Googles 200 Ranking Factors: The Complete List 2025

And if your site has a reputation for publishing useful, trusted content, that’s going to help your rankings in a major way. If so, you’re going to find yourself with a massive rankings boost. But these links also help boost your site’s overall Domain Authority, which is your site’s authority as a whole. And if they can’t BHS Links access certain parts of your page, that’s going to hurt your search engine visibility too.

seo ranking factors

Tactics To Improve Rankings and Master Local SEO in 2025

  • Google uses the Exif metadata to better understand and rank the images in the search results.
  • Focusing on Google’s motivation and working with this will get you better results for ranking than anything else.
  • Google have a patent that shows the age of a backlink is relevant.
  • This means that high search engine ranking positions help you generate organic traffic, brand awareness, and other business results.

The watch time shows how long users watched a video on YouTube in total. If a user watched a video for 5 minutes and a second user watched it for 4 minutes, the total watch time is 9 minutes. If users watch videos for as long as possible, this leads to a high watch time, which has a positive effect on the algorithm and the video ranks accordingly higher. Keep in mind, that the main goal of YouTube is to keep users on the YouTube site as long as possible. All videos that make their contribution in the form of a high Watch Time will be rewarded with a high ranking. Thanks to the YouTube Analytics function, you can see the data in real-time.

seo ranking factors

We do know search engines both measure and reward satisfaction in very significant ways. In fact, I highly suspect satisfaction is one of Google’s most important metrics used to judge the performance of its own search results. On top of that, a slow-loading, bloated landing page will significantly impact your SEO health. Google considers users’ bounce rates and dwell times when factoring in “domain rank” or, basically, how visible your site is for relevant keywords. The more thought and effort you put into users’ experience, the more your SEO score will improve.

seo ranking factors

Semantic Search Optimization (On-Page SEO)

Back when search engines lacked a lot of the sophistication they have today, the term “10 blue links” was coined to describe the flat structure of the SERP. Any time a search was performed, Google would return a page with 10 organic results, each in the same format. In terms of ranking web pages, engagement metrics act like a fact-checker. Objective factors such as links and content first rank the page, then engagement metrics help Google adjust if they didn’t get it right. How do search engines ensure that when someone types a query into the search bar, they get relevant results in return? That process is known as ranking, or the ordering of search results by most relevant to least relevant to a particular query.

If your page takes too long to load, users will return to the search results and select another business. You want to have a high click through rate because it indicates that people are interested in your business and find your website to be helpful. By building up your Google Business Profile listing, you will be able to boost your ranking and reach more local customers.

In March 2024, it evolved and became part of our core ranking systems, as our systems use a variety of signals and systems to present helpful results to users. The Google algorithm uses hundreds of signals to rank content on search engine results pages (SERPs). They range from content and technical factors to user experience and technical signals.

This plugin has a similar tool, TruSEO On-Page Analysis, but it provides feedback directly in the WordPress editor. You’ll get a checklist for keyword optimizations and actionable insights for where to use it. This tool has a user-friendly interface similar to Microsoft Word, Google Docs, or Apple Pages.

And people still share the post on social media and link to it from their blogs. The thing is, what most people consider “high-quality content” has changed over the last few years. And this little shortcut helps me use internal links without having to analyze every page on my site. Google recently reported that properly-optimized images can help your pages rank higher in Google web search.