Increasing keyword rank seems to be a game of link building because this is the way through which you can get traffic onto your website. But you may be surprised to know that this is not the only way to improve the rank of your website against the keywords that you are targeting. As a matter of fact, if you are not paying attention to the ‘other’ factors that we are going to talk about, you might not be able to get better results just on the basis of an effective link building approach.

It is worth mentioning that rank basically refers to the position of a website everyone sees while looking at the SERPs.Well, Google doesn’t work this way anymore.

The results change with the insertion of subtle modifiers such geo-location, local items like a map pack, and user personalization. Google pays attention to the words entered by the users. That makes it challenging for the websites to retain their visibility even if they manage to come on the top of the search results.

If you believe that only link building can help your keywords to get ranked, you are going to have to develop a complicated, exhausting and, at the same time, robust link building strategy. But the good news is that there are some other factors that you can work on in order to increase the ranks of keywords.

Site crawl and indexing improvements

A few questions that you need to ask yourself here may include:

• Does Google crawl all of your website’s pages well?
• Are there any redirect loops or spider traps?
• Are you, unknowingly or knowingly, creating any roadblocks that are causing difficulty for Google to rank your site?

You can use a tool named Streaming Frog to see how well the pages of your site are being crawled.

Schema

Schema is not a direct ranking factor. However, it contributes in the process which leads to the pages ending up in the featured snippets. So, it is quite important to review the schema and find the ones that best for your site.

You can also go for what Google has been recommending, i.e. the JSON-LD version. It is worth mentioning here that the content of schema is the same which is present in the page.

Improving page speed

According to Google, page speed is the ranking factor. The reason is that it serves as a tiebreaker when your site equals your competitors in every other aspect. Remember, the page speed can be a tiebreaker only when your site’s speed is slightly slower.

Content relevancy and on-page optimization

First you will have to make sure that your page remains relevant right from the title till the end of the content in the page. Title tag is what that appears prominently in the SERPs. The content of your page needs to answer the search queries. This is the reason that it is highly important to make a research about the keywords in such a way that it becomes easy for you to identify and target user intent.

Other on-page optimizations include alt image attribute, H1 tags, a summarizing first paragraph, and captions around the image.

AMP

AMP is not directly helpful in ranking but they can help in the placement of pages at certain positions. For instance, it can bring your page into the Google News program if you want to be in the news counsel.