10 Most Important Search Engine Ranking Factors (Updated)

You may have heard that Google uses over 200 factors before deciding which websites to show at the top of the search results. While this is true, not all ranking factors are equal.

This article will explain the most important search engine ranking factors and how to optimize your website for higher rankings.

Let’s start with some popular questions people ask about search engine rankings.

What do we mean by Search Engine Ranking Factors? SEO ranking factors are rules used by search engines during the ranking process to decide which pages to show in the search engine results pages (SERPS) and what order.

Why is it important to know about the different SEO ranking factors? The answer is simple: If you want your website to rank high in organic search engine results and get traffic, you must adhere to these rules.

Google ranking factors change all the time. How do I keep up with the changes? Search engines, especially Google, change their ranking algorithms yearly. Their goal is to improve the quality of their search results and keep their users happy.

Nevertheless, some ranking signals have been the foundation of Search Engine Optimization for years. Google might use more than 200 ranking factors in its algorithm, but not all factors are equal.

Most Important Search Engine Ranking Factors

Here is a list of the 10 most important ranking factors.

1. A Website Optimized for Technical SEO
2. Website Security (HTTPS)
3. Domain Authority
4. Mobile Friendliness
5. Webpage Speed (both Desktop and Mobile)
6. Content Quality
7. On-Page SEO Ranking Factors
8. User Experience
9. Brand reputation
10. Links from Trusted Websites

1. A Website Optimized for Technical SEO

This is coming first on the list and for a reason. If search engines cannot access your website properly, then you shouldn’t expect much in terms of rankings.

The way search engines work can be grouped into three main stages:

• Discovery
• Crawling and Indexing
• Ranking

During the discovery stage, they find all publicly available web pages. Then, during crawling, they extract the information they need and add it to their index so that the ranking algorithms can use it during the ranking process.

It’s your job to ensure that search engine bots can access your website without any blocking during this process and that you assist them in completing this task as quickly as possible.

This is known in the SEO World as Technical SEO.

You can do this by:

• Optimizing your robots.txt – Robots.txt is a file that gives search engines instructions as to which pages of a website they can crawl.
• Optimizing your XML sitemap – A sitemap lists all pages of a website search engines should know about.
• Finding and fixing any crawl errors – You can use the Google Search Console to find and fix crawl errors and make indexing more efficient and faster.

Recommended Reading: Technical SEO Guide – Best Practices for higher rankings.

2. Website Security (HTTPS)

One of the known ranking factors is website security. Websites that have an SSL enabled and serve links as HTTPS have a comparative advantage over non-secure websites.

By comparative advantage, we mean that other things are equal; a website that has HTTPS enabled will rank higher than a website that is not secured.

If your website is not HTTPS, add this task to your list.

Recommended Reading: How to migrate your website to https without losing SEO.

3. Domain Authority

Next on the list is domain authority, a very important ranking factor.

Search engines want to show the best possible websites in their results, and one factor they consider is a domain’s authority.

The authority of a domain is determined by:

Domain age: Older domains tend to rank higher than newer domains. The average age of a page on Google’s top results is 3 years.

This does not mean new websites cannot achieve high rankings, but it is more difficult and will take longer than established websites.

Domain status: For a domain to be eligible to rank, it has to be free of Google penalties.

If you’ve owned your domain from the beginning, you should not worry about this. However, if you bought a domain already registered, you need to check that it’s free of Google penalties.

Recommended Reading: How to check if your website is penalized by Google.

Domain reputation: how other websites (and people) perceive your domain.

As we will see below, one of the biggest factors is incoming links, but reputation is also related to what people say about your brand.

A domain with a good reputation is likelier to achieve better rankings than one without a reputation.

Domain Authority: Google uses an internal metric called PageRank to calculate the authority of a webpage.

Websites in the top positions of Google have a higher PageRank than those in the lower positions.

Google no longer provides information about PageRank, so several companies (moz.com, semrush.com, ahrefs.com) developed their systems for calculating a domain’s authority.

These metrics can be used as a guide to improve your domain score, but this is not directly related to rankings.

Recommended Reading: Increase the authority of your domain by following these 7 practical steps and how to do SEO for a new website when you have a limited budget.

4. Mobile Friendliness

Another factor that is known to affect search engine rankings is mobile friendliness.

