Use the 11 ranking factors above to increase the chance of your content appearing on the first page of Google. It’s important to understand these elements to effectively allocate your resources and strategies. It starts by checking your local keyword rankings in your chosen areas.
On-page signals are also growing in their perceived importance for local SEO. You can see this from the results of BrightLocal’s previous surveys. To assign keywords to URLs, think about which services they map to. If there are no map pack and local “blue link” results, it doesn’t have local intent.
In fact, ensuring the “completeness” of your Google My Business listing has become even more important this year. In addition to the session duration, the end of a session indicates when the user leaves YouTube. If users quickly jump off the video after watching it, the YouTube algorithm will take a negative view and this will have also a negative effect on YouTube SEO. The session duration shows how long users stay on YouTube after watching a video.
Don’t Create Content Until You Do This First
In a 2022 poll by Marie Haynes, 44% of SEOs pros who responded thought that link building was less effective now compared to a few years ago. With all that said, here are the fundamental ranking factors that should all be considered for SERP visibility. This is an issue for Google and for the SEO industry at large, because SEO pros are often looking way too deeply at the wrong thing and losing focus on what really matters. Taylor thinks, in theory, that pages can be optimized for both search engines in the same way without compromising on performance. That would mean the Yandex leak could offer insights into ranking on Google.
How to Use The SEO Ranking Factors List
That move alone contributed to a 25% increase in organic conversions. I have found that organic clicks are a stronger sign of progress than BHS Links impressions. When I notice a steady increase in clicks, it shows that our improvements are connecting with real searchers. Organic impressions count how many times your site appears in search results, regardless of whether users click on it. In the same example as above, you will see that two of the three top-ranking posts have the exact keyword at the beginning of their meta descriptions.
Link velocity is a measurement of how many links you gain over time. Although links from Wikipedia are Nofollow, Wikipedia backlinks are highly authoritative. Google knows the difference between user generated content and site published content. Links coming from the main content of a page are known as contextual or editorial links. You want to have links from lots of different domains and IP ranges for maximum effect. A link from a domain and/or page that is relevant… is much more valuable than a link coming from an irrelevant site.
The higher a site ranks, the more visible it becomes to potential visitors. Google rankings play an important role in the online success of businesses. Moreover, Google’s algorithm is continually updated to improve the accuracy and relevance of search results, making it essential for you to stay informed and adapt the strategies accordingly. Websites that appear on the first page of search results are far more likely to be clicked on, with the top positions gaining the majority of user attention. As the world’s most popular search engine, Google processes billions of queries daily, making it an important gateway for online visibility and success.
- Carmen Santaló, Freelance SEO Consultant, says “It is difficult to choose only one ranking factor because SEO is about many different elements on the site.
- Domain age and domain authority are sometimes described as ranking factors.
- The specter looming over most SEO-related conversations in 2025 is AI.
- SERPs display organic results along with paid ads, featured snippets, and local listings.
- A web page’s title tells people and search engines what it’s about and it’s sometimes the first experience of your site.
- Should you incorporate every single one of these factors into your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts?
If you want to rank, you almost certainly need links, but you’ve got to know the rules. This means that you shouldn’t expect a rankings boost simply because you added schema to your page. Aside from content itself, Google employs a number of ranking signals to determine how authoritative and trustworthy a site is. Your goal at this stage is to find keywords that are not only specific but also relevant to your business and have enough search volume to justify targeting.
Alternatively, you can use AI Overviews to generate rough outlines for upcoming SEO content. If you generate the SGE results, no immediate citation is included. The first is noted as being certified and in compliance with a reputable organization, the Journalism Trust Initiative. The result uses an authoritative tone plus leverages the optimization listed below (data points). Upload content to an LLM, whether Gemini or ChatGPT, to determine how well it understands your content. Alternatively, use another Google Labs experiment, SGE while browsing, to see what Google views as the most important points.