The 12 Most Important SEO Ranking Factors

You will be able to increase your SEO ranking by increasing the user experience on your website. With the rise of mobile browsing, Google’s shift to mobile-first indexing highlights the need for a mobile-optimized website. This is a crucial Google ranking factor, as websites that aren’t mobile-optimized risk losing traffic and rankings. While Google provides clues and guidelines about how they evaluate content, it typically includes a mix of utility, trust, authority, and user experience. In short, you want your website to be the one that most completely satisfies the user for their given keyword.

Finding Keyword Seeds

For example, using the right LSI keywords will tell Google that when searchers type in “mini,” your page is relevant to the car rather than the skirt, and vice versa. But one of the biggest questions we get at OptinMonster is about how to use LSI keywords to optimize content. We’ll look more at linking practices to improve SEO ranking in tip #8. Though Google has penalized exact-match domains (those where the target keyword is in the URL), that penalty is generally for spammy sites with thin content.

Data privacy

• Most people don’t think about the different ways that others may search for what they do.
• For many business owners, website optimization is more technical than they have time for.
• Google Maps SEO isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it process — ongoing tracking and adjustments are essential to stay ahead of competitors and maintain strong visibility.
• It’s also what is used to provide featured snippets, ratings, carousels and other types of rich results in search results.

A simple way of finding the latest information to keep your content fresh is by using Google Trends. Google values transparency when it comes to businesses, meaning it wants clear, consistent, and easy-to-find information about your business BHS Links details. HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) is a secure protocol that encrypts data transmitted between a website and its visitors.

And that source material or citation, at least at the moment, still comes from search. Your content might be amazing to human readers, but it also needs to be communicated in a way Google understands. If you’re looking to ground yourself in modern SEO practices, this list of SEO statistics is a great place to start.

Bounce Rate and Average Time Per Visit

To further ensure your content meets ranking criteria, try using a tool like SEOBoost’s content optimization feature. Its AI-driven insights guide you on structure, readability, and keyword optimization for better rankings. To help you out, I’ve shortlisted the most important ranking factors for ranking higher in Google search results. By consistently implementing these strategies, you can improve your website’s rankings and achieve your online marketing goals.

Google rewards websites that prioritize user satisfaction by improving their visibility in search results. This blog breaks down what Google ranking signals 2025 look like, how SEO ranking works, and what role E-A-T plays in search rankings. Ranking for local searches requires focus on a combination of different local SEO ranking factors.

With Google’s local algorithm relying on so many different signals, it can be hard to know where to spend your time to maximize your chances of ranking highly. Prominence is also based on information that Google has about a business, from across the web, like links, articles, and directories. Google review count and review score factor into local search ranking. More reviews and positive ratings can improve your business’ local ranking. Your position in web results is also a factor, so search engine optimization (SEO) best practices apply.

Compare this number to the keywords with the highest difficulty score you already rank. The magic is choosing exactly the right keywords to target and build content around. Unfortunately, Google won’t directly tell you what your competitors rank for, but a handful of 3rd party SEO tools do exactly that, making the work much easier. Often, seed keywords are the phrases you “think” you want to rank for. If your shop sells motorcycle lifts, your first seed keyword may then likely be “buy motorcycle lifts.” So instead of ranking for a single keyword, let’s start with a keyword seed that grows into a theme.