Discover actionable steps to amplify your brand’s online presence, drive organic traffic, increase lead quality, and accelerate business growth. Understanding is critical to SGE rankings, with a recent study finding that simplifying language improved AI Overview rankings. When possible, use an 8th- to 11th-grade reading level to create easy-to-understand content for users and AI to summarize. Below is our data-backed research into Google’s SGE ranking factors. Don’t get caught up in the change debate just make sure social signals are part of your social media SEO strategy now.

Data privacy

seo ranking factors

With structured data, websites can provide more information about their content, products or services, and offerings to Google and LLMs. In 2025, SEO success depends on great user experience, mobile-friendly sites, and quality content. Properly optimized images not only improve user experience but also help search engines better understand and index the content, which can lead to higher rankings. As mentioned, search engines continue working on their algorithms to improve their users’ experience. The focus points of SEO in 2025 are still high-quality content and technical factors like site speed, security and mobile parity. But there are more aspects that Google and other search engines deem important.

The caveat is that the backlink profile has to be free of any evidence of link schemes. If your keyword is missing from those areas, you’ll be prompted to add it. Lastly, ensure your shopping cart checkout has minimal steps and is easy to use. Make sure all sign-up forms and interactive elements work, on both desktop and mobile. Site owners can use Google PageSpeed Insights to assess their site speed and performance and compare it to competitors.

On-page SEO refers to optimizing individual web pages to improve their ranking in search engine results and attract more relevant traffic. To excel in voice search optimization, it’s crucial to understand the intent behind voice searches and to provide clear, concise, and direct answers to those queries. This might involve creating FAQ pages, optimizing for featured snippets, or using schema markup to highlight relevant information.

  • For example, if you want to rank for “How to learn SEO,” write an informational guide, not a landing page about SEO services.
  • Google pulls data from a wide variety of sources in continuously making up its local business index.
  • To determine the quality and relevancy of a website, Google uses more than 200 metrics.
  • Tools and plugins are available to compress images without compromising quality, maintaining a balance between visual appeal and performance.

In SEO, not all search engines are equal

Good, helpful, engaging content is vital for getting other sites to link to yours naturally. Search engines use automated “crawlers” to find and visit webpages by following links across the web. As they crawl, they gather information SEO Anomaly about each page’s content and structure. Let’s get started and learn how to make your website show up higher in online searches. This comprehensive guide aims to equip beginners seeking foundational SEO knowledge and experienced marketers looking to enhance their strategies. Organic search results are sensitive to a searcher’s location, though seldom as pronounced as in local pack results.

With so many things to optimize and metrics to track, it’s easy to feel choice overload about how to begin. Sometimes a keyword is merely a subtopic under a broader, main topic. Or it might be an alternative way of phrasing that’s not the most popular one. Listings with images and videos receive more clicks, calls, and direction requests, making it a crucial factor for Google Maps visibility. The Q&A section on your GBP allows potential customers to ask questions about your business directly in search results. Once those questions are asked, you or other customers are free to answer those questions.

seo ranking factors

seo ranking factors

It means we can better return relevant content even if it doesn’t contain all the exact words used in a search, by understanding the content is related to other words and concepts. We regularly improve our ranking systems through rigorous testing and evaluation and provide notice of updates to our ranking systems when those might be useful to content creators and others. When you include structured data, it can give your content an additional opportunity to rank near the top of search results. The results above appear both on the recipe card at the top of the page and as standard search results. To confirm that your website provides a good experience for users, start by checking your Core Web Vitals.

seo ranking factors

While not strictly a negative factor, the meta keywords tag was originally used to help software indexing. Having outbound links on your site could add value to your own content which Google may view positively but the links themselves are not a ranking factor. Including a table of contents (TOC) in your content will improve user experience and help Google understand the structure of your content. Latent Semantic Indexing keywords help search engines work out the exact topic. Below I have broken out all of the different page ranking factors you need to consider from an SEO perspective.