The 12 Most Important SEO Ranking Factors

No monthly costs or pay-to-play — just a powerful, cost-effective way to make sure the right customers find you at the right time. When people search for what you offer, they’re likely ready to buy — but if your business isn’t showing up at the top, they’re likely going elsewhere. Every spot you drop in the rankings means fewer clicks, fewer calls, and fewer customers walking through your doors. Three are many SEOs who have spread the misinformation that the quality raters guidelines offers a peek into what Google is using for ranking websites. Google Search Console is an indispensable tool for monitoring your website’s presence in Google Search results.

A recent study by SEMrush found that backlinks were strongly correlated with higher Google rankings. But if you’re willing to publish amazing stuff, you have a good shot of ranking in Google for your target keywords. That said, you don’t just want to add a bunch of random internal links. Yes, random internal linking is probably better than no internal linking at all.

The Importance of Content Marketing in SEO

For more information on calculating your organic click-through SEO Anomaly rate, see organic click-through rate. If your page appears in the search results yet has a low CTR, you may be missing out on potential visitors. However, some pages—like a contact page—might naturally show higher bounce rates.

Content Strategy

Analyze your competitors’ backlink profiles to identify their link-building strategies, top referring domains, and most valuable backlinks. Use keyword research tools to discover new ideas, variations, and long-tail phrases relevant to your business. Core Web Vitals are metrics that evaluate how good or bad a website’s user experience is. To help ensure your website appears at the top of search results, you must understand what criteria search engines use to evaluate and rank web pages.

• That means you may have 100,000 people see your slot in the answer box, but only 10,000 actually click through to the article.
• Review management software such as BrightLocal’s Reputation Manager can automate review monitoring to ensure you never miss important feedback, and help you grow the quantity of reviews.
• Below are actionable tips that target critical SEO ranking factors and help improve your website’s visibility.
• Using “sponsored” or “UGC” (User Generated Content) link tags helps Google understand the nature of your links.

The “regular” organic search results are the “ten blue links” that we’re all familiar with. Search engine optimization works by optimizing the above buckets to meet search engine best practices. Search engine optimization uses how search works to optimize a site for organic search results. If you’re curious to learn more about Google and its impact on SEO, check out our timeline of Google algorithm updates.