The Top 15 Most Important SEO Ranking Factors Updated

Make sure all sign-up forms and interactive elements work, on both desktop and mobile. Site owners can use Google PageSpeed Insights to assess their site speed and performance and compare it to competitors. Popular content management systems (CMS), like WordPress, provide a blank space for you to add alt text. The CMS then automatically adds the required HTML to that alt text.

Long Tail Keyword Generator

Building up backlinks—that is, getting your website linked to from a trusted, high-traffic site—bolsters your site’s standing in the eyes of consumers and search engine ranking algorithms. If someone searches “best bakery in Seattle,” businesses that have those keywords in their Google Business Profile and website are more likely to rank higher. Understanding how to assess your website’s SEO ranking is crucial for optimizing its performance.

This approach makes it more likely for your BHS Links content to match voice search queries. As the popularity of voice-activated devices continues to rise, optimizing your website for voice search has become a crucial part of SEO strategy. High-quality content establishes your website as a credible source of information, building trust with your audience and authority within your industry.

• With a knack for technical SEO, content marketing, and strategic planning, he deciphers the complex world of digital business with ease.
• You should only have one H1 tag per page to establish the main topic.
• In the table above, you can see what Whitespark’s expert survey respondents said they believed were the most important ranking factors to local pack and localized organic results.
• This might feel like a lot of effort, but remember that SEO not only brings more traffic to your site, it also helps build your brand and increase user loyalty in the long run.

Organic Impressions

Read on to explore some of the most relevant facts and figures that show where SEO is in 2025 and where it may be going. They’re constantly tweaking their rubrics for assessing content—not to mention the many outside influences. From semantic search to featured snippets to AI results, the space keeps evolving. Imagine someone nearby searching “best your service near me.” They’re looking for a business just like yours, ready to book an appointment, stop by, or make a purchase. But if your business isn’t at the top of Google Maps, they won’t find you — they’ll find your competitors.

Naturally, all of this data is still relevant, but there has been a shift in what goals to focus on. Search behavior has changed, and search engines are showing your content in many different ways. You need to focus on the overall perception of your brand and being present in the right places. This development, along with the pursuit of the optimum result, has culminated in the constant evolution of ranking factors.

Once you have your keywords, you’ll begin optimizing your site to start improving your ranking. The robot-focused SEOs build pages with just the right keywords and title tags, hoping to attract the bots on relevancy. I say “try” to satisfy robots, because search engines are actually watching the users. Once these types of content start ranking, they tend to naturally earn more and more links over time, pushing them—and your site—even higher in search results.

We recommend not simply adding links to existing text, but adding context around the new links, which can boost both the relevance and the freshness of the new links. Links are a powerful ranking signal, but remember, not all links are equal. Since we’re now linking our topically related pages together, we now want to make sure to optimize our linking strategy for maximum SEO impact. Regardless, at this point you have all the tools you need to create high-quality content.

By having backlinks from sites that are topically similar to yours, the search engine might consider your pages as valuable results for the given topic or niche. Backlinks are the most well-known ranking signal in SEO – that was confirmed many many times by Google representatives. We can’t mention content and keywords without talking about entities, which Google is using to better understand topics.