The Ultimate Guide to Google Ranking Factors in 2019

The Ultimate Guide to Google Ranking Factors in 2019

There are domain-related factors, on-page factors, off-page factors, site-level factors, and numerous technical SEO factors that contribute to where your website falls on Google's search engine results pages (SERPs) for the various keywords related to your industry. Google Ranking Factors There are 200 known Google ranking factors. The most important factors are related to the URL, inbound links, meta tags, the intent of a keyword, how your content is structured, how fast your page loads, and numerous technical SEO specifications that vary in importance based on the topic. Domain Security Importance: Very Important Notice the "https" at the beginning of the example URL, above? Keyword Intent Importance: Crucial Topics might be more important in the long term than individual keywords, but that doesn't mean keywords aren't still a ranking factor. If this website wants to rank for the keyword, "best organic pesticides," it won't rank well by simply including this three-word phrase several times throughout the article. Content Structure Importance: Important It's not enough to just serve your website visitors the info they're looking for. The more engaged a reader is with your content, the longer they'll stay on your website -- increasing what is known as their "session duration," another relevant Google ranking factor that comes as a result of creating good content. And that's a shame, because images can help blog posts and webpages rank quite well in organic search results. Page Speed Importance: Important Page speed refers to how fast your webpage loads when a searcher clicks on it from a Google search result.

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More than 3.5 billion searches are made every day on Google, a company that holds over 85% of the desktop search engine market share.

Needless to say, Google is popular, and marketers looking to perform well in organic search results need to know what factors Google takes into account when ranking content.

With as much effort as we put into optimizing content for search engines, you’d think we’d know by now exactly what Google’s ranking algorithm considers when crawling pages on the internet. But we don’t, and we can’t — mainly because Google has never publicly listed all of the factors it takes into account when ranking content.

What Google has confirmed is that it uses about 200 ranking signals when determining organic search page rankings. There are domain-related factors, on-page factors, off-page factors, site-level factors, and numerous technical SEO factors that contribute to where your website falls on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) for the various keywords related to your industry.

Two-hundred ranking factors is quite a long list. How are you supposed to remember all of them? Luckily, Single Grain and Backlinko have scoured the internet to find all of the known Google ranking factors and created an all-inclusive infographic that categorizes them based on their role in Google’s ranking algorithm.

But, this begs the question: Is every ranking factor equal in importance? Nope. Although this criteria is all relevant to where you end up ranking on Google, there are a handful of universal best practices that publishers should focus on first before solving for the rest.

To make prioritizing your SEO efforts easier over the next year, we’ve isolated nine of the most important ranking factors for you below.

Google Ranking Factors

There are 200 known Google ranking factors. The most important factors are related to the URL, inbound links, meta tags, the intent of a keyword, how your content is structured, how fast your page loads, and numerous technical SEO specifications that vary in importance based on the topic.

1. Website Architecture

Importance: Important

There are factors that have a greater impact on your Google ranking than this one, but website architecture is the first thing you should get right upfront — especially when launching (or relaunching) your website.

By organizing your website into subdirectories, and having clear strings of text (or “slugs”) at the end of each URL, you’ll make it much easier for Google to understand who you are and what topics you want to be an authority on. (We’ll talk more about topics in just a minute).

For example, if you want to launch a blog on gardening — and plan to publish content specifically about produce, watering, and pests — it’s in your interest to organize your website content into those three subdirectories. A good blog post URL might look like this:

https://www.yourwebsite.com/produce/how-to-grow-tomatoes

2. Domain Security

Importance: Very Important

Notice the “https” at the beginning of the example URL, above? This is how Google identifies secure websites from non-secure ones. Hint: You want your site to be secure.

HTTP stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol — a virtual process that transfers information from a website to the visitor’s browser. HTTPS is the secure version of this protocol, and it ensures Google that the information it’s indexing is safe to the searcher. The “S,” as you’ve likely guessed, stands for “secure.”

To secure your website domain, you’ll need what’s called an SSL certificate. Learn more about getting this certificate in this blog post.

3. Inbound Links

Importance: Crucial

Inbound links, also known as “backlinks,” are all the hyperlinks that direct back to your page from elsewhere on the internet. They can make a major difference in where you rank — even which number page you rank on.

Why do these links matter to your Google ranking? You don’t rely on these referral sources for all your traffic, so why does Google care who links to you? Inbound links from other websites tell Google that people trust what you have to say — enough to link to it from their own websites. Trust is huge in the eyes of Google, and the more trustworthy the source linking to you is, the greater the impact their inbound link has on your ranking.

Inbound links don’t work the same way if you’re simply linking to your blog post from another one of your blog posts. The influence of these backlinks comes almost entirely from outside domains.

For this reason, “link building” has become an important (but delicate) process for earning backlinks from other publishers. Some publishers, who have the same perceived authority, agree to trade backlinks from each other. Others write a guest post on this publisher’s website…

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