Yesterday, we released part 1 of our guide on how to identify potential factors that might be damaging your standing and rankings with Google. It’s no secret that Google has become pickier and pickier with each passing year, making it more difficult for blogs and websites to compete against one another for prime real estate in search results. From the concerns over duplicate content to the precise formatting of keywords and phrases, it has never been more difficult to find the right path to better standings in most SERPs. Today, we’ll wrap up the list with three more important variables to consider when improving overall standings.

Inferior Visitor Experience

Google has deployed many different changes in recent years to its algorithms in order to discover how individual visitors feel about a given website. In many cases, a visitor’s experience can determine just how well you rank in select search results. For instance, a visitor who immediately leaves the site because he or she could not find relevant information will tell Google that the site in question is not ideally suited to be ranked high in search. In other cases, pinging users with an inferior design or navigational menu can make it difficult for them to access or navigate the website; without prior loyalty to the website or blog, visitors will mostly leave and find a comparable solution somewhere else. Because of this, user experience is crucial in sending the right signals to Google and maintaining decent SERP rankings.

No Mobile Solution

Not too long ago, Google announced that websites that do not deploy a mobile responsive solution will experience a drop in rankings. Why is this? Google has observed that a majority of its web traffic now originates from mobile devices. Mobile-optimized search results are crucial in providing users with relevant and accessible information that does not require them navigating obstacles in order to find what they need. Because of this, websites and blogs alike must make the transition to a mobile responsive design. Many modern WordPress themes and comparable content management system options provide this functionality already, but some websites – especially those built from scratch using custom HTML – will need to implement a custom solution. There are many mobile responsive design services available on the web that can be used to customize an existing website into a mobile-responsive alternative, which is provided to mobile users when they visit based on browser detection.

Improperly Optimized Titles and Tags

Search engines rely upon distinctions in content in order to properly classify it and determine its value. Google uses many different metrics to determine whether a piece of content is relevant and enjoyable; the analysis of page titles and tags is included in this. Despite the sophistication in its algorithms, page titles are still heavily weighted by Google when determining how to classify your content. Pinging users with results that they’ll enjoy is based on in part how your page titles appear, how sub-titles and headlines are optimized, and how page tags and keywords are customized. All of these individual elements can weigh greatly on how Google views your content, which determines whether or not anyone else will see it via search.