Googles 200 Ranking Factors: The Complete List 2025

When building link-worthy content, spend 50% of your time actually creating the content itself, and 50% of your time promoting it. In truth, it’s incredibly difficult to rank a single page by itself for a handful of keywords – especially if there’s any competition at all. If you’re new to SEO, you should absolutely make sure your website is friendly to search robots such as Googlebot. You can do this easily with online tools such as Hubspot’s Website Grader or Moz’s On-Page Grader, for example.

On-page SEO refers to factors on your own website that you can optimize, such as the underlying code and the content. So instead of focusing solely on what a site’s page says, Google now tries to understand who is saying it. When someone goes to Google for information that could have real-world consequences, Google wants to be sure it’s giving its users the most accurate information possible. Google realized that most searchers come to their platform for just about everything. That means their users’ lives could be seriously impacted for the worse if the wrong results appear.

HTTPS SEO Anomaly encryption is a small ranking signal for the search engine that was announced by Google in 2014. Even though E-E-A-T is not a ranking factor technically speaking, Google uses various signals that are trying to reflect this concept in practice. The alt text is an important ranking signal for the search engine – especially for Google Images search. By including important keywords into the headings, the search engine can better understand what individual sections of the page are about. Many sites follow old, outdated, bad advice, but are still reasonable sites for users, and search.

HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) is a secure protocol that encrypts data transmitted between a website and its visitors. It helps keep visitors’ data secure and prevents it from being tampered with or accessed by unauthorized parties. And while keyword stuffing used to work in the past, that’s no longer the case.

Link Building

That also means you want to have very few inbound links from low-quality domains. Open a Google search in your in-private browser and type in your keyword. See which results are currently ranking and determine whether or not your content would be a good fit. If so, take this opportunity to see why certain pages are ranking.

• Search volume refers to the number of times a keyword is queried within a specific time frame.
• Analyze your results, identify areas for improvement, and adapt your strategy based on the latest trends and Bing ranking factors.
• To build high-quality backlinks, focus on creating valuable and shareable content that attracts natural links from other websites.
• Even small differences — like using “St.” on your website but “Street” on your Google Business Profile — can create confusion with search engines and hurt your rankings.
• Then, you can create more high-quality content around similar topics to increase your topical authority.

This will show you sites linking to one or more of your competitors, but not you. Reviews have also grown in their perceived importance for map pack rankings over the past few years. Reviews refer to the quantity and quality of reviews on your Google Business Profile and elsewhere online.

User Experience

Because more users are on mobile devices, Google followed the logical path and began prioritizing sites with designs that adapt to mobile screens. Google added experience as a new component, signaling the increasing value placed on content created by those with relevant credentials and direct, real-world experience with the topic. This is especially critical for YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) topics like health, finance, safety, etc.

Content Usability

SEO best practices also apply to local SEO, since Google also considers a website’s position in organic search results when determining local ranking. A search engine like Google has its own proprietary index of local business listings, from which it creates local search results. All those can play a role in how well a page performs in search, but the focus should be on the users who will be reading the content. The more natural backlinks you have from high-authority (trusted) websites, the better your odds are to rank higher within search results. Very early on, search engines needed help figuring out which URLs were more trustworthy than others to help them determine how to rank search results.

Multitask Unified Model (MUM) is an AI system capable of both understanding and generating language. We have various systems that understand how pages link to each other as a way to determine what pages are about and which might be most helpful in response to a query. Among these is PageRank, one of our core ranking systems used when Google first launched. Those curious can learn more by reading the original PageRank research paper and patent. How PageRank works has evolved a lot since then, and it continues to be part of our core ranking systems. Our ranking systems are designed to work on the page level, using a variety of signals and systems to understand how to rank individual pages.

If you want to rank well, you must create and optimize a Google Business Profile. An example of formatting for search intent is writing on a “how to” topic and organizing it by numbered steps. Learn how to connect search, AI, and PPC into one unstoppable strategy. For more information on building your geotagging SEO strategy, read this.