SEO ranking factors and trends on Google to know

The mystery around Google’s search algorithm can be equally intriguing and confusing.

Since 1998, its PageRank algorithm has evolved to use artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and neural networks.

Google even understands the search intent and semantic context of web pages. Then, Google released another algorithm update on site speed that became a major ranking factor.

Now, we have Google AI Overviews, alternative generative engines like ChatGPT, and agentic SEO.

Understandably, optimizing for SEO can be challenging. It is not the easiest marketing channel to drive traffic, but it is one you cannot ignore.

In this 3,000 word guide, I’d like to break down the 7 most important SEO factors that will move the needle for traffic and rankings on Google, understand what they mean and how to optimize for it.

What are the most important SEO ranking factors to look out for in 2023?

In 2023, Google’s helpful content update and content quality factors

Generally, the broad factors that weigh in importance to SEO today are:

1. Content
2. Links
3. Indexation
4. Page Experience
5. Site Speed
6. Rich Results
7. Metadata

How does Google rank websites?

Google ranks websites by crawling, scanning, and indexing page content. Every page gets a ‘score’ based on its authority and usefulness to the user’s search query.

Then, to decide which pages rank first, Google uses its search algorithm of over 200 factors to order and rank pages on its search results.

So Google’s ranking process looks like this:

• Crawling: The first stage of discovery where web crawlers or “spiders” such as Googlebot crawls and looks for new and updated content. Generally, the more accessible your web pages are, the easier it is for Google to find them. This could mean an updated XML sitemap, ensuring your robots.txt file does not unintentionally block important pages, and there are links pointing to your web pages.
• Indexing: After crawling, Google stores the web pages it has found in its huge database known as the Google Index.  Indexing is about understanding what the page content is about.
• Ranking: The final stage is serving up the best pages for a given search query. This is when Google decides which pages to serve from its index and in which order. The more authoritative and relevant a web page is, the higher it would rank on the search results.

What Google considers when deciding the best result for a given search query

This is where the SEO ranking factors come in. These are the broad factors we discussed above that weigh in importance when it comes to ranking.

What Google is thinking when ranking pages on its search results:

? Does this web page have high-quality content that provides value and answers search intent?

?️ How authoritative is this website? Is it trustworthy and credible? What are the external domains that link to it?

? Is this website secure (HTTPS) and has good technical site hygiene?

? Does this website provide a fast loading experience and is it mobile-friendly?

?️ What do I know about this web page content – what does its structured data and HTML tags say?

This is why ranking on the first page is highly coveted. Because Google’s search engine algorithm is highly sophisticated.

Also, there are other websites that do it better than you. Thus, search competition exists.

As Google indexes billions of web pages, and there is new content published every second, it makes ranking on Google very competitive. Optimizing for SEO is something you must do early on. Don’t wait!

Now, let’s analyze each of the broad SEO ranking factors and how they weigh in importance.

#1. Content

The 1st and most important SEO ranking factor is content.

Content of a page usually consists of text, images and files.

Relevance and page content

Google’s search algorithm looks to the page content to identify relevance. Which pages have the most relevance that can answer the search query.

Your page content is the primary signal for relevance. The more information it has, the more able it can answer a user’s query.

Relevance of a page’s content can be identified with:

• Keyword Frequency: How many times the keyword is mentioned 
• Keyword Placement: Where the keywords are found, such as headings and title
• Topical Depth: What are the keyword variants, synonyms, content sub-topics found

By now, Google understands words and phrases better than people can. Consider that Google knows what is the best answer/solution to a question searched.

So optimizing for single keywords is no longer sufficient.

Having the same keyword repeated or optimized in headings and title would still be basic SEO, but not enough. It would not be enough to show sufficient relevance by mentioning the same keywords.

Beyond keyword frequency and placement, SEO now prioritizes topical depth to establish page relevancy.

That means expanding the content to include other keywords and sub-topics. This brings us to content quality and search intent.

Content quality

In this section, we are going to understand what content quality means and look into Google’s quality guidelines and E-A-T.

What is quality content, anyways? Who sets the benchmark for quality content – Google or publisher?

Well, quality content should mean usefulness. And the best person to judge what is useful content and what quality means should be the person creating it, the publisher.

Though Google has some guidelines that we can follow to assess whether our content meets the standards of quality:

Google probably has sophisticated algorithms to assess quality. So what is quality in Google’s eyes?

