Achieving and maintaining a high SEO ranking in this competitive digital landscape requires a solid understanding of the core SEO ranking factors and google ranking factors. From optimizing your on-page content to ensuring a strong backlink profile, these search engine ranking factors play a significant role in determining how your website performs in search results. The key is to stay proactive—consistently refining your content, improving technical SEO, and delivering an outstanding user experience. Not Prioritizing High-Quality Backlinks Despite being a key search engine ranking factor, backlinks are often not given the priority they deserve by many websites. Earning links from high-authority sites signals to Google that your content is trustworthy and valuable. However, relying on low-quality or irrelevant backlinks can hurt your SEO ranking factors.
Total image content
- These penalties are not manually issued but are the result of the website being evaluated by the search engine’s algorithm.
- In addition, you should occasionally do a kind of spring cleaning and sort out videos that are no longer relevant and/or work poorly.
- Google’s Search Quality Raters Guidelines used to be a closely guarded document at Google that was eventually leaked online.
- High-quality content establishes your website as a credible source of information, building trust with your audience and authority within your industry.
- Tools can provide insights into competitors’ organic traffic and their strategies.
Google clarifies that removing explicit mentions of HTTPS from its list of ranking signals doesn’t mean it should be ignored. Google’s emphasis on website security dates back to August 2014, when it announced that HTTPS had become a signal for its search ranking algorithms. Recent updates to Google Search documentation have led to speculation about the importance of HTTPS and Page Experience for search rankings. To begin our research, we worked with Matt to create a list of of 2,000 random search queries from the 2013 Ranking Factors study.
Avoid spammy tactics like link farms, paid links, or excessive link exchanges, as these can get you penalized. Instead, create great content, build genuine relationships, and earn links properly. Engage in digital PR and outreach efforts to build relationships with journalists, bloggers, and influencers in your industry. You can earn coverage and backlinks from reputable media outlets and industry publications by providing valuable insights, expert opinions, or original research.
User Experience (RankBrain)
Your content might be amazing to human readers, but it also needs to be communicated in a way Google understands. If you’re looking to ground yourself in modern SEO practices, this list of SEO statistics is a great place to start. Read on to explore some of the most relevant facts and figures that show where SEO is in 2025 and where it may be going. They’re constantly tweaking their rubrics for assessing content—not to mention the many outside influences.
On-page Optimization:
Indeed, page rendering has a proven link to user satisfaction and sales conversions (we’ll get into that later), but surprisingly we could not find a clear correlation to ranking in this case. Engaged audiences are more likely to interact with your content, share it, and return to your site, all of which positively impact rankings. Effective keyword integration is extremely essential for optimized content. Intrusive interstitials, such as pop-ups that obscure the main content or demand immediate action, can severely disrupt the user experience.
As part of the Search team, she enjoys creating content that helps you master SEO. For example, when I search for the term ‘sustainable phone case’, these results are shown by Google. Based on my search term and SEO Anomaly the intent behind it, Google deems these results the best ones found in its index.
While we’re on the subject of mobile, mobile-friendliness is another major SEO ranking factor. More people use mobile devices than desktops to access the web, and that’s one reason there’ve been changes in how Google ranks search results. So before we get into the actual SEO ranking factors, let’s start by answering some basic questions most people have about SEO. We’ve created this handy table of contents if you want to skip ahead to the SEO ranking factors.
