Website Ranking in 2022 – 11 Facts about Website Ranking in 2022
You have set up your store or website and found reliable suppliers of quality goods. You made sure to be active in answering queries and customer concerns. You bought a new theme to personalize your customer’s shopping experience. But why does it feel like you’re not getting the traffic and sales your website should be getting by now after all your efforts?
The truth is, the success of your business depends on what you are doing and hardly on how much you are doing. You can work hard or twice as hard as every new and old entrepreneur in e-commerce, and yet, without proper strategies, there will be no new leads or change in conversion rate on your site. Therefore, you may consider investing in strategies that work- like increasing your website ranking.
What Is A Website Ranking?
A website ranking, also known as a Search Engine Rank, or a Search Rank, refers to the position that a particular webpage holds among the search results of a search engine when a visitor enters a query.
To further understand this, a search engine is a software system or program designed to search and identify information on the World Wide Web to respond to the keywords or queries input by the user.
Examples of search engines are Yahoo!, Google, Bing, Baidu, Yandex, and Amazon (product-based search engine).
To illustrate a website ranking, a user goes to a search engine, like Google, for example, and inputs queries or keywords on the search bar.
Google then shows the results, which are web pages that start from the most relevant to your query to the least relevant, from the top to bottom of the page, to the next pages after it.
The first organic result that you see (which excludes all paid ads on top of the results) means that it has the highest website ranking.
Now, SERP and PageRank are two terms often confused with each other. SERP, or Search Engine Results Page, is the page that a search engine returns after a user has submitted a query.
It shows the rankings of the web pages that are relevant or connected to the query you input. A PageRank, on the other hand, is the Google algorithm that measures the legitimacy and authority of a webpage.
Basically, Google “ranks” a web page, between 0-10, depending on criteria like the number and quality of inbound links present on the page, the recentness or newness of the content, metadata, and some other technicalities.
Honestly, it is more like a grading system that Google imposes on a page, which could help it rank higher (or lower) on search rank or SERP.
Why is a High Website Ranking Important?
Every business’ ultimate goal is to increase its sales. To achieve this, a business has to acquire customers. So, how do businesses gain customers?
By making their brand or their products and services visible to people. But how do they make themselves visible? One way is to pay for search channels and social media networks for advertisements. Another way is to improve your website ranking.
So, why is a high website or search ranking important? It’s because it will make your website visible to a large number of relevant audiences who can be your potential customers or users.
It will generate leads (prospective customers or clients) to your website, which will increase traffic, which, in turn, increases your web conversion rate, which, ultimately, increases your sales.
According to a BrightEdge report, 53.3% of all trackable website traffic comes from organic search. In the same report, it was indicated that organic search generates more revenue for B2B (business-to-business) companies than any other channel.
Moreover, a study shows that around 70- 80% of search engine users tend to focus and click through organic searches than paid ads.
Added to this, 67.60% of clicks made by users are accounted for the first five organic search results on Google.
It means that whether you’re a small business or not, ranking high on search results will give you more visibility and, therefore, more advantage than the ones that follow after you.
Finally, a high website ranking psychologically makes your website more trustworthy in the eyes of the users. It enhances your image and authenticity, regardless of your business size.
How Does Website Ranking Work?
It’s pretty scary to ask how a search engine processes data to rank millions of websites on the World Wide Web.
With so many things to consider, from content to images, links, and all other backend processes involved, one might wonder how painstaking and complicated the process must be.
But to give you some background, search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Bing rank websites by first using a bot to “crawl” through the pages of every site and putting all the information it collected on an index.
Crawling means a team of robots or bots, which are also known as crawlers or spiders, go from site to site to find updated and new content, which they discover by links, and collect the information for indexing.
After the crawlers indexed the content or data, algorithms analyze the pages and data collected in the index and start organizing the pages based on what should appear first relevant to your queries.
This process is called ranking. When search engine algorithms rank pages for your query result, they calculate, evaluate, and consider hundreds of ranking factors from the search engine’s ranking criteria.
All these factors also point to Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
What is SEO?
A digital marketing strategy used by businesses and website owners for their web pages to rank higher on search results is SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization.
Through SEO, websites can boost their visibility and increase the number of visitors that go to their page, otherwise known as web traffic.
As a strategy, SEO is the process of improving several elements of your website.