E-A-T

E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

It comes from Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines used by search quality raters to assess search engine quality.

So the E-A-T score of a website is determined by human search quality raters. And Google collects the E-A-T scores to help them assess a website’s quality.

What is E-A-T?

• Expertise: Refers to the professional experience, life experience, and credentials of the author. The point is so that people are finding information from sources with expertise and credibility.
• Authoritativeness: Recognition of authority is key. Who is linking to you, what kind of press mentions, reviews has your brand gotten? Authority is about online reputation.
• Trustworthiness: Trustworthiness is pretty much about authority.

To assess the EAT of your content, check out Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines here.

Google uses E-A-T to rank pages on its search results

How important is E-A-T?

E-A-T is very important for YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) topics – medical information, finance, legal, safety, current affairs.

These topics could “potentially impact a person’s future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety.”

Google has placed very high quality standards for YMYL pages because such content has a huge impact on people’s lives.

So if your website is built around YMYL topics, E-A-T is very important for you.

Websites that were mostly hit with this update were from the health, fitness, and medical industry, according to Barry Schwartz.

#2. Links

Links form the cornerstone of Google’s PageRank algorithm. After content, links are the 2nd most important ranking factor on Google. This was how the search algorithm ranked pages in the 1990s.

PageRank accessed the authority and trustworthiness of web pages by the external links pointing to them.

Building backlinks can be a time-consuming and complex process. An easy way to get started with link building is through blog comments.

The more authoritative backlinks a website has the higher its trustworthiness. And so, the better it could rank on Google.

Domain Authority (DA)

Increasing the domain authority of your website is the first step to building trustworthiness or credibility of your site. That would mean a score of 30/100 or more.

You can check your DA score on most backlink checker tools such as Ahrefs, SEMrush or Moz.

When other websites link to you, you have a backlink. To increase your domain authority, you need more backlinks from other authoritative sites.

So aim to build backlinks from websites with a DA score of at least 30/100. Backlinks from these websites will help boost your own PageRank.

Domain Authority Range: How to Assess Backlink Value

The table below shows the range of domain authority or DA scores, and how to assess their backlink value. It shows us what is the value of getting backlinks from websites of varying DA scores and how valuable their link juice is.

• Websites with DA scores between 0-10 are usually low quality and might be spammy. Avoid building backlinks from low authority websites. They don’t help much with building your PageRank. If you have backlinks from such sites, you might also want to check if they are toxic.
• Websites with DA scores between 30-40 are authoritative, and their backlinks have a high link value. The majority of your link-building efforts should be from websites with at least a DA score of 30.

Over time, I have managed to build backlinks from fairly authoritative websites with DA scores of 75/100 and higher. This has helped boost my website’s domain authority by a lot.

#3. Indexation

The indexation of your website is the 3rd most important factor. 

You want to ensure that your website build is search engine friendly, easily accessible, crawled and indexed on Google.

Indexation has to do with things like redirects, canonicalisation, broken links.

The best way to check indexation of your website? Look at Google Search Console!

I would suggest reviewing this report weekly to check your website’s site hygiene. Let’s break this report down.

Index Coverage Report on Google Search Console

The index coverage report tells you which pages Google has found, indexed and had any problems with indexing.

There are 4 indexing status results:

• Error: Page is not indexed. Focus on fixing these issues first. 
• Valid with warnings: Page is indexed, but has issues to be aware of.
• Valid: Page is indexed. All OK.
• Excluded: Intentionally not indexed and Google thinks it is fine. The pages found here would have a ‘noindex’ tag, or are caonicalised to another page already indexed.

Examples of pages excluded from indexation

For pages excluded from indexation, usually it is the case that Google is smart enough to know not to index them. But it might also be good to check these pages and ensure you are not unintentionally excluding certain important pages from indexation.

#4. Page Experience

We will use the same page experience report from Google search console to assess this.

The page experience report shows you what are the page experience signals that Google uses to assess your website. Currently, there are 3 main signals for page experience:

• Core Web Vitals
• Mobile Usability
• HTTPS

Core Web Vitals

In June 2021, Google rolled out another major algorithm update that places more emphasis on site speed.

This is the ‘Page Experience’ update with Core Web Vitals that is now a major ranking signal for SEO.

