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What factors can have an impact on my rankings?

The position of a website on the search engine results page is referred to as its ranking in SEO. There are other ranking criteria that determine whether a website shows higher on the SERP, such as the relevancy of the content to the search query or the quality of backlinks connecting to the page.

 

Different search engines get different results.

The ranking of a website or URL for certain keywords or keyword combinations differs every search engine. A domain may rank in the top three for a certain keyword on Bing but not even on the first page of Google search results for the same term. Of course, this is true for all search engines – Bing, Google, Yahoo, and every other search engine has its own algorithm for calculating rankings and, as a result, ranks websites differently.

When utilizing multiple language or nation versions of the same search engine, such as Google, rankings might also vary. A search analysis software, such as the Searchmetrics Suite, is an excellent approach to obtain insight into and track ranking disparities between search engines.

Good rankings are an excellent source of traffic.

The goal of good search engine rankings is to get as much traffic as possible through the organic search channel. The higher a page ranks in the search results for a search query, the more likely it is that the searcher will click on it. This illustrates the clear relationship between high ranks and increasing traffic.

The top three search results have the strongest association between ranks and clicks (and traffic). With the incorporation of Google’s Knowledge Graph data and the integration of Universal Search components (SERP Features) such as videos, maps, and Google Shopping advertisements, the appearance of search results pages is continually evolving. These changes may imply that the top three organic ranks are no longer the best three spots on the SERP. This has been proven in heatmap and eye-tracking testing.

What factors can have an impact on my rankings?         

Search engine optimization is a technique for influencing search engine rankings in a long-term manner. Google and other search engines use incredibly complicated algorithms to determine keyword search results. Individual ranking components and their weighting within the ranking computation are protected intellectual property owned by search engines and are not publicly published.

Rankings are said to be closely related to the following factors:

• Number of backlinks
• Sitemap and internal linking
• Usage of keywords in text elements like meta titles, meta descriptions, text etc.
• term optimization of content, based on comparison with other documents on the same topic (proof and relevant terms, topic/content clusters, WDF*IDF)
• URL structure
• trust assigned to the page
• page load time (site speed)
• time on site and bounce rate (here: how long a visitor spends on the page before they return to the SERP)
• CTR in the SERPs, i.e. how often searchers click on the result

Presumably many other factors like page traffic, authorship, how up-to-date a page is
etc.