Google Ranking Factors Explained : 2023

26 Google Ranking Factors Your Business Needs to Generate More Leads

If you want your website to get more traffic and ultimately more business leads, then you need to understand Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and ranking factors work. Google uses over 200 (secret) ranking factors which can be challenging for any SEO expert, never mind a business owner. We developed this guide to explain in simple terms the top 26 Google ranking factors that will help your business to dominate search results in 2023.

#1 Relevance of overall page content

Creating relevant content is the most important factor when it comes to SEO. Writing content just for keywords will not work, neither will high quality content on its own. Relevance is the key.

When Google begins exploring your website the first thing it sees is your homepage. Google then analyses your page and searches for relevant keyword terms, then determines how relevant your pages are and ranks you appropriately on its search platform. Your overall page content needs to have credible, relevant information that these search bots can easily read and understand. Thus, overall giving you a higher SEO ranking. Content should not be duplicated, or you will be penalised!

Since the release of Google’s Panda update the search engine has been able to determine the content quality of websites. It can determine whether a site is too thin or has duplicate content allowing for a much better analysis of content quality than before. Many of well ranking older sites have extremely high content quality but may be overlooked by Google because Google doesn’t only look at the content on a site.

It looks at the content on one website and compares it to others within that space. Essentially if you have higher quality content than the majority of your competitors you are much more likely to outrank them in the long run. So, it’s important to keep your content unique and relevant to the topics displayed on your website.

So how does Google determine relevance?

It is about how your content answers the search intent behind the search query. There are four search intent types – informational, navigational, transactional or commercial. When creating content for your website, you must address the intent.

The phrase “How to do SEO” gives you an idea of the search intent – as you can see below. This search is informational, so you need to give them more information about the specific topic they are searching.

Another example is navigational content – here the searcher is looking for something specific.

A transactional search is when the searcher is looking to buy; they usually know what they want and now need the best place to get it at the best price.

The final search intent is where the searcher is in the market for a service or product but hasn’t yet decided, they are now looking around to see which product or service is the best for them. This is called commercial investigation intent.

#2 Quality of linking sites and pages

A crucial part of the SEO ranking process is the quality of inbound, outbound and internal links. Google uses inbound links as one way to determine how authoritative and relevant the content is. The authority of the page linking to you is important because in Google’s eyes if an authoritative page has noticed you, you and your content must be relevant. In addition, if the content of the backlinks from a high authority site is not related to the content on your webpage, then it is a waste. Why? Because relevance also applies to link-building.

Outbound links are links where you send people from your website to another website typically to verify facts or to point them to other resources.  There are two kinds of outbound links: nofollow and dofollow. Nofollow tells the search engines not to follow links and do follow links pass on ranking ‘authority’ from your website to the target page or from another site to yours.

#3 Use of query relevant words and phrases

Just like images and external links, words and phrases need to be credible and validated too. Search algorithms do not just match keywords as they did in the past; Google is a little more intelligent than that and introduced natural language queries as well as semantic search back in 2013. What is known as semantic search forms a key part of the ranking process.

And with RankBrain, which was launched in 2015, Google uses artificial intelligence to learn and analyse the best performing results. Also, as more people use voice search via Siri or Alexa, search engines are adapting to include conversational type searches too.

Did you know that 50% of search queries are four words or longer? This means that semantics is very important. Semantic search basically has three elements – intent, meaning and conversational. Firstly, algorithms look for the intent of the searcher (similar to #1 about relevance) and secondly, they consider semantics (the meaning of words or phrases) to display results that are closely related in context. Thirdly, they are evolving to understand conversational searches which use longer phrases with questions.

What this all means is that the content on your website has to include natural, semantically relevant words and phrases. You must stay away from the old tactic of keyword stuffing; this just doesn’t work anymore.

#4 Domain’s perceived expertise, authority and trust

Just like pages, Domains also need to be credible, trustworthy and include validated information so that over time Google will rank your domain. This includes having trusted, accurate and relevant content; the age of the website; credible anchor text; exact keywords, freshness of content; external links to your site content and many more factors. Google will then perceive the domain as trustworthy.

This doesn’t happen overnight but a place to start is to use a tool like Ahrefs which allows you to evaluate your website based on Domain Rank. The results will give you a good indication of your current authority and trust factor.

#5 Mobile friendliness

Almost all of us use mobiles to browse the internet, well so does Google. If you want to build traffic you have to be in the now, which means optimising your site so that it is easily accessible from a mobile phone. Well-optimised sites get more traffic over time and that means more leads and more sales. If your site isn’t optimised for mobile, you are at risk of being left out in the cold.

