The higher a page ranks, the more visibility and traffic it can attract, making SEO an important part of the strategy for digital marketing and for the growth of your business. In the past, many website owners tried to improve their website’s ranking by repeating or including various keywords on their pages without any context or additional value. The search engine tries to understand the content on your webpage and determine whether or not it might be relevant for some particular search query.

#9 – Site Speed

Mueller next introduced the topic of the quality raters guidelines and how it’s important for SEOs and publishers to read. In fact, he calls it important and encourages anyone concerned about ranking better to at least give it a scan for topics that may be important to the individual. In one case, a retail client faced strong competition but managed to improve product descriptions and incorporate customer reviews effectively. Gradually, as each KPI improved, their rankings and conversions rose noticeably.

For example, backlink relevance signals to Google your content is a relevant and trusted source. The linked anchor text also signals relevancy and helps Google understand your content. Backlink relevance is how helpful and topically similar a linking website is to your content. Links from relevant websites and pages also have more value than irrelevant links. Instead of listing 200+ ranking factors, I’ll discuss the top nine that deserve your attention.

Are you relying on search forms?

“Ranking systems are different than ranking signals (systems typically make use of signals). We had some things listed on that page relating to page experience as ‘systems’ that were actually signals. However, it’s important to use keywords judiciously to avoid keyword stuffing, which can harm your rankings. Rank Math PRO’s Search Intent feature simplifies intent-based optimization, helping your content rank better. Clicking the Show Intent button beside your keyword reveals its intent instantly.

For example, searchers landing on a page from a query like ‘what day is Christmas on in 2025? ’ won’t stay on the page as soon as their problem has been solved. I recommend signing up for our free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools and running a crawl of your website. Catching and fixing glitches early can save you from mysteriously missing out on search traffic.

How to Write a Good Meta Description: An Ultimate Guide

• By prioritizing Google Page Experience, your startup can attract, engage, and retain more users.
• Title tags are one of the most important on-page SEO factors of your website.
• The changes are about how SEO professionals conceptualize and examine their efforts, not about changing the impact of individual signals.

The landscape of SEO is changing constantly with the change in technology and the way people choose to interact with the content available online. Thus, it becomes a tedious task for all our SEO enthusiasts, learners, and professionals to keep up with the changes and try to bag that top spot in the search engine’s SERP. 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. This approach stems from the increasing prevalence of mobile internet users over desktop users. Click-Through Rate measures the percentage of users who click on a link to your site in search engine results pages (SERPs) out of the total users who viewed the SEO Anomaly link.

The number of tweets a given URL or domain will influence rankings in Google so having a robust Twitter strategy is important. Pages that get a higher click-through rate in search results get a boost in rankings. Using structured data markup (or schema markup) helps Google better understand specific aspects of your content. A list of site level rankings factors that can affect your rankings positively or negatively. These factors are all changes you can make to your site to rank higher. Even if it’s just 1 bad outbound link across your entire site and having too many outbound links can hurt your site’s ranking.