In researching this article, the author spoke directly to Pedro Dias (former Google employee), Ammon Johns (SEO Pioneer), and Dan Taylor (Russian search engine and technical SEO expert). Google’s Search Quality Raters Guidelines used to be a closely guarded document at Google that was eventually leaked online. Google now openly publishes the document as an example of what its Quality Raters are looking for when they manually review websites. For example, queries such as “best coffee shop” are considered location-dependent and will deliver a map of results based on your location.
Google Shares Valuable SEO Takeaway About Quality Raters Guidelines
Dive deeper into the Bing ranking factors and Bing ranking algorithm to craft a winning SEO Anomaly strategy in 2025. While Google often dominates the SEO conversation, Bing shouldn’t be ignored. Understanding Bing ranking factors is essential for a comprehensive SEO strategy. For the most useful data on your local SEO results, use tools you can trust to give you a genuine average local ranking.
- To maximize how often users find your business in local search results, ensure that your business information in Business Profile is accurate, complete, and engaging.
- Avoiding duplicate content is one of the most important SEO best practices to keep in mind.
- All in all, understanding and leveraging these key ranking factors can help businesses reach the top of local search results, drive more traffic, and ultimately, enhance their growth.
- Two terms you’ll hear mentioned a lot when talking about SEO ranking factors are on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
- Here are the top 12 SEO ranking factors (not ranked in order of importance).
Local SEO Link Building
This helps build trust and authority, both of which boost your ranking. See what Google has to say and what you need to know for your SEO strategy. We based this conclusion on the fact that highly specific queries with four or five search terms are not returning results for highly trafficked websites. However, even for these smaller sites, fast websites with lower TTFB are consistently ranked higher than slower websites with higher TTFB. Unfortunately, the exact definition of “site speed” remained open to speculation. The mystery widened further in June, when Google’s Matt Cutts announced that slow-performing mobile sites would soon be penalized in search rankings as well.
When people share your content on social networks, that’s another sign that it’s valuable. Cognitive SEO’s study of 23 million shares found a definitive link between social shares and search engine ranking. SEO ranking is a website’s position on search engine results pages (SERPs) for specific keywords or phrases. The higher a website ranks, the more likely it is to be seen, resulting in more clicks and traffic to the website. In the early 2000s, heading elements (H1, H2, H3) were actual ranking factors.
E.g. updating the publish date and refreshing the content every couple of years. The same way you can leverage your competition to find the most profitable keywords, some of the easiest link building opportunities you will find will also come directly from your competitors. Finally, after you’ve created a new page and linked to other pages on your site, you have one more step to go. Now it’s time to update your older pages with links to your new page.
In this post, you’ll find the 40 most important SEO ranking factors along with actionable tips that will help you improve your SEO considerably. Instead of focusing on the optimization of just one keyword, develop topical clusters that illustrate your site’s authority on a subject. Write several pieces that are in-depth on a core topic and internally link them to gain more relevance across a wide variety of queries. Beyond site speed, check Google’s Core Web Vitals—Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
You need to focus on the overall perception of your brand and being present in the right places. This development, along with the pursuit of the optimum result, has culminated in the constant evolution of ranking factors. The endless feedback loop of permanent-iterative update cycles is designed purely to generate search results that offer constant improvements to the individual searcher.
They’re one of the first things a user sees after entering a search query related to local services, providing an immediate visibility boost. The click-through rate (CTR) represents the percentage of users who click on your site after it appears in their search results. A high CTR indicates that your website listing is attractive and relevant to users. A longer dwell time suggests that users find your content valuable and engaging, which is a positive sign to search engines.
