Google uses hundreds of ranking factors to provide search results to users, but not all carry equal weight. When your goal is to get your site to show up in search results, some factors are more important than others, and some are absolutely vital. According to Delante, about 92% of all website traffic comes from the first page of search results. If you aren’t making the cut, you’re missing out.
Where should you start? If you’re feeling overwhelmed, confused, or curious about what ranking factors to focus on, you’re not alone. The best approach is to establish roots in the most critical factors first and then work on the remaining signals to fine-tune your rankings.
Here are 8 of Google’s top-ranking factors that deserve your attention first.
1. High-quality content
High-quality, relevant content is king. The web pages that get ranked are ones that provide answers, solutions, and information users want. It doesn’t matter if your website is for entertainment or educational purposes, Google knows quality content and won’t rank pages with low-quality content or that appear to be spam.
Given the popularity of ChatGPT, you might be wondering if you can publish AI-generated content. The answer is yes, and it’s completely okay with Google, as long as it provides value. Although Search Advocate John Mueller previously announced that AI-generated content goes against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, their stance has since changed.
With high-quality content, visitors spend more time on your pages, your bounce rate decreases, and you get more sales and signups. Focus on creating content users want, and you’ll have a foundation for ranking higher in search results.
2. Authoritative backlinks
Inbound links pointing to a web page tell search engines that the page in question is important and relevant to the topic being discussed. It’s critical to generate backlinks from authoritative websites related to your own content and avoid links from unrelated or spammy sites.
3. Page Speed
Slow-loading pages don’t rank well because users don’t want to wait. The general guidance is that pages should load in less than three seconds. As of January 2018, the average load time on mobile was 15.3 seconds. To avoid this issue, don’t load your web pages with too many elements, and test them before you launch. If you need to, hire someone to speed up your pages. Otherwise, you’re guaranteed to lose sales.
4. User Experience
A website’s user experience (UX) is vital to success. If your site looks bad or is hard to navigate, users will bounce and never return. If you rank your web pages in the search results but offer a poor UX, ranking high becomes meaningless.
5. A strong internal linking structure
Adding keyword-rich internal anchor text to your website is a must. Your internal links tell Google what your page content is about, and it indicates which pages are most important. This is how implementing a strong structure of internal links will help you rank higher in search results.
6. A mobile-first design
As of March 2021, mobile-first indexing is official. Although, unless you have a separate version of your website for mobile devices, this won’t affect you. Google doesn’t use separate databases for mobile and desktop searches, but if there are two versions of the same page, it will automatically index the page that happens to be mobile-friendly, and that page will come up in both mobile and desktop searches.
If you haven’t already, use a responsive design so you don’t need to have separate websites for mobile v. desktop, and make sure the user experience is great on mobile devices.
7. On-page optimization
Optimizing your on-page elements can boost organic traffic. According to a case study published by Mockingbird, they increased organic traffic by 62% just by optimizing H1 tags.
Make sure your on-page elements are solid, including your image alt text, page URLs, meta descriptions, headers, page titles, and structured markup.
8. Keyword research
Today’s keyword research is a little different than in the past. Instead of using it to get a list of phrases to insert into your articles, use keyword research as a roadmap for content creation. This is the easiest way to find out what people want in your niche. For better rankings, focus on search terms with a high click-through rate and an average search volume.
Ranking factors will always change
Google is constantly on a mission to meet the needs of users, and that requires adjusting ranking signals on a regular basis. Although these factors will always be in flux, the basics will never change. Don’t get overwhelmed by the minutia.
Focus on delivering high-quality content, maintain a strong backlink profile, and if you don’t have time to get more involved, hire a professional SEO expert to handle the rest on your behalf.
