A website's ranking is its position on the search results page.This is a simple and straightforward definition of the term, which in fact contains many endless subtexts that form the basis of the most important branch of Digital marketing – SEO.

Search engine optimization is all about positioning a website correctly.A high ranking in the SERPs, perhaps as a first result, offers several strategic advantages. It is therefore important to understand what search engine optimization means for a website, what it means in terms of benefits, investment, and resources.

What are ranking, definition, and explanation?

The term is formed from the verb to rank.

Website ranking is an activity that search engines, not just Google, perform to place portals in the top 10 search results. It is done based on several qualitative factors that determine the order in which the snippets are presented to the requesting user.

Closely related to this concept of ranking sites and competing for the most interesting search queries is the profession of search engine optimization, or SEO, which deals with search engine optimization, e-commerce, and blogging.

A must-read: enhancing the user experience

Why website rankings matter

Search engine optimization aims to improve a website's ranking, as these results can increase the number of visits from potential customers.

The goal is always to rank a site according to its objectives: sites should be ranked in informational (how-to, data collection, non-monetization) and transactional (tangible conversion, purchase, or booking) searches based on quality, non-sponsored content.

Website ranking is necessary to increase a project's authority, generate organic results and increase brand awareness. In other words, company and name recognition.

How to increase a site's ranking

The reality is simple: there are 10 search results, and most clicks focus on the first results.So it seems obvious to focus a lot of resources on ranking. The stage in Google's process that follows indexing and crawling pages.

The search engine scans the content, if suggested rules (such as index) allow the spider access, it indexes the publication and then ranks it by evaluating various factors.How can you try to influence this step? Here is some basic information on the Internet.

SEO pages.

This includes all the steps that allow an SEO expert, along with other experts such as bloggers and copywriters, to optimize a site for a specific audience.

This starts with good keyword research, search analysis, good advantage positioning, competitor behavior, and activation strategy.

Then you'll develop an editorial plan by analyzing search queries and dividing them into informational (blog posts), navigational and event-related.

These will be useful for converting users into customers or leads. This balance also includes optimizing internal links and meta tags such as title, description, robots, and others. Not forgetting the structure of the web page and its different formatting H1, H2, etc.

Off-page referencing

The ranking of a website is linked to the concept of PageRank (PR), a mathematical formula that indicates the value of a page as a function of the links it receives. These links, as you can imagine, are the starting point for working with off-page SEO: the techniques needed to improve rankings using signals that come from outside and are not controlled by the people involved in the project.

Off-page SEO aims to acquire mentions and especially inbound links, which must be do follow links to be of value for search engine optimization. In the world, link building is widely used, but there are other nuances that can help you get useful links to rank your website.

For example, digital PR is often used to garner mentions through publications in local and national newspapers, to earn links, to secure links through content marketing work, and then it gets to other methods that can be risky, like building a PBN (Private Blogging Network).Remember that Google tends to penalize link schemes.

On-page SEO

Many people count this definition as on-page SEO. To be precise, we can say that on-page work concerns the whole structure of the portal and affects the organization of the project.

Here, for example, we can talk about page loading speed, core web vitals, and everything related to the user experience of the pages, the hierarchy of resources, the tree structure, the optimization of the crawl budget, and the insertion of sitemap.xml in the Google Search Console.

Solutions that do more than PageRank

Over the years, several paid tools have offered alternative measures that allow various web marketers and SEO experts to rank a domain.

These include Zoom Authority for Seozoom, which looks at search engine traffic, organic ranking stability, and growth opportunities.Then there's Moz:

Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking value introduced by Moz that predicts the chances of a website's placement in search engine results pages (SERPs). The Domain Authority value ranges from 1 to 100, with higher values indicating better rankings.

Are there other useful solutions to get a metric to evaluate the ranking of a website? You can use the Ahrefs Rank (AR), which determines the ranking according to the number and quality of backlinks. The higher the number of high-quality backlinks, the higher the rank of the domain and the AR value approaches the maximum mark.

How to check the ranking of the website?

If the positioning of a portal can be considered a decisive factor for the success of a digital project, the need to check the ranking in Google as a goal is obvious.

What is the ideal solution? That depends on the needs and the resources available.For a quick check, you can simply open your browser tab, incognito so as not to contaminate the results with your personal history, and perform a search. Are you working on your domain?

You can use a free SEO tool, namely Google Search Console: you will find a detailed analysis of the positioning and ranking of images and videos in the performance reports section.

There are other advanced tools that are useful for your domain and those of your competitors.

With SEMrush, for example, you can define important keywords for your business and track their ranking over several months. With Seozoom, you can easily do a keyword search to get an idea of your ranking in the SERPs with the various ranking changes that have occurred over time.

Do you want to improve your SEO ranking?

There is only one solution: you need to tackle it with the assistance of an SEO expert, a professional agency who will help you find the right solution for your needs. Without pursuing useless goals that only have to do with vanity metrics.SEO positioning must be functional and defined by precise and achievable KPIs. Is this a goal you want to achieve for your website or e-commerce positioning?