Ever wondered why a website ranks on top of a search engine for a keyword and other websites rank lower for the same keyword?
Whenever we search for any keyword, we get billions of search results, but still, the winners are the ones ranking on the first page or even in the first five positions.
Just the other day, I was searching for “4 Bedroom Apartments in London” on Google.
After some time, I realized that there were a staggering 468,000,000 results for this query.
Naturally, I wanted to understand the difference between the top and lower-ranking websites.
So, I took a closer look at two sites: “www.rightmove.co.uk,” which ranks at the top, and “www.acorngroup.co.uk,” which ranks well below at more than the 40th position.
After conducting thorough research, I identified 5 key points that explain why websites like Rightmove consistently rank at the top of search engine results.
In this article I am going to explain to you the five key differences between a top and lower ranking real estate website on Google.
Overview of Rightmove.co.uk
Rightmove.co.uk is the largest online real estate portal in the United Kingdom.
It was launched in 2000. It has become a top platform for property buyers, sellers, landlords, and tenants.
Rightmove.co.uk lists residential and commercial properties. You can buy or rent them in the UK.
Rightmove.co.uk has become a trusted and influential platform in the UK real estate market.
It attracts millions of visitors every month.
It is a key resource for anyone involved in buying, selling, renting, or investing in UK property.
Overview of Acorngroup.co.uk
Acorngroup.co.uk is a full platform. It offers many financial services.
It focuses mainly on investment, savings, and retirement planning.
The website is a hub for people seeking financial products and services. These include pensions, ISAs, and investment funds.
The website is user-friendly. It has intuitive navigation. It is for both new and experienced investors.
It offers educational resources, investment guides, and personalized advice.
The website uses many traffic sources. These include search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, and affiliate partnerships.
They use these to attract a broad audience. Acorngroup.co.uk builds traffic through partnerships with industry influencers and targeted ads.
They also focus on user engagement and satisfaction.
They do this with interactive features and responsive customer support.
Now, let’s dive deeper into five key aspects that drive higher ranking for a website
1. Domain Authority and Page authority
Domain Authority and Page Authority are considered a main factor of a website whereas domain authority shows the strength of the whole website and page authority shows the strength of a particular page.
Having high DA and PA from your competitors helps your web pages to rank on SERP.
As you can clearly see in the above picture rightmove.co.uk has better Da Pa than acorngroups.co.uk which shows that the authority of rightmove.co.uk is higher than the acorngroup.co.uk
Which factors determine the Da and Pa of a website?
Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) are determined by various factors, including:
- Backlinks: Backlinks are important. They are links to a website or webpage. Their quality and quantity influence DA and PA. High-quality, relevant backlinks from authoritative websites contribute positively to these metrics.
- Content Quality: The quality of the content is essential. It must be well-written, informative, and relevant. It must engage users and provide value. This is key for building authority. Websites with high-quality content tend to have higher DA and PA.
- Website Age and History: Older, established websites have a history of good performance. They tend to have higher DA. But, new websites can also reach high DA and PA. They do this by using SEO.
- On-Page Optimization: On-Page Optimization relies on factors like keyword optimization, meta tags, and site structure. Internal linking also matters. These things contribute to a page’s authority and affect its PA.
- Social Signals: Social Signals are not as important as backlinks. They include shares, likes, and comments on social media. They can indirectly impact DA and PA by boosting visibility and traffic.
- User Experience: Factors like site speed, mobile-friendliness, and overall user experience play a role in determining website authority. Websites that provide a positive user experience are more likely to have higher DA and PA.
- Domain Diversity: Having backlinks from a diverse range of domains, rather than just a few sources, can positively influence DA and PA.
- Linking Root Domains: The number of unique domains linking to a website or webpage also contributes to its authority. Obtaining backlinks from a wide range of reputable websites improves DA and PA.
By focusing on these factors and implementing effective SEO strategies, website owners can improve their Domain Authority and Page Authority over time, leading to better search engine rankings and increased organic traffic.
2. Backlinks
Backlinks are the most important part of the growth of a website. It is a link that one website gets from another.
Backlinks can benefit your overall SEO performance.
The popular sites get natural backlinks but if you are still unknown to the masses you need to create high quality backlinks for your website.
Backlinks are very effective to rank web pages on SERP.
Here, Rightmove.co.uk has more than 5x the quantity of backlinks but here only the quantity of backlinks does not matter.
10 quality backlinks are much better than 1,000 bad backlinks. So the quality of the backlinks must be good.
3. Page loading speed
Google reports that most people will leave your site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
Another Report by explodingtopics.com has said that 92.3% of internet users access the internet using a mobile phone and 60% of the website traffic comes from mobile so it is important to have a better page loading speed on mobile so it can enhance user experience on your website.
The loading speed of a website also plays a very important role in website rankings because better loading speed means better user experience which tends users to stay on the website for a long time which decreases the bounce rates.
Here acorngroup.co.uk overall website performance is not much better as rightmove.co.uk’s loading speed of acorngroup.co.uk is 5.6s which is much lower compare to rightmove.co.uk which has a website loading speed of 3.4s
Chances of the user to go back from the web page is more in acorngroup.co.uk as compared to rightmove.co.uk which give advantage to this website in terms of SEO.
4. Content
Everybody says content is the king!! But is it true?
Well after the Google March 2024 update the preference for quality content has increased content with relevancy, good length, and meaningful will automatically rank on Google
Most of the blogs rank on Google with only content no more backlinks are made on such pages but it doesn’t mean that every content will rank on google.
Keywords play a significant role in content keyword placement is good then Google will understand the purpose of your target
Let us understand it with an example-
My keyword is “4 Bedroom Apartments in London” so let us check the content on both of the web pages mentioned above.
Here not proper keyword is mentioned but a keyword with a similar meaning is present in the content that’s why both websites show on my keyword in SERP that the relevancy of content to the keyword is slightly more than acorngroups.co.uk
Acrongroups.co.uk has only 4 listings on its page which decreases its content length on the other hand rightmove.co.uk has 24 listings on its page which increase the length of the page and also holds users on the web page for a long time which increases user attention.
5. Sitemaps
A sitemap is a file that provides information about the pages, videos, and other files on a website, along with the relationships between them.
It serves as a blueprint of the website’s structure, helping search engines find, crawl, and index all of its content efficiently.
By including URLs and metadata, such as the last modified date and change frequency, sitemaps facilitate better search engine optimization (SEO) and ensure that search engines can access and understand the website’s content more effectively.
As you can see rightmove.co.uk has a sitemap on its site which helps google to better identify the purpose of the page canonical URL and robot.txt files are also submitted by rightmove.co.uk.
But acorngroups.co.uk has missed this opportunity; they have not submitted sitemaps, canonical URLs which is an important missing point of the acorngroups.co.uk.
Conclusion
While both Rightmove.co.uk and Acorngroup.co.uk implement different effective SEO strategies to optimize their website, there are a lot of points that create differences between the top and lower-ranking websites.
In this article, we have only discussed 5 major key points that will be sufficient to understand that there are several small points that are very effective in Google rankings. Still, most people ignore them, and the website that grabs these small things wins in Google SERP.