Factors to take into account include:

• A responsive site that automatically resizes to fit many devices
• Using large fonts for easy readability on a small screen
• Accessibility and navigability, including easy tap menus
• Ensuring that essential content isn’t hidden by ads

#6 Exact match keyword use

As we demonstrated in the section about semantics, exact keyword match is not critical, but it does help with SEO. Things like headers, making sure exact keywords are in the page URL’s, titles and alt text of images should definitely contain exact keywords. Where exact match is very relevant is with Google Ads.

Exact match essentially ensures that your adverts are shown to customers who are searching for that exact keyword, or close variants of the keyword. These adds then may appear when the meaning of someone’s search matches the meaning of your keyword.

It is possible to limit who sees your ad to only those who search for the exact keyword or its close variants. It’s important to remember to build and maintain a list of the exact match keywords.

For example, we understand that people are searching for the best SEO company to do business with, so we do not just have SEO as a keyword, but SEO + companies + best.

#7 Quantity & diversity of linking websites

Link diversity is the tactic of getting inbound links from a variety of pages such as articles, news links, directories and so on. It is also about getting links from different domains (for example .com, .biz, .net), and about getting a variety of anchor text in links such as “do follow”.

The strategy behind this is if you have more inbound links with diversity, your website on the backend will not be seen as spammy by Google. If it is not seen as spammy, your website rank gets better.

#8 Contents accuracy w/ accepted facts

This factor is controversial with some SEO experts claiming that accuracy is not a ranking factor because Google cannot actually tell if your content is accurate. However, what the search engine does is rely on the authority of the page and the relevancy of the topic to assess whether your website content is “accurate”. In this context, it is a ranking factor. Your content should always be accurate, credible and have been researched properly.

What Google has done over the years to improve the quality of search results, has placed more emphasis on authoritative content, it has also created trust indicators which publishers can add to news content and this year Google updated its Search Quality Rater Guidelines for its manual raters to score news sources and content creators based on quality. It is worth mentioning here that Google uses manual raters to “test” and fine tune based on these guidelines before updating its algorithms.

The upshot: always ensure your content is accurate and well researched.

#9 Link authority of host domain

Domain authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score and is based on many factors. They key factor revolves around your link profile – how many backward links are pointing to your website and how authoritative are they. Generally, having a very large number of high-quality external links are at the top end of the domain authority scale. The greater your DA, the more likely you are to have strong traffic and rank higher.

Because domain authority is meant to be a predictor of a site’s ranking ability, having a High Domain authority score should always be your aim.

#10 Pages perceived as expertise, authority and trust

Google ranks pages based off expertise, authority and trust. Google has dubbed this ranking factor EAT – expertise, authority, trust.

Expertise is about the credentials of the organisation and the credentials of an author. For example, an industry award, degrees obtained and the experience of the author all count towards ‘expertise’.

Authority is not only about the raters at Google, it is about how external sources rate the quality of your website content – for example ratings on Yelp or any wider review platform. In the same vein if authors have many citations (this means having many published articles), their content appears on authoritative sites and their work is well written, Google will see this as having high EAT.

The last component is trust. Trust is about having valid information such as an about us page or if it is an ecommerce site there are links to customer service information or that the transactions are secure. An author is mainly about citations, if they have many citations on other high EAT websites and their content is well written, their EAT and ranking will be high.

#11 Use of query-relevant entities in page content

Simply put entities are basically words that when grouped together are seen as a query-relevant phrase by Google. Google considers four factors when ranking entities:

Relatedness

Two entities are referenced together such as Donald Trump and President, because they are frequently mentioned together, they yield a single result. If you put President of the United States in the search bar, Google will bring up Donald Trump, even if you didn’t use his name.

Notability

Notability is about determining how valuable an entity is, by examining links, reviews or mentions about that entity. Then Google says: “this entity value is higher than the category or topic it’s competing in, therefore it has a higher notability”.

Contribution

This is about entities and their contribution to a topic based on links and reviews.

Prizes

This is about relevant prizes/awards an entity has received.  The type of prize or award determines the value attached to an entity.

After a user enters something like “best pop singer” Google will run through their process in order:

• Determine the relatedness of other entities and assign a value
• Determine the notability of those entities and assign a value to each
• Determine the contribution metrics of these entities and assign a value
• Determine any prizes awarded to the entities and assign a value
• Determine the applicable weights each should have based on the query type
• Determine a final score for each possible entity

And then it would produce the results.

It’s important to have query relevant entities involved in the content of your page when considering your overall ranking.

