so it should come as no surprise that Google values engaging content over anything else.

What does this mean for you? It means that it’s worth having a good writer on call to produce pages and blog posts for your site. Five years ago, Google was much less sophisticated at separating good writing from bad, and so copywriters weren’t so important. Today, they can be the difference between success and failure.

One very important way Google determines whether a page is worth serving up to users is by looking at how many other pages are linking to it, and where those links are from.

This also makes sense. If your page about home repair is linked to frequently on the Internet, it may be useful. If it’s linked to frequently on other home repair sites, it is definitely useful. If it is linked to on random sites that have nothing to do with home repair, that is a spam single and could potentially hurt.

On balance, this is a very natural and organic way to judge the worth of web pages, but like anything else, this system can be gamed. Business that do well when it comes to backlinks go out of their way to get them.

What does this mean for you? It means you must take measures to bring links to your company. One way to do this, of course, is to create content that is so useful that readers will share it and other authors will link to it. It’s always good to strive for this goal, but readers are fickle and this tactic can be hit or miss.

Another way is to guest blog. You can contact sites that are related to your own and ask to write blogs for them. Sometimes, they will agree. You can then put links in the blog you write back to whatever page on your own site back to whatever page you are attempting to promote.

Mobile is huge. It’s number three on our list, but in the extremely near future, it will probably be number one. The percentage of people accessing the Internet through mobile devices is increasing incredibly rapidly.

Last year, for the first time ever, mobile users became the majority on the Internet. The percentage of people using desktop only is decreasing , in favor of a multi-platform approach.

What’s more, Google favors mobile responsiveness. Regardless of the actual behavior of your customers, Google (the company) recently made the decision to penalize non-mobile sites in search rankings.

For this reason, having a site that is favorable to smartphones and other mobile devices is paramount.

What does this mean for you? It means you’ll need a mobile optimized site! If your site is too old, and not built on a modern content management system like WordPress or Shopify, you may need to make a new one. If you do have a new site, it may still require some design tweaks to be truly mobile friendly. Google analytics is a great tool to use to see how easy it is to use your site on a non-desktop device.

This is often a tricky issue for regular businesses to solve without help. Technical factors are, after all, technical.

Technical factors tend to fall into two categories:

As Google is the arbiter of search rankings, both are very important.

What does this mean for you? It means you need to pay attention to, at the very least, site speed, correct heading structure, and keyword density.

For most people, this will mean that you need to work with a web designer. Improving site speed, for example, takes a bit of expertise and is also a long and tedious chore.

However, if you want to take a DIY approach, a good solution is to run each page on your site through the Moz on-page grader. This useful tools will tell you what you need to fix, and how to do it.

Whether you’re competing nationally or locally, drilling down on these four factors and making them work will put you ahead of the pack.

Until Google changes its algorithm again.

Looking for help with the technical side of your website? Our basic website maintenance package may help. If you want help with content, try one of our search engine marketing packages.