Struggling to rank higher? Learn the leading SEO Google ranking factors and optimize your SERP results.

SEO is a competitive business; no one knows this better than the internet giants. Google has invested millions of dollars in developing algorithms that help them identify and rank the best pages on the web. This has resulted in an SEO arms race where everyone wants to be at the top of Google’s search results for relevant keywords so their site can get more traffic and make more money. Organic search is now more important than ever for small businesses trying to compete with larger brands on Amazon or Walmart—they need keyword rankings just to stay afloat!

The Key Factors for Google Ranking in 2023

Factor	Description
Page speed	Faster loading pages rank higher. Optimize images, minify code, and leverage browser caching.
Mobile friendliness	Sites need to be easy to use on mobile devices. Responsive design is key.
Secure HTTPS	HTTPS provides better security and ranks higher than HTTP. Obtain an SSL certificate.
Quality content	Unique, useful, and engaging content ranks well. Write for humans, not search engines.
Backlinks	Relevant backlinks from authority sites pass “link juice.” Focus on earning quality links.
User experience	Easy navigation, positive UX, and valuable content improve rankings. Site should fulfill user intent.
Local SEO	Optimizing for local SEO helps rank for geographic searches. Create a Google My Business listing.
Page authority	Authority sites rank higher. Create compelling content that earns backlinks over time.
Crawling and indexing	Search engines need to easily crawl and index pages. Ensure proper use of robots.txt and sitemaps.

Why is it important to understand the Google and SEO ranking factors?

It is important to understand the Google ranking factors for many reasons.

Understanding these factors can help you improve your:

• Website
• SEO
• Conversion rate optimization (CRO)
• Business overall.

Google Ranking Factors: 200+ Factors, One Search Engine

It’s important to understand that no single factor will guarantee successful SEO. It takes a combination of on-page and off-page factors, good content, and links for your website to rank well in organic search results.

Google has many ranking factors, and they change often. However, we can’t say what all these are or even if they are all known!

As much as we would like to know everything about Google’s 200+ ranking factors and how they work exactly, it may never happen because some of them are not publically disclosed by Google due to competitive reasons or security issues (or both). And even if we did know all of them, it still wouldn’t give us any certainty that our site would rank higher than another website with similar content but weaker signals from its backlink profile!

“During a 2021 survey carried out among search engine optimization (SEO) professionals worldwide, 24.6 percent stated that depth and accuracy of content were one of the most important factors impacting search rankings in the 12 months leading up to the survey. On-page elements, such as meta titles or descriptions, ranked first, mentioned by 32.8 percent of respondents.”

Leading SEO factors for search rankings worldwide 2021, Published by Statista Research Department on Jan 7, 2022

Top Ranking Factors for Google you must Optimize

On-page SEO

On-page SEO is the optimization process of a website to improve its search engine rankings. It’s a critical part of any well-optimized page and a key part of an SEO strategy.

The goal of on-page SEO is to ensure your content has all the elements that search engines look for to rank it highly—and there are several types.

Organic User Behaviour

Organic user behavior is the most important factor for SEO.

Google wants to see that your site is being used, that users are finding what they’re looking for, and that they’re coming back to your site. They also want to see that users are sharing content from your site with other people.

Depth and Accuracy of Content

Google wants to deliver the best results to searchers, so they consider the quality of your content.

How much time do you spend on creating your web page’s content? If there is not enough time, Google will penalize you for that. It can also happen if there are some problems with errors in the text or broken links or images.

If you use a lot of keywords without an explanation for each one, then it may be considered “keyword stuffing” by Google and lead to penalties for spamming or low-quality content. So try to avoid any stuffing and ensure each word has its meaning on the page.

Structured Data

Structured data is a form of metadata or information about your website’s content. It’s like an interface that lets you tell search engines what your site is about and how to use it.

Structured data helps Google better understand the content on your page and then show it in more useful ways to people searching for relevant information. For example, structured data can help improve search engines display local businesses’ results (think “Movies + nearby”). People looking for local businesses might also want to know if there are theaters nearby where they can catch a movie before or after dinner. With structured data on these pages, Google knows which businesses belong together; all you need to do is set up some markup so that Google understands how those entities relate to each other.

Content Freshness

Content freshness is the rate at which your content is updated. Google wants to show current, relevant content to their users, so they will penalize sites that don’t have a high rate of new content creation. For example, if you have a blog that hasn’t been updated in months or even years (especially if it has no social media presence), you will miss out on this important ranking signal.

Content freshness can also refer to how often you post original articles on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. When users see new posts regularly being shared by brands they follow, they are more likely to take action, like clicking through to visit your website or interacting with the post itself (liking or commenting).

Mobile Friendly

Mobile-friendly websites are better for SEO. Google has made it clear that mobile-friendly websites will rank higher. Mobile-friendly sites are also better for SEO because they

• We provide a better user experience.
• It’s easier to navigate, meaning visitors spend more time on your site and can access more information without zooming in and out of pages or scrolling left and right.
• It has been shown to improve conversion rates by as much as 80%.

Brand Awareness

Brand awareness is the degree of recognition of the brand. It is a key factor in determining consumer trust in a product or service. Brand awareness, however, is not the same as brand loyalty. While both factors indicate that you have earned some level of trust from your customers, brand loyalty speaks to the strength of their commitment to purchase from you and use your products over other available choices.

