Relevance as the key to better website rankings

ByDr.-Ing. Erik Neitzel
Relevance as the key to better website rankings

As an SEO, you want to permanently develop your web projects. You may also have a very structured approach here, and yet you are wondering what your website is still missing as a whole. So let’s take a closer look.

What you’ve been doing as SEO so far

You hope for new rankings through various optimization measures. At the same time you know “content is king”. So you may try to continue to appear attractive to Google with new content. At the same time, you check your rankings and hope for continuously better results through optimization on the one hand and new content on the other.

This approach is not fundamentally wrong either. However, it is not necessarily complete either.

What does Google actually want to achieve?

Keep in mind what Google actually wants to do and how Google works. What is responsible for the better rankings you get from Google?

From the point of view of the search engine, page rankings are all about giving the visitor (the searcher) the richest result. In other words: does the user get the most suitable (deepest, most valuable, most diverse) page for his search or not.

In order to live up to the claim of the “best page” for a topic, optimization measures for performance, security, page structure and so on are undoubtedly necessary, which you may already take to heart.

At the same time, you are only the “best page” for the topic of a search term for Google if you provide as much relevance as possible (depth of content and further content). You can achieve that with content that really fits.

What new content you should really publish

Especially if your website has not yet been visible, it is important not to get lost in the topic. Stick to one core issue, no matter how small.

If you then develop more and more suitable content, tools, videos and supporting material on this topic, you can expand yourself more and more from there.

With new content, be like a spiral that is thematically always very close to the last publication, and yet goes one step further. Then you automatically come to meaningful internal links and are completely unsophisticated with very high relevance for the topic of the searcher.

Small relevance conclusion

What Google wants to deliver to the searcher is the highest possible relevance of the proposed website in relation to the search term that the searcher has entered. Google will only place you higher in the ranking for this search term if the machine is convinced that you are delivering this relevance.

Optimizing your website in terms of various OnPage factors is the minimum of what Google expects from every page. From there on, it’s about how much added value you really offer a user. If you offer this added value, you can be very sure of improved rankings over time. Not previously.

It makes sense to check your rankings. But don’t expect miracles as long as you don’t actively take measures to improve them on a content level via increased relevance.

A tip for the future

Do not monitor the rankings of your pages as long as they are not really relevant to a topic. Ranking checks are used to control what you have achieved thematically.

It takes some time until you rank individual search terms such as “dog school” or “suitcase”, which are searched very often, but also have a correspondingly large number of competitive websites.

But you can score here by posting (really) relevant content – close to the many subtopics that exist on this big topic. With creative ideas, first-class research, structured preparation and media support. This is how your site gets big. We wish you a lot of success.

Dr.-Ing. Erik Neitzel