#12 Load Speed

Photo by Chuttersnap on Unsplash

Load speed is the amount of time a user must wait before your page is completely loaded. On average a page for traditional ecommerce sites is around 7 seconds meanwhile the ideal load time is around 3 seconds or less. Google actually compares your site to your competitors and adds a bonus point when you are the fastest. It takes into account the country, devices and network.

In essence you would want to optimise your site and lower your pages loading speed as much as possible.

What can slow your page speed:

• Your host
• High size file images
• External embedded media
• Unoptimized browser, plugins and apps
• Too many adds
• Your theme
• Widgets
• Double-Barrelled code

#13 Usage Data, e.g. Pogo-sticking, engagement, etc

Googles algorithm analyses the behaviour of users on your website and data can result in your ranking on Google to be negatively or positively affected. Google uses the analytics on your webpage to gather this information.

Photo by Edho Pratama on Unsplash

Let’s consider something called pogo sticking. This is when a user goes to your website, immediately (within 5 seconds) goes back to search and then clicks on another link below yours. The algorithm then determines that your page did not meet their expectations and your ranking could drop on the search page.

Google also takes into account the engagement on your website and ranks you higher if user engagement is high.

It considers engagement as:

• Clicking a link to another page
• Leaving a comment on a page
• Playing a video
• Purchasing an item
• Clicking a button to share a page

By cleverly analysing your website analytics, you can get ahead of the search engine – focus on lowering your bounce rate and upping your engagement.

#14 Freshness of publication

Freshness does not necessarily mean new content – whether it is old or new – nor does it mean frequency – how often you post new content. You can go into the Google Search Console and ask Google to immediately index your web page; it is that simple.  So then, what does Google mean by freshness? Google favours fresh content particularly for news site, in this case new content is more relevant because the searcher expects the latest information.

But for normal sites, it is probably better and less time consuming to update your old content than to create new content. This does not mean just changing the date, it means updating the content with new information or by updating statistics.

There are also other factors that contribute to freshness such as the topic related to your content – is it becoming more popular on social media? Is it getting increased backlinks? Google is constantly analysing the freshness of your website based on anything that is happening right now and how relevant your content is to what is happening.

Before you invest time and energy into creating new content, investigate other ways you could make your website ‘fresh’.

#15 Anchor text of links pointing to the page

As explained previously, anchor text refers to the text which is used in hyperlinks. It helps Google understand what your page is about and for which keyword it should rank. For example, if I linked a page from this article with “ice cream” as the anchor text, this would indicate to Google that the linked page probably has something to do with Ice-cream.

If many other websites are doing the same thing, then that will increase Google’s confidence that the page in question should possibly rank for “Ice Cream”. The logic is that the chances of two or more unrelated websites linking to the same web page, with the same anchor text if the page doesn’t have anything to do with Ice cream, is pretty thin.

Google found that anchor text was extremely open to manipulation, so in order to rank a web page for a query, other people must point multiple links at it with their target keyword as the anchor.

#16 Location, frequency & distance of related words

Keyword frequency is a hotly debated topic, with many differing opinions on the number of times keywords or keyword phrases should appear within a web page. Because Google penalises spammy sites, if you use too many of the same keywords or phrases on your web page, your rank will be very low.

Frequency is also known as density which is the calculation as a percentage of keywords vs the overall word count of your content. As a rule, you should avoid stuffing as many keywords as possible onto your pages because it will have the opposite effect to what you intended. We recommend a ratio of 1 to 200: that is for every 200 words of content you should have one keyword.

You should also understand a bit about proximity – sometimes called clustering – which is about the distance of keywords and related keywords to each other.  When Google index’s pages of a website and finds keywords, it will contextualize these words in relation to the content surrounding them. Google therefore “expects” certain keywords to be present in relation to other keywords. By “clustering” relevant keywords together you will increase the chances of visibility.

For example, the search below brings up more than one mountain, and as you see these mountains are measured in metres. Therefore, when Google is crawling the web it expects to find the height in close proximity to the keywords highest mountain in the world.

Let’s use another example.

In this case, if you wanted to rank highly for HP laptop you have to include the price and specification / product name in close proximity to your keywords HP laptop.

#17 Total amount of on-page content

Long form content is the best way to ensure high ranking on search engines. When developing your website each page should have at the very least one 1900-word article. The more the merrier as long as the content is relevant and well written. Also remember that on-page content is not just text, it includes audio, animation, images, videos, links and more. However, because longer content tends to rank higher on Google, you cannot ignore placing many high quality, longer articles on your site.

