Top Google Ranking Factors in 2025 With Data

If you haven’t addressed all of these items, try to take action as soon as possible. In today’s mobile-first world, ensuring your website is mobile-friendly is essential for ranking well. Google uses mobile-first indexing, meaning it primarily uses the mobile version of a website to determine its ranking. A website that is slow to load or difficult to navigate on mobile devices will have a harder time ranking well. You can also expand any of your keywords to get their historical performance and see who’s ranking in the top 10 positions right now.

Google’s Search Quality Raters Guidelines used to be a closely guarded document at Google that was eventually leaked online. Google now openly publishes the document as an example of what its Quality Raters are looking for when they manually review websites. For example, queries such as “best coffee shop” are considered location-dependent and will deliver a map of results based on your location. Some product queries are served by location to surface local suppliers. Launched in 2022, Google’s helpful content system is focused on providing the best content to the user. Most likely, the number 200 originated as a PR attempt by Google to portray its algorithm as complex and having multi-factors.

Google views backlinks (links from other websites to yours) and local citations (mentions of your business name, address, and phone number across the web) as signals of trust and authority. The more high-quality backlinks and accurate citations your business has, the stronger your Google Maps ranking. I have seen cases where focusing on improving keyword rankings, backlinks, and organic traffic significantly improved a site’s SEO performance.

How To Create & Pitch Content That Attracts Incredible Links

This is part of the rank refining where Google will try to return the most relevant results to a query. It also allows Google to return results for queries with no previous record of searches. Launched in 2015, RankBrain is one of Google’s machine learning systems that can connect words to concepts and helps Google understand the intent of a search query.

a. Find service-based keywords

It may have worked in the past, but this is never what search engines wanted. Just as a crawler needs to discover your site via links from other sites, it needs a path of links on your own site to guide it from page to page. If you’ve got a page you want search engines to find but it isn’t linked to from any other pages, it’s as good as invisible.

To maximize how often users find your business in local search results, ensure that your business information in Business Profile is accurate, complete, and engaging. (Never assign the same keyword to more than one page on your site as this can confuse search engines and cause keyword cannibalization). Before we dive BHS Links into the top SEO ranking factors, it’s important to note that these factors can and will change.

• At that time, bounce rate, as measured in Universal Analytics, was poorly conceived.
• These elements align with other search engines and their ranking factors, like Google.
• When deciding which Google ranking factors to prioritize, keep in mind that speed considerations are relative and trumped by quality.
• There are 200+ SEO ranking factors that help search engines determine which sites should show in search results and how they should rank.

Additionally, consider long-tail keywords, as they often have less competition and can drive targeted traffic. With tools like Moz, you can track your rankings and analyze competitors’ performance, providing a well-rounded view of the landscape. This can inform your strategy and highlight opportunities for growth. Always compare options for affordability and comprehensive features to find the best fit for your needs. This is quite a long list of Google ranking factors—too long to memorize and remember. So, in a way, EAT is the combination of multiple Google ranking factors working together.

Huge volume of searches

Latent Semantic Indexing keywords help search engines work out the exact topic. Below I have broken out all of the different page ranking factors you need to consider from an SEO perspective. That’s why having an expert’s opinion on which ranking factors have proven most important in 2025 can help. These links show the crawl bots a content trail to follow, allowing more pages to rank and your overall website to perform better. While a few people listed this, bounce rate as we see it in Google Analytics in and of itself isn’t a ranking factor. Bounce rate is possibly one of the most misunderstood performance indicators when it comes to search engine’s ranking algorithm.