Things you need to take into account and optimize are keywords used on the title and articles of your website, the images and videos you use, metadata, backlinks or inbound links, internal links, and many others.
11 Facts You Need to Know About Website Ranking in 2022
- Google holds 92.47% of the search engine market share worldwide.
It’s so big that even if all other search engines are combined, they still won’t hold a candle against it. Google owns YouTube and powers other search engines like Ask, which is the sixth largest search engine in the globe.
Google is followed by Bing, with 2.31% market share, Yahoo! with 1.53%, Baidu with 1.29%, Yandex with 0.8%, and lastly, DuckDuckGo with 0.6%.
- 68% of all trackable website traffic accounts for the combination of paid and organic searches. Organic search comprises 53.3% of this statistic, while the rest is contributed by paid ads that appear on top of the organic searches.
- Occupying the first three positions in a website or search rank gives you the most advantage against competing websites. These positions give a combined click-through (CTR) of 47.82%, or almost half of the overall click-through percentage from top 1- 20 page results.
- Google received 89.50 billion visits in the month of June 2021.
This is the latest and definitely not the highest recorded monthly visit on Google as it fluctuates every month. It was followed by Baidu with 5.67 billion visitors in a month and Yandex with 3.75 billion visitors.
- The most visited website in the world is Google.
Google occupies the top spot as the number one search engine and the number one website among all websites in the world. It is followed by YouTube, which it also owns. The third spot is occupied by Facebook, and the fourth and fifth spots are occupied by Twitter and Instagram, respectively.
- Mobile is dominating the market among the most used device for online searches.
Mobile’s market share stands at 55.4%, followed by desktop at 41.6%, and tablet at last at 2.64%. Google also developed a mobile-first algorithm to index all websites.
- Most keywords only get ten monthly searches or lower.
Keyword research is very vital in optimizing your website. You have to use the tools available and do your research to find the right keywords because 94.42% of keywords from a monthly search of 1.9 billion queries only receive ten or fewer searches a month.
- User experience (UX) is a top-ranking factor for search engines.
A visitor that goes back after clicking a web page from the search results in google means they aren’t happy with the user experience provided by the website. That’s why Google now adds UX as an important factor in ranking websites.
- Backlinks are the top contributing factor to ranking high in search results.
A study concluded that backlinks that come from different sites or different authoritative domains help websites rank higher in search results.
- People conduct web searches before making big purchases online.
A study showed that 81% of consumers go online to conduct research and read reviews before going to the store to make a purchase. Among these figures, 60% first visit a search engine before going to the store’s website.
- Second-page results from a Google search only receive 0.78% clicks.
An SEO analysis showed that results from the second page only get 0.78% clicks. Another SEO analysis site also displayed how low the clicks become for results on Google’s second page. It also indicates that very few visitors go to the next page to see more search results.
Frequently Asked Questions
What happens when I don’t rank high on website search results?
People or search engine visitors with queries tend to open only the first few results of their search. When your website did not make the top one to three spots on the results, you’ll be lucky enough to gain a few visitors to your site. You don’t get the exposure and visibility you need to attract visitors, so you can expect low traffic, leading to low conversions and sales.
Is my ranking the same for all search engines?
No. Your rank on one search engine will not be the same for all other search engines. Each search engine has its own unique way of calculating and evaluating website rankings. For instance, the keywords that helped you rank at the top spot on Google will not even put you at the first page of search results on other search engines like Yahoo! or Bing. You can use search analysis software like Searchmetrics Suite to find out more about the ranking differences of different search engines.
Can I pay search engines to put me at the top spot of search engine rankings?
Paying search engines to rank at the top spot is tempting because it’s the easy way to get website traffic. However, there is no such thing. If this becomes the case, the ranking will not be reliable and trustworthy. You need to put in the work which means you need SEO professionals on your team.
Conclusion
The continuous shift of people’s daily life in the digital era requires businesses to keep up with the times.
Migrating a brick-and-mortar store or establishing a business in the digital landscape is not enough to achieve your business goals. You have to find ways and develop strategies to leverage your business.
Paid ads and promotions to become visible in multiple channels combined with SEO to improve your website rankings is one of the most effective ways to gain new leads and increase your revenue.
To know more about website ranking, read more on Sellers Planet.
