SEO rank is determined by these 4 basic metrics

For those of you who are trying to tackle SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, the first thing to remember is that search engines are just machines that use an algorithm to determine your site’s SEO rank. There are no real live people involved, and search engines are basically blind unless you explain what an image is.

So what is this blind machine, that determines how much organic traffic you get, measuring when it crawls your Shopify site? There are four factors that determine site rank: Relevance, Authority, User experience, and Freshness.

Relevance

Relevance is the first sort search engines do when they try to match the user’s query with sites that might be a good fit. If you search for great family cars, you won’t be directed to a site that sells fishing lures. (Hopefully.) There are lots of additional factors that go into relevance like keywords, overall content match, geography, and the age of the relevant content.

Authority

Authority measures the quality of a site’s content, the number and quality of backlinks, how long a website has been around, and how much traffic it gets. If you are smaller site It is easier for you become an authority on a very narrow topic than it is for you to rank for a broad category. That’s why you often hear SEO experts talking about niche-ing down on one narrow market.

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User Experience

User Experience measures how much, and how often, visitors engage with a website. Things like time on site, total events (events are things like clicks, swipes and drags) and return visits are all part of user experience. Stylaquin really shines with this factor. It really boosts your engagement stats. here’s a link to the Stylaquin video.

Freshness

Freshness is how old your content is. Freshness is also a metric in your Authority score. If you google a keyword you want to rank for, pay attention to the age of the post. If you see a lot of older posts that shows you there’s an opportunity to rank higher for those keywords by covering the same topics in a newer post. It’s also a good idea to periodically update your top posts to keep them on top.

To recap: in order to improve your site’s search engine ranking you will need to dial in your site’s Relevance, Authority, User experience, and freshness.

Watch the Hump Day Bar Hopping video on SEO Metrics.