Googles 200 Ranking Factors: The Complete List 2025
Optimizing for the LLMs behind AI Overviews starts with understanding its view of you and your content. With the launch of Google’s AI Overviews (formerly Search Generative Experience or SGE), SEOs have lots of questions, including how to rank in Google’s AI-generated search results. YouTube SEO study finds common factors shared by top-ranked videos. You can use this part of the guide to optimize your site for Bing traffic if a chunk of your target market use Bing.
Optimizing images can also help you to gain more visibility through image search and in the SERP image carousel. Adding pictures, videos, charts, and other eye-catching visuals makes it more attractive for visitors and improves its appearance in search results. However, with advancements in AI and natural language processing, you’ll need to think beyond individual keywords. SEO without it is like a beautiful new sports car without an engine; it might look nice, but it’s going nowhere.
User Experience (RankBrain)
- Metrics like time on site and bounce rate are indicators of user engagement, which search engines take into account when ranking pages.
- Focusing on a blend of key strategies is essential to elevating your website’s SEO ranking and driving more organic traffic.
- With over 68% of all online experiences starting with a search engine, mastering SEO is the key to staying ahead of the competition.
- HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) is a secure protocol that encrypts data transmitted between a website and its visitors.
- The number of comments a given URL has received on Facebook will impact rankings.
What we do at Searchmetrics, however, is interpret these correlations. We compare the properties of Web pages with the sum of their positions at Google and derive a structured list of more or less weighted factors. So, if in the front positions of the investigated SERPs, for example, many pages contain the keyword in the title tag, then we recognize it as a high correlation with a good ranking.
The Top 3 Google Ranking Factors That Really Matter
It tells the user’s browser where to display what on the page and it also tells search engines what your page is about. Creating content that prioritizes search engines and converts human visitors to your site is an art. Use keyword research tools to identify relevant entities and related queries around your main topics.
Understanding LSI Keywords and SEO Ranking
It is possible that the effects are too small to detect relative to all the other ranking factors. If you care about your search engine rankings, and the BHS Links experience of your users, you should be improving both the front-end and back-end performance of your website. In our next blog post, we will discuss simple ways to optimize the performance of both the front and back ends of a website.
We have various “query deserves freshness” systems designed to show fresher content for queries where it would be expected. For example, if someone is searching about a movie that’s just been released, they probably want recent reviews rather than older articles from when production began. For another example, ordinarily a search for “earthquake” might bring back material about preparation and resources. However, if an earthquake happened recently, then news articles and fresher content might appear. Without a full-funnel approach, you probably won’t see the results you expect — even if you produce content at scale.