Google Ranking Factors: The 3 That Really Matter

Regardless, at this point you have all the tools you need to create high-quality content. On the last note, it’s typically ideal to link internally to one of your own pages if you can, but don’t be afraid to link to other websites. Remember, you want to be the last click so users don’t have to go back to Google.

Strategies for Optimizing for Bing

Link building, for example, is a time-intensive and ongoing task, whereas a lot of work with reviews or local citations can be automated or outsourced, freeing you up to focus on other factors. We’ll go into the individual factors in more detail below, after looking at how trends have changed over time. It’s my hope that this won’t just give you a snapshot of what impacts rankings in 2020, but where things might be headed, too. The CTR shows in percent how many users click on the video at all when they see it in the search. The algorithm can understand, how relevant a video is for the user when the thumbnail and video title appears in search results or suggestions.

Content Diversity and Value Factors

• Practices like buying backlinks or participating in link exchange schemes can lead to penalties from search engines.
• Third-party SEO tools like Moz Pro can provide in-depth insights into your rankings and website performance.
• Content quality, on-page SEO, backlinks, user experience, mobile optimization, and technical SEO all play crucial roles in improving your website’s visibility on search engines.
• Many SEO tools, like SEMrush or Ahrefs, integrate AI-powered features that simplify the process.
• In addition to content freshness, some other factors such as relevance, authority, and user experience also  play a major role in determining rankings.
• SEO requires adaptability, a focus on quality content, and a user-first approach.

BrightLocal’s study shows that 34% of SEOs think on-page signals are the most important factor for regular organic search. And 16% believe it’s the most important factor for map pack rankings. Local SEO is important because many people use search engines to find local businesses.

We’ll show you exactly how we can help you better optimize your website to rank. Read about how to maximize your content architecture and other on-page SEO factors, check out our resource page. With that in mind, let’s dive into the most critical Google SEO factors that can make or break your site’s performance in search.

If you’re new to SEO, you should absolutely make sure your website is friendly to search robots such as Googlebot. You can do this easily with online tools such as Hubspot’s Website Grader or Moz’s On-Page Grader, for example. One of the easiest ways to find out if you can rank for a keyword is to find the keyword difficulty score of your target keyword. Compare this number to the keywords with the highest difficulty score you already rank.

You want to make it easy for search engines to discover SEO Anomaly and understand your site’s key pages and information. Although not listed by Google as a local ranking factor, the role of engagement is only going to increase as time goes on. Google continues to enrich local results by incorporating real-world data like popular times to visit and average length of visits… Local rankings are influenced by the number and consistency of local business citations. Google pulls data from a wide variety of sources in continuously making up its local business index.

You can sign up for a free Google Search Console account if you don’t currently have one. With this tool, you can submit sitemaps for your site and monitor how many submitted pages have actually been added to Google’s index, among other things. Google has confirmed that it uses page speed as part of its page experience evaluation, which means you need to be aware of it for your site. It’s also what is used to provide featured snippets, ratings, carousels and other types of rich results in search results. Alt text is important for a number of reasons, most notably for accessibility, in that it describes images to visually impaired visitors. This score is essential to your site’s reputation from Google’s perspective.

While search engines are getting better at recognizing images, there’s no guarantee they will be able to read and understand it just yet. Sometimes a search engine will be able to find parts of your site by crawling, but other pages or sections might be obscured for one reason or another. It’s important to make sure that search engines are able to discover all the content you want indexed, and not just your homepage. It’s possible to block search engine crawlers from part or all of your site, or instruct search engines to avoid storing certain pages in their index. While there can be reasons for doing this, if you want your content found by searchers, you have to first make sure it’s accessible to crawlers and is indexable. Everyone knows a slow-loading site drives an increased bounce rate, but you may not know it also directly hurts your search ranking.