Google Ranking Factors: The 3 That Really Matter

Write several pieces that are in-depth on a core topic and internally link them to gain more relevance across a wide variety of queries. Beyond site speed, check Google’s Core Web Vitals—Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). These metrics will be increasingly important for ranking, especially as user experience continues to take center stage.

Providing a great user experience

If enough people bounce from your site to the search engine results, this tells Google that your result didn’t give that searcher what they were looking for. For example, this list of content marketing tools has an eye-catching title. When lots of people click on your result in Google, you can find yourself with higher rankings for that term. And, according to Semrush, this page also ranks for 5.9k different keywords.

SEO best practices also apply to local SEO, since Google also considers a website’s position in organic search results when determining local ranking. A search engine like Google has its own proprietary index of local business listings, from which it creates local search results. All those can play a role in how well a page performs in search, but the focus should be on the users who will be reading the content. The more natural backlinks you have from high-authority (trusted) websites, the better your odds are to rank higher within search results. Very early on, search engines needed help figuring out which URLs were more trustworthy than others to help them determine how to rank search results.

To assume that there is some magical number of words you must use (or even worse, that the more words you use, the better rankings you’ll get) would be a big misunderstanding of the concept. Good quality links do still have an influence on ranking, and a lot of SEO professionals would say they do still count. This is why a page with no inbound or internal links can be difficult to rank, as it it’s not found by Google via links in order to be crawled and indexed. The potential for the absence of links highlights the importance of submitting a sitemap, which tells Google what pages you want indexed. In some circumstances, it’s not applied to ranking but is more critical when there are two pages vying for position. As an example, the query “London Zoo” serves desktop results with an emphasis on research with video and image carousels, while the mobile SERP has a focus on tickets, directions, and location.

Check out my advice to create the best permalink structure for your site. This could introduce the possibility of duplicate content but Google say its not a problem. It also demonstrates that you have the appropriate experience and expertise to write about the subject. Interstitial Ads are pop up ads that force a user to view an ad before seeing the content. They can appear before the page loads, when the page loads or when a user scrolls.

#4 – High Bounce Rate

• Creating lists typically involves using a combination of Google and keyword tools (either free or paid) to find all the related keywords to your keyword seeds.
• With AI Overviews, search is more than reaching users at the right time — it’s reaching them at the right time and anticipating their next move.
• When getting other sites to link to yours, focus on quality, relevant links from authoritative sites in your niche.
• That’s because they don’t have access to all WHOIS data, especially for ccTLDs, and that makes it unreliable.
• Bing prefers sites that have lots of unique content which is also of good content quality.
• With paid or free AI image generation tools, it’s possible to generate helpful graphics or visuals (ChatGPT can even create charts!).

Besides the content itself, this is how you tell Google what your article is about. Blog comments are also considered an update to existing content, so it is very important to make your users share their opinion. Duplicate content can be your worst nightmare because it’s often hard to identify.

Links in the main content might be more relevant for the search engine as opposed to the links at the sidebar or the footer – this can be applied to the internal as well as to the external links. By having backlinks from sites that are topically similar to yours, the search engine might consider your pages as valuable results for the given topic or niche. Backlinks are the most well-known ranking signal in SEO – that was confirmed many many times by Google representatives. We can’t mention content and keywords without talking about entities, which Google is using to better understand topics. This article explains in depth why it’s essential to understand entities in SEO. Content is key not just for ranking, but also for user experience and conversion.

Focus keyword in the URL of the page may serve as a ranking factor – it makes the URL more user-friendly and relevant for the search engine. Ranking factors are signals search engines use to sort the search results according to their quality and relevance to the particular query. Every two years, SEO Anomaly Moz surveys the opinions of dozens of the world’s brightest search marketers and runs correlation studies to better understand the workings of search engine algorithms. We gather this data to gain insight into the factors that may help—or hurt—a website’s visibility in search engines.

Google Analytics is a free tool that provides detailed information about who visits your website, how they use it, and how well it performs. To maximize its impact, you must actively promote and distribute it across various channels. Focus on creating high-quality, original content that informs, educates, or entertains your target audience. A good content calendar keeps you posting regularly, prepares you for events and promotions, and helps your team work together. The content on your web pages should be informative and relevant to your target audience.

Focus on improving your Core Web Vitals, which measure loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability. Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool can help you identify areas for improvement. Optimizing images, reducing server response times, and enabling browser caching can significantly improve page speed. That’s not to say that publishing this type of content will automatically result in links.