Mobile searches make up more than 60% of the total Google searches made monthly.

A website not optimized for mobiles will not appear in mobile search results, immediately excluding the possibility of getting any mobile traffic.

5. Webpage Speed (both Desktop and Mobile)

Page speed has long been a known Google ranking factor. Google is obsessed with making the web faster and has rewarded faster websites with better rankings.

Having a fast website is also good for users. Many studies have shown that slow-loading websites lose customers and drive users away.

To make your website faster, follow these proven tips:

• Upgrade your website software to the latest version
• Use a caching plugin
• Use the latest version of PHP (if you are on WordPress)
• Use a VPS hosting and not shared
• Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network) Service
• Optimize and compress your images
• Optimize and compress your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

6. Content Quality

The quality of the content you publish on your website is the most important SEO ranking factor.

When we talk about content that is published online, quality is measured using these three factors:

• Uniqueness
• Expertise – Authority – Trustworthiness (EAT)
• Relevancy

Content Uniqueness

First on the list is uniqueness. Any content published on your website must be unique and not duplicate what is already available on other websites.

Republishing an article from Forbes because you found it interesting (even if you properly cite the source) won’t help your website rank.

Google knows that the article first appeared on Forbes and will ignore yours.

It won’t punish your website for this but won’t reward it. However, if you keep publishing duplicate content and have no unique content, this will reduce your Google Trust and make it difficult to rank on Google.

Recommended Reading: What is thin content – A guide on how to find and fix thin content pages.

Expertise – Authority – Trustworthiness (EAT)

Search engines don’t want to show untrusted content in their search results. During the ranking phase, they look for signals to help them identify content written by ‘experts’ who have ‘authority’ and ‘trustworthiness’.

This is not a new concept, but Google raised its importance by including it in its Quality Raters Guidelines.

It particularly states that E-A-T applies to all types of websites and gives some examples of how it can be applied in practice.

What you should do to improve E-A-T is the following:

• Make sure that each page has an author. You can add the author bio at the bottom of each page with a link to the full author bio.
• Ensure your ‘About’ page explains who you are and why your company and authors are experts on the topics.
• Showcase any awards or mentions from trusted websites that can prove your authority.
• Invest in promoting your brand and the reputation of your authors.
• Make sure that your website is secure
• Try to get good reviews published in other trusted sources. Depending on your niche, you may seek reviews in Google My Business, Yelp, Trustpilot, BBB, etc.
• If applicable, try to get a Wikipedia page for your website and authors
• If you are selling products or services online, ensure you have a privacy policy and a refund policy.
• Get mentions on authoritative sites like major news publications, big forums, and leading industry websites.

Recommended Reading: Google Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines

7. On-Page SEO Ranking Factors

Besides proving to search engines that they can ‘trust’ you, you also need to give them signals through your page structure to help them understand the meaning of your content.

This is what On Page SEO is all about.

This is achieved by sending them the right signals through your content and, in particular:

Does your page title match what the user is searching for?

The page title is the most important on-page SEO factor. It is what users see in the search results, and search engines use it to get a good idea of what a page is all about.

To optimize your titles for both users and search engines, you must ensure they include SEO keywords.

SEO Keywords are the exact phrases users type in the search box. By including keywords in your title, search engines can associate your content with specific search queries, increasing your chances of ranking for those terms.

It also encourages users to click on your search snippet since it closely matches what they seek.

Recommended Reading: How to optimize your page titles

Headings and Subheadings

A well-optimized page structure has headings and subheadings. Headings make the page easier for both search crawlers and users to read.

Usually, a page has one H1 heading and multiple subheadings (H2 and H3). These are laid out in a hierarchical structure, i.e., H1 -> H2 > H3.

Headings should also include keywords and phrases users can recognize.

Recommended Reading: How to optimize your website headings

Internal Link Structure

Internal links are links pointing to pages on the same website.

Each piece of content you publish on your website needs at least one link pointing to another page.

Internal links should be placed in the page’s BODY and relevant to the content.

By adding internal links to your content:

• You assist both search engines and users in discovering more pages on your website.
• Help in building topic relevancy
• Gives users more information about a topic

Recommended Reading: Internal linking best practices for SEO.

 Image and multimedia elements Optimization

Search engines don’t only index text content, but they also index videos, audio (podcasts), and, of course, images.

