Some Important Google Ranking Factors

Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s turn to the details you need to know about the best way Google Ranking Factor for your website.

What we think are the some important Google ranking factors

Google never tells us exactly what factors they use and how much weight they give to each factor to determine how they rank pages in search results. However, Google gives us many clues through its interviews, the patents it files, the videos it shares with the SEO community, its algorithm changes, and its stated goal of providing the best content in response to users' search queries. Also, by observing how different tactics affect page rankings and reading similar studies and reports written by others, we can get a pretty good idea of what's important to Google. This list summarizes what we believe are the most important ranking factors that Google considers.

1) Content quality

From an interview with Andrey Lipattsev of Google, it appears that the most important ranking factor for Google is content quality. We think this answer is accurate, knowing that Google's goal is to provide search results that best answer users' search queries, so that Google can gain more users and advertising revenue.

How Google determines content quality is somewhat less clear. We believe it likely uses a complex calculation to determine this. We suspect that the ratio of text to video and images, the simplicity or reading level, the ratio of content to white space, and the uniqueness of the wording are all taken into account. This is all speculation, but we do know that Google somehow evaluates the quality of content and uses this evaluation as a top ranking factor.

What we can do is make sure we are creating good content. Over time, Google will improve its search algorithms and push the best content higher and higher.

2) Number of total backlinks.

Again, from the same interview with Andrey Lipattsev, we learn that links are the second most important ranking factor Google considers. We assume that both the number of total backlinks and the number of domains are taken into account. We believe that the number of total backlinks and the strength of the pages the links come from are more important. This assumption is in line with this report we found at openumbrella.org. Building links is definitely one of the most important actions you can take for your website. To learn everything you should do, download our free report on the 7 most important SEO tasks you need to do to get more website traffic.

3) RankBrain

Rankbrain is an AI that Google uses to sort all search results. According to SearchEngineLand, Rankbrain is part of Google's Hummingbird search algorithm and plays an important role in search results. From the same interview with Andrey Lipattsev, we know that it is the third most important ranking factor. Basically, RankBrain tries to learn which words have similar meanings and tries to teach itself how to improve search results over time. We believe this also needs to be done using page interaction metrics like click-through rate, time spent on page, and bounce rate to determine if it's successful. So that means you need to include multiple words or phrases that mean the same thing as the keyword you are targeting in your content.

4) Click-through rate.

Even though we believe that click-through rate is taken into account in RankBrain. The reason why we rank click-through rate so high is because there are a number of case studies where a large number of people can be made to click on a search result that is not at the top. Here is just one such study. As you can see from the report below, some reports even list it as the #1 ranking factor.

5) Relevant terms in the content of the page.

Next, we notice that pages that contain many similar terms to the search phrase in the body of the page content usually rank high in the search results. For example, if you are trying to rank for auto mechanic, and the page contains some instances of auto mechanic, some of auto repair, some of auto repair, some of auto mechanic, some of auto maintenance, etc., the page will rank better than if it does not have those keywords in the content. This theory coincides with the data from the report below.

6) Number of social media shares

As you can see from this report from Searchmetrics, all social media factors combined have a huge impact. So it makes sense for Google to take this into account. It's not clear which platform is the most important. However, it is clear that Google+, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter are the only channels that have a major impact. There does not seem to be one channel or action that carries much more weight than the others. Even the action with the highest correlation (Google+) is only slightly higher than the others. Therefore, we recommend focusing on making sure your website receives social media activity of any kind (comments, shares, likes) on the four major platforms (Google+, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter) in that order.