Brand awareness is a complex concept composed of two elements:

• Brand Recognition: The ability for people to recall and name your company when prompted (usually by name), whether they’ve done business with you or not.
• Brand Recall: The ability for people who have used your product or service before but may not recognize it instantly upon being prompted with its name again (due perhaps to lack of exposure).

BackLinks

Backlinks are the most important factor in SEO. They link to your website from another website. The more backlinks your website has, the better it will rank in search engines.

There are many different ways you can get backlinks:

• Social media: You can share posts and pages on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., which will result in some of these websites linking to yours! This can be a great way of building up a large number of quality backlinks in a short amount of time!
• Guest blogging: This is where you write blog posts for other people’s blogs/websites using relevant keywords from their niche (e.g., “how-to” blog post). When people read your guest post, they’ll see that it’s linked to another website, which means they’ll think, “Hey, this article must be good if someone else wrote about it!”
• Content Syndication Networks: These work by allowing other websites or blogs to re-publish content found on yours without needing permission first—perfect if you want lots of exposure right away but don’t have time (or don’t want) to create new content all the time!

Site Speed: Page Speed Optimization

A slow site means a bad user experience. Your pages will load slower for visitors and search engines, resulting in fewer visitors to your website.

In fact, according to research from Google, 53% of users expect a page to load within 2 seconds. That’s how important speed is!

Site speed also impacts bounce rate, which is the percentage of people who visit one page on your site and then leave without viewing any further pages or performing any actions on that site. A fast-loading website can significantly reduce bounce rates by keeping visitors engaged with their content longer and increasing their chances of converting them into customers or subscribers.

Internal Linking

Internal linking is the process of linking pages within a website. SEO is important because it can help you increase your organic traffic and improve user experience.

Internal links are also very important for improving search engine rankings as well.

Domain Authority

“Domain Authority” is a score that Google assigns to every website. It’s a measure of how much power and trust that site has. Domain Authority is based on several factors, including:

• The number of backlinks (links from other websites) pointing to your domain name.
• Keywords are used in your site’s HTML tags.

Site Security

The primary objective of site security is to prevent intrusions, malware infections, and other cybersecurity attacks. Here are some ways you can improve your site’s security:

• Use HTTPS. Google recommends using secure connections over HTTP because it encrypts the data transmitted between users and websites (making it more difficult for hackers to intercept that data).
• Use a password manager. It’s recommended that you use strong passwords for all accounts on your website—and use different passwords for each account. If you need help remembering those passwords, consider using a password manager like LastPass or 1Password; both are free services that generate random passwords for each account on your site (and even automatically fill out login forms). This way, you only need to remember one master password—and if someone gains access to your accounts through brute force or social engineering, they won’t be able to get into any other parts of your web presence due to having different logins than those required by Google or other search engines.
• Use a content delivery network (CDN). A CDN is essentially an object cache—it stores copies of files in multiple locations around the world so they can be retrieved quickly regardless of where visitors are located geographically when browsing websites online through their browsers’ address bars (and thus reduce latency times associated with accessing resources hosted remotely). This helps keep sites running smoothly even during periods when servers are overloaded due to high traffic levels caused by unexpected surges in demand for resource availability.

Expertise, Authority, and Trust (EAT)

Building a strong brand presence is one of the most important factors for SEO. It is also one of the most challenging things to do, but it can be done. You can do many things to build your brand awareness and authority with your audience.

There are two types of content marketing that you should focus on if you want to rank higher on Google: link-building content and social media engagement. We will talk about both in this section.

An important part of building trust with your audience is sharing helpful information with them regularly through blog posts or ebooks, which then leads people back to their website when they want more information on a particular subject matter (eBooks) or when they need help fixing an issue they’re having (blog posts). Share these kinds of valuable resources often so that people begin recognizing you as an expert in whatever field(s) you specialize in—and this will improve your SEO rankings over time!

Another way companies gain authority within their niche areas is through social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, where posts receive likes, shares, and retweets by other users who deem them valuable enough to share themselves, which gives said additional company exposure across multiple networks simultaneously, thus increasing traffic flow along with visibility levels, which makes it easier for consumers searching online services such as search engines like Google to find them faster than ever before, primarily due to the increase in

Social Signals

Social signals are a good measure of popularity, authority, and trust.

If you’re new to online marketing, it can be difficult to understand why social signals are important. They’re not as obvious as other factors that have been around for longer—such as backlinks or keyword usage—but they’re really important! Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter use algorithms that measure user engagement with your content to rank your website higher in search results. When someone shares a link on their wall or retweets something from their account (or even likes the post), it helps the page get more exposure across different networks within the social site itself. This means that if one person likes or shares something, there’s a higher chance another person will also see it because of how these companies’ algorithms work.

You need these types of things for visitors coming from Google searches to find relevant information about what they’re looking for when visiting your site through an organic listing versus paid advertising clicks through AdWords campaigns where only specific keywords trigger ads being shown next time someone searches using those terms after clicking them out of curiosity instead.

Conclusion

From the data, it’s clear that there are many ranking factors, and some of them are more important than others. If you want to know which ones are most important for your website and how to use them in your SEO strategy, contact us today!

FAQs about identifying the leading SEO factors