#18 Use of Unique, relevant images

Much like duplicated content, using the same image multiple times on the website is not good for SEO. What happens is that Google will not take the time to rank them, so having different images on all pages is key. Optimising images is also highly important because images send search engines important relevancy signals through their file name, alt tag, title, description and caption.

In the example above, the image is relevant to SEO and the image filename is SEO-south-africa which ties in well with one of our main keywords. Search engine crawlers do not only index text but look for keywords in your image filenames as well as in the Alt tag which can therefore increase your ranking.

#19 Site accessibility factors

Website accessibility means making your website usable by all people, regardless of their ability, education, or technological background. You have to setup your website so it is easy to navigate, and it should be intuitive. If your grandmother can easily navigate it, you have done your job.

This means simple elements like putting your logo on the top left and linking it to the homepage; using left aligned text for body copy; ensure pages load quickly; menus that are easy to hover and click; images that are clickable to relevant content; displaying contact details prominently. The easier you make your website to navigate, the higher you will rank.

#20 Anchor text of links to other pages on the domain

Essentially an Anchor text is the visible, clickable text provided in the hyperlink (usually underlined or highlighted). Using anchor text for links within your website is important for Google to determine the relevance of the pages they point towards. For example, if your linked word is contact, and the page linked to includes a telephone number and address location, Google sees it as relevant to the page doing the linking.  This relevance determines the score that is assigned by Google in its ranking factor.

In the example above, we linked the text content marketing to informative content about the topic, ensuring that the link is relevant and will hold weight with Google.

One of the biggest mistakes that new sites are making right now is that they tend to forget to use internal linking, in which you link one of your web pages to another. If you happen to use internal linking, you probably will be using rich anchor text, which isn’t a good thing. The key to weighing out internal linking is to avoid using rich anchor text.

It’s also important to remember to not expect immediate results when you start adding internal links even within non-page content. It typically could take 3 months or more for the links to start kicking in and you can’t exactly go into your old web pages and posts and insert tons of internal links. This needs to be done slowly, over time and carefully.

#21 Keyword use in the URL

Every time you launch a page on your domain, it should be discoverable by the right people and by the search engine. Doing your keyword research and including relevant terms in the URL of each page is an important step in getting Google to rank you higher for those keywords. Your URL keywords must get to the essence of what that particular page is all about. Keywords in your URL also lets searchers understand quickly what your content is about. Do not put more than 1 or 2 keywords in your URL or you could be penalised by Google.

#22 Unlinked mentions of the site/brand

Unlinked brand mentions are online mentions of your brand—or anything directly related to your brand—that do not link back to your site. High-quality pages where you have an unlinked brand mention are worth pursuing because Googles PageRank is calculated at the page level not the domain level. What you would need to do is then convert that mention to a link. The author has already mentioned you so convincing them to convert that mention into a link is easier.

#23 Age of Website

Fun fact, nearly 60% of the sites that have a top ten google search ranking are three years old or more. Very few sites that are less than a year old achieve that rating. Spammy sites with thin content get penalised by Google for exact match domains by target keywords in the URL. When it comes to ranking factors, authority matters which is usually a match of great content and off-page SEO signals.

In order to stay ahead of the game, it’s important to remember that exact match domains are deemed relevant and high quality; so valuable domain names can see a ranking boost because of it while allowing the age of your domain to grow.

#24 Use of Google AMP

Google AMP which stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages is a project with the sole goal of creating pages that load more quickly rather than the traditional non-AMP counterparts. basically, AMP breaks down unnecessary parts on your website for the use of mobile development. With Google AMP users can move through the web faster and find what they what more efficiently.

#25 Use of external links on the page

External links are hyperlinks that point at any other domain other than the domain the link exists on. For example, if another website links to you this is considered an external link to your site. Essentially the most optimal format in using external links would be to use descriptive keywords that reflect the same topic or keyword that the target page is trying to target. Also, it’s important to remember that it’s not necessary to use the same keyword text every time, doing this can trigger spam detectors. Instead focus on a variety of anchor text that explains and enhances context and usability for the visitors of your page.

#26 Keyword in the Domain name

Think of a domain name as an alias, by purchasing domain names that have your top keywords in them you are more likely to “capture” searchers who are looking for what you provide. This is an easy and simple way to point people to a specific spot on the web where you have built your website.

Keywords in these domain names are generally words which help search engines identify one or more of the IP addresses of these websites. If you are just starting out, when choosing a domain name, it’s very important to check history and of course having a unique and memorable domain that also tells people what you do.

For example, when we created SEO Pros we looked at the search history for people seeking out an SEO company and we were very fortunate to find a domain name that directly related to what we do – which is always first prize when getting a domain name.