The Google Ranking Factors That Matter In 2025

It’s my hope that this won’t just give you a snapshot of what impacts rankings in 2020, but where things might be headed, too. The CTR shows in percent how many users click on the video at all when they see it in the search. The algorithm can understand, how relevant a video is for the user when the thumbnail and video title appears in search results or suggestions.

seo ranking factors

YouTube appears to allow multiple videos from the same channel to rank for identical keywords. Authored by Chinasa Ferderick and Felix Johnson, the study offers insights for businesses aiming to improve their visibility on YouTube. A study by the video hosting platform Adilo revealed common factors shared by high-ranking YouTube videos. If you have experience with ranking sites in Google you will know to avoid those SEO practices. It is very important that you stay on top of your outbound link profile. Make sure that you are only linking to clean and related sites as Bing will punish you for this seriously.

seo ranking factors

Essential On-Page SEO Factors

seo ranking factors

By default, the engines will maintain visible copies of all pages they have indexed, accessible to searchers through the cached link in the search results. Index/noindex tells the engines whether the page should be crawled and kept SEO Anomaly in a search engines’ index for retrieval. If you opt to use “noindex,” you’re communicating to crawlers that you want the page excluded from search results. By default, search engines assume they can index all pages, so using the “index” value is unnecessary.

seo ranking factors

It’s focused on satisfying user intent rather than just targeting keywords. High-quality content prioritizes expertise, depth, credibility, and strong presentation over trying to manipulate rankings. With Google ranking factors 2025 becoming more sophisticated, websites prioritizing E-A-T will see improved rankings and trustworthiness. Many marketers believe that backlinks are one of the most powerful SEO ranking factors. But Google’s Gary Illyes said that links aren’t as important as people think. While E-E-A-T itself isn’t a confirmed ranking factor, it helps you create content that aligns with Google’s definition of quality.

Since our analysis of the total page size surprised us, we decided to examine the median size, in bytes, of all images loaded for each page, relative to the search rank position. Other then a sharp spike in the first two rankings, the results are flat and uninteresting across all remaining rankings. The surprising result here was with the the median size of each web page, in bytes, relative to the search ranking position. By “page size,” we mean all of the bytes that were downloaded to fully render the page, including all the images, ads, third party widgets, and fonts. We would expect this graph to have a clear “up and to the right” trend, as highly ranked pages should have a lower document complete or fully rendered time. Indeed, page rendering has a proven link to user satisfaction and sales conversions (we’ll get into that later), but surprisingly we could not find a clear correlation to ranking in this case.

#8 – Positive Social Velocity

Frequent content publication demonstrates to search engines that your website is active and engaged with its users. Schema markup, or structured data, offers additional information to search engines, allowing them to generate rich snippets in search results. This can improve click-through rates by making your results more visually appealing. Regularly updating your content signals search engines that your site is active and relevant. A recent Statista report shows that Google controls 95.32% of mobile searches and 81.95% of desktop searches globally. These figures reveal just how influential Google is in shaping online search behavior, making it the platform of choice for businesses looking to capture online traffic and potential customers.

seo ranking factors

Since this process requires you to create at least one piece of “linkbait” content, it makes sense to create content that earns more and more links over time. Another similar tactic this pairs well with is broken link building. Whatever you choose, be sure to find who is linking to the competition, and earn those links for yourself. When you understand these data points ahead of time, you can create content that exactly fills an existing need.

Monitoring Search Performance

  • This disruption hinders seamless navigation and diminishes the user’s trust in your website’s relevancy and value.
  • Practicing black-hat SEO strategies such as buying backlinks is one way that websites build a bad link profile.
  • Mobile-first indexing refers to Google’s practice of indexing and ranking a web page’s mobile version rather than its desktop version in its search results.
  • One of the easiest ways to find out if you can rank for a keyword is to find the keyword difficulty score of your target keyword.
  • Bounce rate is the percentage of people that end up on your landing page and immediately return to the search results.

The perfect length for any piece of content is dependent on the reader’s goal and the subject matter. If your content is duplicated or too similar to other web pages, it could negatively impact your SEO. Let me know if you want to continue with more details in a specific section or if there’s another focus you’d prefer.

seo ranking factors

Incoming links from other websites have a huge influence on Google’s ranking algorithm. The Google algorithm uses ranking factors to determine the order in which websites appear in search results for a specific query. Next, we’ll look at 3 ranking factors that impact local businesses. Be sure to read Google’s guidance on how to improve your local ranking. By having descriptive alt text on web pages alongside quality content, sites can improve rankings and traffic from search engines.