Core web vitals have to do with page load time, interactivity of your page, and how visually stable your page is.

Continue reading for an introduction to core web vitals and a step-by-step course on core web vitals.

Mobile Usability

The mobile usability report shows you what are the pages on your website that are mobile-friendly.

A mobile-friendly website is immediately usable and readable to users. Without needing to pinch or zoom to read the content.

Google shows you the exact details of what hurts mobile usability and which pages are affected. Review these first and fix them to improve your website’s mobile-friendliness.

Why is mobile friendliness important?

Having a mobile-friendly website is important for two reasons. (i) Mobile searches now exceed desktop searches, and so mobile traffic exceeds desktop. (ii) Mobile-first indexing. Since July 2019, Google has been using the mobile version of a website for indexing and ranking.

That’s right! So optimizing for a mobile friendly website will have good effects on SEO.

How to improve the mobile friendliness of your website

• First, Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool to check if your website is mobile-friendly.

• Then, work on optimizing for responsive web design. How does your website look like on desktop, tablet, and mobile? A responsive site is one that is adaptable for different screen sizes.
  • Every page URL of your website should remain the same on mobile and desktop, so you shouldn’t have separate subdomains for another device type.
  • Ensure that the content on every page adjusts based on different screen sizes. I use Elementor Page Builder and it allows me to build my site in a responsive way.
  • It also helps to learn how to make design customizations by editing code in HTML on WordPress.

HTTPS

Your website must be served over an HTTPS connection. That is the ? padlock icon in front of your website on the browser’s address bar.

HTTPS stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure. It means that data is exchanged in an encrypted and secure connection.

Google considers HTTPS an important signal for a good page experience. Not just for SEO, but you want users to browse your website and content securely too.

It is very easy to implement HTTPS now with just a click of a button. You can go to your web host and get this implemented in seconds. I use Siteground and the HTTPS setup was quick and easy.

#5. Site Speed

A fast-loading site has tremendous benefits for users and SEO. Getting that green 90/100 score on Google PageSpeed Insights is absolutely possible.

You can find out how fast your website loads with the ‘Speed Index‘ in Google PageSpeed Insights report.

Since 2022, we will see a more sophisticated search engine that will get better and better at what it does. It has only been a few months since the last major algorithm update on core web vitals and page experience.

It will take some time for webmasters to improve their site speed and page experience. A fast-loading site is something we cannot neglect anymore.

Get started early, clean up your website and speed up load time now.

#6. Rich results

Rich results are enhanced search results. In terms of SEO ranking factor, I would say this is somewhat important and ranks 5th in terms of importance. Because marking up your content with schema does not change your rankings.

It only improves the appearance of your website on Google.

Google supports a number of structured data formats:

• Article
• Breadcrumbs
• Carousel
• Course
• Reviews
• FAQ
• How-to
• Local business
• Product
• Podcast
• Q&A
• Recipe
• Sitelinks
• Video

Reviews rich result

The review snippet shows an average rating from many reviewers. Google finds the review schema markup or valid reviews and shows the rich result below. This includes stars and summary info.

Recipe rich result

Below is a recipe host carousel from Just One Cookbook, using the recipe schema markup enhancement.

FAQ rich result

When a frequently asked questions (FAQ) page is properly marked up with structured data, it may appear as a FAQ rich result on Google.

Q&A rich result

Q&A pages contain information in a question and answer format. When properly marked up, they can appear as a rich result on Google.

Video rich result

Videos rank and appear on Google search results. You can provide more information about your video such as description, thumbnail, duration, and marking up your video with schema markup.

Below is an example of a video rich result where Google shows ‘clips’ which enables users to quickly navigate to specific points in the video.

How enable rich results by adding structured data to your website

You can add structured data to your website in a few ways:

• Using Google structured data markup helper
• Install WordPress plugins like Yoast
• Adding structured data code manually to your web page

Structured data helps to provide more context to your content and enables it to show up as a rich result on Google. Though again, it does not move the needle for rankings.

Marking up your web page for schema markup wouldn’t move your rankings from page 3 to 1.

#7. Metadata

HTML tags communicate meaning to search engines.

From a web crawler perspective, it would be an HTML document with element tags.

This is where on-page SEO comes in such as title tag, meta description, header tags (H1-H6), image alt, which provides information about your page to web crawlers.