The problem is that crawlers find it difficult to interpret non-text elements accurately.

It is thus important to optimize them for SEO by giving search crawlers the necessary signals.

For example:

• You can optimize the filename and provide an ALT text for images.
• For videos, you can add a video schema.
• For podcasts, you can add the podcast schema.

There are various ways to make non-text elements easier to index. The following guides can help you out:

• SEO for Images: A complete guide on how to SEO optimize your images
• Schema Markup – An introduction to schemas and structured data and how they can help you improve your rankings.

Add Semantically Related Keywords in Content

Last but not least, one factor that can affect the position in which your website appears in search results is the use of keywords within your content. This is known in SEO as Content SEO.

Content SEO can help you pick the right keywords to embed in your content to make it more relevant to the user searching.

In addition to adding your main keywords in the titles and headings (as mentioned above), you must add semantically related keywords in your content.

Semantically related keywords are words or phrases related to each other conceptually.

Look at the following example:

Google can understand that the meaning of the words ‘replace’ and ‘change’ are the same (in this context).

Recommended Reading: You can read my SEO keywords guide for more information on how to find and use semantically related keywords in your content.

8. User Experience

One of the signals used by the Google ranking algorithm is RankBrain. RankBrain uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to rank websites based on user experience and behavior.

So, the ranking algorithm considers all the factors discussed in this article and uses input from RankBrain before making a final decision.

Some of the signals used are:

CTR (clickthrough rate) – CTR is the percentage of people clicking on a search snippet in the SERPS.

If the system spots a pattern where more people click on a search snippet lower in the results than on the top, the algorithm may push that snippet higher on the page.

Pogosticking – When users click on your search snippet, visit your website, and immediately return to the search results, they are unhappy with what they see.

Bounce rate and dwell time – Similar to pogo-sticking, users visit your website and leave immediately because they do not find the information they seek.

Recommended Reading: How to reduce your bounce rate

9. Brand Reputation

This SEO ranking factor has nothing to do with backlinks (we will deal with links below) but with the importance of having a good brand reputation.

Brand reputation, in this context, means having a community of people who talk about and mention your brand online.

Mentioning your brand doesn’t necessarily mean adding a link to your website; it simply discusses it on different social networks and forums.

From a webmaster’s perspective, you should do everything possible to promote your brand online through your industry’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or popular forums.

Getting people to talk and search for your brand name in Google will eventually translate to a strong signal for the ranking algorithms.

10. Links from Trusted Websites

Back in the 90s, Google founders came up with a brilliant idea.

Websites with backlinks pointing to them from other websites are more useful and popular than others and thus deserve a higher position in the Google search results.

That’s a very simplified version of how Google ranking used to work back in the early days.

Over the years, people took advantage of this and started building hundreds of links to their websites, and as a result, the quality of the Google search results was diminishing.

To protect its reputation and improve the quality of its results, Google adjusted its algorithm and changed how backlinks are accounted for.

Links are still one of the most critical ranking factors, but it’s no longer a matter of which website has the most links but where they are coming from.

Links that can influence your rankings are the ones that come from:

• Google trusted websites
• Websites that demonstrate Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness
• Related Websites
• Links that don’t have the nofollow attribute (
• Links that are included in the body of a webpage
• Webmasters naturally add links that do not result from link exchanges or buying links.

The following guides can help you build a strong link profile that will help you with rankings:

• How to remove bad backlinks from Google
• What is Off-Page SEO

SEO Ranking Factors Summary

If you are new to SEO and Search Engine Marketing, you need to understand that Search Engines are constantly working on improving their search results. They do this by getting feedback from the users and through machine learning.

They gather and analyze this information and then adjust the search engine ranking factors to improve the user experience.

As an SEO expert, you must follow these changes and comply with the new rules.

It should be noted, though, that while algorithms are changing all the time, the basic ranking factors have remained the same since the beginning of Google:

• Publish great content to satisfy the user intent
• Make your website accessible to search engines
• Build fast and secure websites
• Get ‘votes of trust’ (links) from other websites on the Internet to prove your Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness

Websites following the above rules enjoy high search engine rankings and are more likely to survive the competition for years.

Websites that take shortcuts and try to trick search engine algorithms can achieve temporary success, but they will eventually get caught and penalized.

Are any important SEO ranking factors missing from the list? Let me know in the comments.