Understanding the Three Pillars of SEO: Authority, Experience, and Relevance

There are multiple factors that you need to pay attention to in order to make your website appear at the top of search engine results. It’s not just about optimizing your website content for keywords and doing basic on-page SEO. The world is highly competitive today and you need to do some real hard work to make your website stand out in the competition. Understanding the three pillars of SEO can be of great help here. These three pillars, include: Authority, Experience, and Relevance. All three are equally important. When creating SEO strategies, you must keep in mind these three elements. Let us dive deeper to understand the significance of these three pillars of SEO:

Pillar 1: Authority

Authority is one of the most important pillars of SEO. It refers to the importance that a website holds in the eyes of search engines. For every search query, Google ranks web pages based on their authority in the respective niche. There are various factors that search engines consider when determining the authority of a web page.

The backlink profile of a website plays an important role in establishing the site’s authority. Sites having more relevant and high-quality backlinks are often considered more authoritative by search engines compared to sites having less and low-quality backlinks. 

Establishing your website’s authority is a gradual process that happens over time. You cannot expect your site to be considered authoritative by Google just one day after improving content quality or within one week after improving your backlinks profile. Here are a few factors that contribute to a website’s authoritativeness:

1. High-Quality Backlinks

Backlinks, also known as inbound links, are the links present on other websites that point to your web pages. Sites that get backlinks from high-quality websites are considered trustworthy and authoritative by search engines. If a website is linking to your content, it means your content is valuable enough for them to use it as a source of information. This is what you need to gain authority. However, you must keep in mind that not all backlinks have a positive impact on your site’s SEO performance.

Some of these backlinks can be irrelevant to your website. Backlinks that come from low-quality or spammy sites can make search engines consider your site as spammy as well. To avoid this, you can conduct a backlink audit and mark such low-quality backlinks as no-follow links. You should try to create high-quality content that naturally attracts backlinks from good-quality sites.

Also Check: Backlink Strategies in 2024

2. High-Quality Content

The quality of content on your website matters more than you think. With the recent Google SEO updates, it is clear that Google now prioritizes high-quality content that is genuinely helpful for the readers and pushes low-quality keyword-stuffed content that is written to manipulate search engines. Therefore, it becomes extremely crucial to focus on the quality of your website content, including landing pages, blogs, and any other content.

The content must be original, easy-to-understand, well-structured, and relevant to the topic. It is still important to incorporate relevant keywords into your content, but these keywords should be added naturally. The content should not be keyword-stuffed.

Apart from the quality of content, in-depth research and thoroughly covered information also play a vital role here. The more in-depth information you cover, the better understanding your readers will get. However, this doesn’t mean you have to go over and beyond the topic. You can instead consider building topic clusters to cover topics in detail.

3. DA (Domain Authority)

Domain authority is a score ranging between 1 and 100. It is a measure of how trustworthy or authoritative your website is in the eyes of Google and other major search engines. Higher domain authority improves your chances of acquiring top positions in search engine result pages. It’s a metric introduced by Moz and you can check your site’s DA using Moz domain authority checker or other tools, including Semrush, Ahrefs, etc.

The domain authority of your website is affected by various factors, including your site’s backlink profile, content quality, technical SEO elements, up-to-date content, etc. Maintaining a good domain authority can help you gain higher authority in the eyes of search engines and position your site higher on SERPs.

Pillar 2: Experience

Experience is another important pillar of SEO. It refers to the experience of users visiting your website. Google and other search engines have improved their search algorithms to better rank sites that prioritize user experience. Also, it is one of the important elements covered under Google’s EEAT guidelines, where EEAT refers to Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Therefore, it becomes extremely important to pay attention to your site’s user experience.

There are multiple factors that impact the user experience of a website, including user-friendly design, mobile responsiveness, website loading speed, etc. Let us discuss each of these factors in detail:

1. User-Friendly Website Design

The design of your website should be user-friendly, i.e. easy to understand and use for your target audience. You can use engaging visual elements that go well with your website content, include relevant CTAs, and ensure that the site is easy to navigate. You can use the breadcrumb schema markup so that users do not feel lost when navigating through your site and easily go back to any previous step if they want.

2. Website Page Speed

The loading speed of your site also matters when it comes to the user experience of your site. Users do not prefer sites that take too long to load the content. If your site takes more than 3-4 seconds to load properly, you must work on its speed optimization. It not only impacts your site’s SEO rankings but also has an important role to play in user retention. A user is very less likely to come back to your website if their experience was hampered due to poor loading speed.

3. Mobile Responsiveness

As most people make search queries using mobile devices, it is important to ensure that your website is responsive on mobile devices. Google recently announced that websites that are not responsive on mobile devices will no longer be indexed and considered for search engine rankings. Google has already implemented this starting from July 5, 2024. It also plays a crucial role in determining your site’s user experience and further impacts its SEO performance. 

Pillar 3: Relevance

Relevance: this is the third and last pillar of SEO. The purpose of SEO is to make your website appear for relevant search queries. Therefore, this pillar revolves around the relevance of of content you publish on your website. This starts from the very first step, i.e. keyword research, itself. When conducting keyword research, you have to ensure that you only pick keywords that are relevant to your website. Pick a niche and stick to it. Here are two important aspects of a website’s relevance:

1. On-Page SEO

This is where you align your website’s content with the user needs and search engine algorithms. When doing on-page SEO, ensure that you target keywords that are relevant to your target audience. Just optimizing content for keywords will not suffice. Ensure that you have incorporated relevant keywords in title tags, meta descriptions, image alt texts, headings, etc, as well. Also, it is important to pay attention to the technical SEO Agency in India elements of your site.

2. Freshness of Content

The content of your website should be up-to-date with the latest information and market trends. Content that is not updated regularly is slowly pushed by search engines resulting in content decay. To make sure that your content remains relevant, update it from time to time and add new information if any.

What Our SEO Experts Have to Say?

The team of SEO professionals recommends paying special attention the the above-mentioned pillars of SEO. Google now prioritizes websites that have high-quality content and that offer good user experience. Even if you are creating good quality content but your technical SEO elements like website page speed, navigation, etc, are not fine enough, your site may be pushed down by search engines.

The goal here is to attain a perfect balance between the three pillars, i.e. authority, relevance, and experience. You cannot overlook even one of them. So, just make sure that your site loads fast, is mobile-responsive, has high-quality content, and has a good backlink profile. In case you need any further assistance with your site’s SEO, you can connect with our experts!

Frequently Asked Questions

1. How does authority impact SEO performance?

Ans. Authority is one of the three key pillars of SEO. The authoritativeness of a site is about how trustworthy it is in the eyes of search engines. Higher authority may lead to better SEO performance and hence higher website rankings. 

2. What are some strategies to build authority in SEO?

Ans. Some effective strategies to build authority in SEO are:

• Acquiring high-quality backlinks
• Creating high-quality content
• Covering topics in depth by creating topic clusters

3. How can improving user experience enhance my SEO?

Ans. User experience is one of the key factors considered by search engines when determining your site’s rankings. Better user experience leads to higher rankings and bad user experience can have a negative impact on the SEO performance of your site. 

4. What are some key metrics to measure authority, relevance, and experience in SEO?

Ans. Some key metrics to measure authority, relevance, and experience include DA (domain authority), site rankings, impressions on the site, search visibility, bounce rate, average time spent by users on a page, etc. 

5. What tools can help improve authority, relevance, and experience in SEO?

Ans. Some tools that you can use to analyze and improve your site’s SEO performance include Google Search Console, Semrush, Ahrefs, Moz, etc.