Google SEO ranking factors are known to change from time to time, and it’s not always easy to know what is factored and how. Yet that being said, as of 2019 the known factors that will influence your website ranking follow, ordered by their importance. This information was curated from highly credible sources, and includes an explanation of each.
Relevance of overall page content:
Relevance refers to the page content matching the intent of the search. The perceived “purpose” of a page, whether it is perceived as beneficial or not, will be a deciding factor of ranking. Keep in mind that “content is king”. The relevance and purpose is directly supported by:
- Amount of expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness
- Main content quality and amount (grammar, spelling, factually correct)
- Website and contact information clearly available
- Website reputation (articles, awards, user ratings, etc.)
Quality of linking sites and pages
Inbound links, also known as backlinks or external links, are HTML hyperlinks that point from one website to another. They’re the currency of the Internet, as they act a lot like real-life reputation. Trustworthy sites tend to link to other trustworthy sites.
Use of query-relevant words and phrases
It would be impossible to target every single search query since there are numerous variations possible. The goal is to identify the most likely searched keywords /phrases and then optimize your site pages to rank well for those searches.
Domain’s perceived expertise, authority, and trust (E-A-T)
Expertise refers to the individual or organization having suitable credentials. For a website, the authority ranking would be metrics such as one’s BBB rating, review websites, the number of citations (for Authors), social shares and mentions. And trust would require include having an about us page, contact information, and how well content is written. This is also influenced by how visitors interact with your pages.
Mobile friendliness of the UI/UX
Mobile friendliness is about putting the user first. It’s important to make the navigation intuitive by utilizing a mobile “hamburger” menu with recognizable icons. In addition, the design needs to be responsive (providing a consistent experience across devices), fast loading, and easy to navigate by utilizing effective design and layout principles.
Exact match keyword use
An exact match to the search query has always improved the likelihood of coming up for that search. Most recently Google announced that will also factor close variants as an exact match. Exact match benefits a website, yet it is especially important for Google Ads.
Quantity and diversity of linking websites
In addition to the quality of linking site and pages, the quantity and diversity of backlinks will also benefit ranking. Yet to be clear, links from websites within a topic-specific community are generally better than links from websites that are less relevant. The primary contributor will of course be CTR (click through rate).
Content accuracy with accepted facts
Google has noted that they cannot verify the accuracy of content, so it’s not a ranking factor. But logically if your website is presenting content that is not otherwise supported or trusted online, you’re going to negatively influence your expertise, authority, and trust rating.
Link authority of host domain
Domain Authority is difficult to influence directly. The best way to influence Domain Authority is to improve your overall SEO. In particular, you should focus on getting more links from other well-linked-to pages.
Page’s perceived expertise, authority, and trust
Google’s search algorithm seeks to differentiate high-quality content from low-quality. The (E-A-T) rating for pages is influenced in large part by whether the website page is perceived to have a beneficial purpose.
Use of query-relevant entities in page content
This is merely noting that content related to a search has SEO value. Google notes that an entity is anything that is singular, unique, well-defined and distinguishable. From an SEO perspective content is the connection of entities by relationships, and links are a connection between entities.
Loading speed
Slow loading website pages can hurt Google ranking since it affects how fully your pages are indexed (which is why content above the fold has the highest SEO value). In addition slower websites negative affect visitor engagement which Google factors in as well. There are varied ways to improve site speed including faster hosting and server response time, removing render blocking JavaScript, optimized images, compression and browser caching, minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML, CDNs, and more.
Usage data
Usage data tracks the number of unique IP addresses (users) visiting a page, repeat visitors to the site, traffic volume, pages viewed per visitor, the duration of a visit, and the CTR (click through rate). Traffic volume and visitor engagement are important SEO criteria.
Anchor text of links pointing to the page
Anchor text is the characters/words that a hyperlink displays when linking to another page or web document. Anchor text “types” include exact match, partial match, branded, naked link, generic, and images. Best practices notes that SEO-friendly anchor text is brief and clear, relevant to the linked-to page, of low keyword density, and not generic (click here).
