Google Ranking Factors: Which Ones are Most Important?

Google uses hundreds of ranking signals and tweaks their algorithm around 500–600 times per year. And many of these ranking factors can’t even be looked at independently. It’s not to say that they’re unimportant, but an average person doing SEO for their site doesn’t need to worry about 200+ ranking factors. So today, I’m going to walk you through the most important Google ranking factors. so you stay focused on the things that matter most.

The first and arguably most important ranking factor are quality backlinks. Backlinks form the basis of PageRank, which is the foundation of Google’s ranking algorithm. They mention it on their "how search works" page, they’ve tweeted about it, and independent studies confirm the relationship between backlinks and organic traffic. But not all links are created equal. There are a lot of factors that contribute to a backlinks ability to push a page higher in the SERPs. And the two most important are relevance and authority.

We have a full tutorial that goes deep into the attributes of high-quality backlinks, so I’ll link that up in the description. The next ranking signal is freshness. Freshness is a query-dependent ranking factor, meaning it’s more important for some queries than others. For example, a query like "tesla news" has super-fresh results. And that’s because people want information on current news.

Not something that happened four years ago. But freshness isn’t limited to just news topics. If we look at the SERP for the query "best
headphones," you’ll see that all of the top ranking pages have the current year in the title.

And that’s because people don’t want to know about the best headphones from 2014.

Technology is advancing and there are always new models and manufacturers coming out. But for a query like, "how to tie a tie",
freshness isn’t as important since nothing has really changed.

So for queries that require freshness, keep your content up to date. We have a step-by-step tutorial on how to
identify these queries and republish content to get more search traffic, so I’ll link that up for you in the description. The next ranking factor is search intent. While backlinks are arguably the most important ranking factor, search intent is likely the most overlooked. Search intent represents the reason behind a searcher’s query. So when someone searches for "how to make chicken soup," they want to find a recipe.

When they search for "best headphones," they want to see a listicle with a variety of different headphones. And the way we determine search intent is by looking at the top-ranking pages and identifying the 3 C’s of search intent. The first C is content type.

So are the top pages mostly blog posts, product, category, or landing pages? For "best headphones," they’re clearly blog posts.

The second C is content format. So are most of the top pages how-tos, tutorials, listicles, or opinion editorials? Again for "best headphones," they’re listicles, which is kind of obvious since the word "best" implies that comparisons need to be made. Finally is content angle. And this is the most dominant USP that the top-ranking pages are using. For the query "best headphones," it looks like they’re going with the "freshness" USP by including the current year in the titles. Of the 3 C’s, content type and content format are absolutely critical to match, otherwise, you’ll be hard-pressed to rank high
for any meaningful query.

Next up is topical authority of the website. Google wants to rank pages from authoritative sources and this goes way beyond backlinks. For example, if we look at the SERP for "how to unclog a toilet," you’ll see that this DR 42 site is outranking much more powerful websites with significantly more referring domains. Well, this page comes from a website that’s just about plumbing so it’s likely more authoritative on that topic. Now, if we’re being honest, this is just an educated guess. But there are more clues to help
us solidify our argument. #1. Google’s search quality rater guidelines mention something called E-A-T, which stands for expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. I don’t know about you, but in our opinion, we believe that it’s near impossible for a person or website to demonstrate all three qualities on every topic.

Alright, so the second point of support for topical authority is in Google’s SEO starter guide. They say "cultivate a reputation for expertise and trustworthiness in a specific area."

#3. Pages on websites that are focused on one particular topic will have more internal links from pages about similar things. And not only do internal links help increase "authority," but they also help Google understand what the pages are about. Finally, there’s evidence to suggest that the perceived authoritativeness of a site is query-dependant in this Google patent. Alright, the next ranking factor is content depth. Depth is about hitting the talking points of a topic that searchers want and expect to see. For example, if we look at the SERP for "best watch brands," you’ll see that search intent tells us that we need to create a listicleblog post specifically about luxury watches. But this doesn’t tell us what’s important from a content perspective other than the fact that we should be talking about Breitling instead of Timex. In order to figure that out you need to actually visit the top-ranking pages and look for similarities between the content. And if you look at the top-ranking pages, you’ll find that they all mention something about price. They all mention popular brands like Rolex. And they all talk about technical specifications.

So if you want to rank for this query, you should probably talk about these things too. It’s not about limiting your creativity or copying others, but since Google is ranking similar pages at the top, it’s telling us what they want to see. And since Google’s job is to deliver the most relevant results for any given query, it’s probably what the searcher wants to see too. Another way you can find talking points is to look at the People

Also Ask box in the SERP, as well as the related searches at the bottom. Now, one other thing I highly recommend doing is to do a content gap analysis at the page level. This is a bit different because it’ll show you common keyword rankings between the top-ranking pages. Just go to Ahrefs’ Content Gap tool and add the top 3 relevant ranking results in the top section. Leave the bottom section blank and then run the search. So as you can see, people want to know about the "most expensive watch brands," they want "high end watches" and so on. Try and extract subtopics from here and get a better understanding of the language people use when they’re searching for content on this topic. Next up is PageSpeed. PageSpeed has been a known ranking factor since 2010. And while a lot of people obsess over improving their site speed by fractions of a second, from an SEO perspective, it doesn’t really matter much for most sites. In fact, Google said: "The speed update will only affect pages that deliver the slowest experience to users and will only affect a small percentage of queries." Bottomline: improve your page speed so it’s not super-slow. You don’t want people to bounce because your page wouldn’t load. What’s more important about page speed is that if visitors won’t wait for your page to load, they won’t see your content, contact you, or purchase anything from your site. We have a full tutorial on how to optimize a WordPress website’s speed, so I highly recommend checking that out. And even if you don’t have a WordPress site, I cover a lot of the main principles that contribute to load time.

Alright, next up is to ensure your site uses the HTTPS protocol. In 2014, Google announced HTTPS as a very lightweight signal affecting fewer than 1% of global queries. And while using HTTPS probably won’t make a huge impact on your site’s rankings, it’s a quick win that you can do in under 5 minutes. So if you’re still using the unsecure HTTP protocol, then it’s probably worth changing.

Finally is user experience. Google wants to rank content that offers visitors a positive experience. Because if people are finding good results
from their search engine, then they’ll keep using it. So the absolute basics would be to try and keep visitors on your site for as long as possible without any kind of trickery.

So create easy-to-read content, a well-organized site, responsive design, and go easy on the ads and pop-ups. Basically, you want to have a site that’s designed around the users’ needs first. Now, in terms of the way they measure user satisfaction is debatable. There is no definitive proof that Google uses things like dwell time or CTR in their ranking algorithm. But if we look at this patent from Google,
they describe how clickthrough rate and other behavioral signals could be used to influence search engine rankings.

And while Google remains adamant that these factors are too noisy and unreliable, SEOs have tried experiments and found CTR to be effective in higher rankings. So the key takeaway: instead of obsessing over metrics like CTR and dwell time, focus on creating excellent content and an overall positive experience for visitors. Now, was any of this advice new or exciting? Nope, but that’s kind of the point.

Ranking in Google is rarely about the latesttips, algorithm updates, or buzzwords. It’s about putting in the work to create content that searchers are looking for, providing a great user experience and proving to Google that it’s the best result for a query. Now, a topic like Google ranking factors can be pretty controversial. So are there any other ranking signals that I missed that you think are critical to focus on? Let me know in the comments and if you enjoyed this video, make sure to like, share, and subscribe for more actionable SEO and marketing tutorials. I’ll see you in the next one.