SEO: Non-Technical Aspects That Influence Positioning

A few weeks ago, I found some technical blogs related to the loading speed to be taken into account in SEO. But in SEO along with the technical quality of a site, there are other aspects that we must take into account. It all begins when I start with this travel project flights from London to Copenhagen travel agency website.

Inbound links

In an extremely summarized way, we can consider each link to our website as a vote. Although the value of these votes will depend on several factors, such as:

• The authority of the domain and the authority of the page on which the link is. There are several options to calculate these values; the most usual and reliable are those of Moz, Domain Authority and Page Authority, and those of Majestic, Trust Flow and Citation Flow.
• The anchor text of the link.
• The theme of the page that links us -which should be related to our product.
• The position of the link -better the higher up.

A study of backlinko.com in which 1 million results were analyzed, has reached the following conclusion:

The number of different domains that link us has a great influence

More than the number of links, the most important thing is the number of different domains that link us. According to the authors themselves, this indicator has the highest correlation with positioning.

The greater the authority of the domains that link us, the better positioning.

Logical. It is not the same as linking us a blog that does not remember nor its author, to which we link a domain with DA 92.

Content

We already know that it is about offering interesting content related to the keywords we want to position – remember that Google’s objective is to offer the user information relevant to their search. But it is also about the content being sufficiently extensive.

A study by Ahrefs on the top 20 of 3 million searches offers us the following results:

That is, if you want to position in the top 5, you have to write content of 600 words or more. And the closer we get to the 1,000 words, the better.

The problem is that generating extensive and quality content takes a long time, but an SEO strategy will never be complete if it only focuses on the technical part.

A trick that can help you is to update old contents of your blog: Surely you have a lot of publications that you can update and, incidentally, increase its length.

Titles and Descriptions

The titles and descriptions influence in two ways in the positioning: Through the CTR that they are able to generate and through the information that offers to Google.

A study by Contently suggests titles between 90 and 99 characters have a higher CTR in Google’s search results (and, yes, CTR also has an impact on positioning):

In addition to the length of the title, the joint content of the title and the description influence the decision of the user to click on the result: Good copies will always be more attractive than poor texts. If you want some advice, HubSpot has some recommendations to generate effective descriptions – by the way, in an old article that has been updated and Moz also has advice for titles and descriptions.

Finally, keep in mind that Google uses the title and the description to answer the basic question “what is this page about?”, So they are fundamental elements when it comes to working on positioning. The basic advice is: Use natural language (remember, the objective is the end user, not a machine), trying to put the objective keywords at the beginning.

You can use Screamingfrog to crawl your site and get a complete list of URLs and titles for easy analysis.

Conclusions

SEO is becoming more multidisciplinary and is influenced by more factors. Some of them are technicians (loading speed, code quality, Schema.org, etc.) and are managed by IT team profiles. But there are many other factors with great weight in the positioning that we can control and improve without needing our computer head.