Why Knowing Google’s Keyword Hierarchy Can Help You Improve Your Website’s Rankings

When it comes to improving the rankings of a website, SEO is the usual means to do so. Whether you do this internally or employ outside help in the form of an SEO agency, there will be a huge list of possible optimisations that need to be considered and implemented, some of which are a lot easier to achieve than others.

One of the reasons their so much to do is the fact that when Google’s algorithm is calculating where any single website should rank, it assesses numerous ranking factors. There is some argument over how many there are exactly, but the consensus is that it is at least 200 which are known, and speculation that there are several more which only Google is aware of.

Within the array of ranking factors, Google places a different weight or importance on each one than it does others. Near the top will be backlinks and user experience whilst some of the less important ones include domain age and the number of social media followers.

Integral to a lot of the ranking factors Google considers will be keywords. For every search that is entered, Google will apply its algorithm to each one using the ranking factors we have just discussed. As it does so, it will find keywords in different locations within and outwith a website.

A crucial point to understand here is that Google does not treat each location where a keyword is found equally. It has a hierarchy within its algorithm that gives more weight and thus more ranking juice to some locations than it does to others because it believes it is more difficult for website owners to achieve.

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