Location, frequency, and distance of related words
Keyword frequency (density) refers to how often a keyword appears on a given webpage or within a piece of content. As a rule, a keyword should not appear more than once per 200 words of copy. Location refers to how far down on the page the keyword is located, for which higher up is of course best. The distance of related words (proximity) relates to the distance between the keywords in a search. The smaller the distance between a search term’s individual keywords, the more relevant it will be from a search engine‘s point of view.
Total amount of on-page content
Longer content tends to rank significantly higher in the search results. Most SEO experts suggest that you should aim for over 1000 words for every piece of content that you publish, while others suggest that around 1900 words is ideal. Yet Forbes notes an average of 600-700 words per page is optimal. The important thing is to ensure that all pages and articles are SEO optimized and contain useful content.
Use of unique and relevant images
Unique images provide for visitor engagement and retention and they help to let the search engines know what your page/post is about by way of the image name, title, and meta-description. In addition images are often found in an image search which can affect ranking and lead to more visitors.
Site accessibility factors
Accessibility refers to web content complying with the ADA (American Disabilities Act). The commonly provided for include image alt attributes, title tags, header tags, link anchor text, on-site sitemap, breadcrumbs, size and contrast of text (and colors), content order, and semantic HTML.
Anchor text of links to other pages on the domain
The descriptive keywords used in the anchor text (and the title tag) have direct SEO value since links are weighted more heavily than regular text. Keep in mind that internal links include the main navigation and links within content to another page or section within a page. Effective linking helps to establish an information hierarchy and they promote indexing, which benefits ranking equity.
Keywords use in the URL
As with anchor tags above, keywords in the page URL does have SEO value. As for best practices — a page name should be kept relatively short, include keywords specific to the page or category (hierarchical and consistent), and use dashes between words. Dynamic URLs and special characters (excluding hashes) should be avoided, and duplicate pages should use canonical tags.
“Unlinked” mentions to the site/brand
It’s common to find unlinked mentions of branded products, service, and slogans. Google does give value to brand mentions, even if they are unlinked, though links provide far more SEO value as the primary off-page ranking signal. Contact pages that include brand mentions and see about getting your link added.
Age of the website
How long a website has been actively online will certainly influence ranking since it directly relates to authority and trustworthiness. Established websites will typically have more content and more backlinks, which is a huge ranking consideration; yet keep in mind that a niche-related and catchy domain name is also of benefit, especially if you’re creating landing pages.
Use of Google AMP
Google AMP (accelerated mobile pages) is intended to create mobile optimized content (noted as AMP in newsfeeds) that loads approx. 4-times faster than non-AMP pages. It includes its own schema markup, which may not be compatible with all development platforms. Speed is certainly important yet there are other ways to significantly decrease page loading time.
Use of external links on the page
While an external link to your site is a value (viewed as a third-party vote), there is benefit in linking to other websites as well. Beneficial links are of benefit to visitors and encourages visitor participation and contribution, it incentivizes links, and quality linking can help with ranking “trust”. Links also allow for tracking, which is part of SEO strategy.
Keyword in the Domain Name
While keywords in the domain URL has SEO value it is considered less important that keywords in the page URL. The reason here is that a page URL relates to the content of that page, whereas a domain URL is general in nature. In addition to the “best practices” noted for page URLs, domains should be consistent in prefix usage and cloaked domains should be avoided.
Structured data
Structured data markup doesn’t directly affect ranking, but it can help indirectly since it can make it easier for search engines to understand what a page is about, which improves targeting and possibly ranking for the right term. In addition, structured data, via snippets, allow users to learn some about the websites before they visit. Google has noted that structured data should be unique to each page.
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If you do a search online for SEO ranking factors you’ll find lots of information. Some are relatively easy to provide for, though it’s important to understand that the major component of SEO will always be whether the content is perceived as useful. To learn more https://backlinko.com/google-ranking-factors is a good place to start.
