Unfortunately, we do not have access to data from Google pertaining to how much weight is applied to certain SEO factors. Google has access to data related to tracking user engagement in the SERPs.
Even though we don’t have access to this helpful data (all SEOs are hopeful for another Google data leak), we can make assumptions based on what data we have. Therefore, it’s important to treat this article not as the source of truth but as a guide to spark conversation about Google ranking factors.
The goal of this article is to show you which traditional (and non-traditional) ranking factors we believe are still important to Google. Also, even though some SEOs believe that Google AI overview optimization is the hottest topic since sliced bread (and probably with good reason), we aim to provide more insight into the importance of still reverse engineering different pages to see what made the article rank highly or not at all.
How Does Google Go About Ranking Content?
This is question number one for anybody aiming to improve a website’s organic exposure. The search giant has been changing, revealing more information and offering direction to the SEOs and webmasters. Now, there is a lot of information about what Google’s algorithm seems to favor. Some of these include different types of content tactics, new Google updates rolling out, content quality guidelines, Google’s AI capabilities, and developments in machine learning.
Still, the conflicting rules for SEO on the web, frequent algorithm changes, different frames for different systems, and the gap between the rules formulated in the basic guidelines and the content of the web pages that the SERP favors confuse marketers.
That’s why, when facing this confusion, the reliance on data can be constructive and informative. By comparing rankings with known (both confirmed and unconfirmed) factors, clearer patterns and, thus, solutions can be determined.
We urge you to, after reading about the top search engine ranking factors, keep a closer eye on your own data. Implement changes and monitor how the changes affect your rankings.
The Top 8 SEO Ranking Factors of 2024
The factors listed below are listed in order of importance. This means that the higher the factor on our list, the higher the chances are that this factor will influence your position in the SERP.
1. Search Intent
Search intent isn’t something new to any SEO. According to Google and other widely performed data analyses, it makes sense that search intent, or text relevance, is at the top of our list of SEO Google ranking factors. Put more simply, the more relevant your URL’s content is, the more likely it is to rank on Google.
Google explains that they view the most basic signal of matching search intent when content contains the same keyword as your search query. However, let’s dive deeper into actionable items to improve search intent.
Steps to Get Search Intent Right
1. The Intent Behind a Query
When looking at the intent of a query, my best advice would be to forget about keywords for a second. There are various factors that influence keyword rankings, and while you’re busy with the first step of optimizing your content, the user needs to be top of mind. The best way to do this is to use an SEO tool to take a look at the SERP (so nothing is influencing your search) and then add in your keyword. Go into each top-ranking page and answer the question: “What question does the user want answered?”
2. Quantifiable Signals
Google looks at quantifiable signals. They use the example of the target keyword “dogs,” stating that if you type in this search query, you wouldn’t want to visit a page with a page that’s mentioned the word “dogs” a hundred times. On the contrary, you’d want to visit a page showing different kinds of breeds populated with images and videos.
So, as a first step, get the quantifiable signals right by having the right format before you start writing your article or landing page’s copy. Here, you can answer the question: “How does the user prefer their information to be displayed? A listicle, video format, infographic, etc.” More quantifiable signals include URL and target keyword similarity. Thus, ensure that you don’t miss adding your primary keyword (as is) in the URL and H1 of your page.
Furthermore, other quantifiable signals may include language and region. So, if the target keyword is in French, for example, you should also write your planned article in French. However, if you’re planning to target a French audience in France, but you just use a translator to write and translate your content, this would most likely still not be seen as helpful content by Google.
While doing research for this article, it was interesting to me to learn that, according to various other webmasters, there is a correlation between the percentage of pages with keywords in the titles and URLs across domains and more top-ranking content. In essence, while you might only want to optimize one page, implementing best practices across all your content will most likely result in your target page ranking higher.
3. Timely
If you’re targeting trendy keywords and wondering why your content isn’t ranking highly on Google, the following could be your issue. Google’s systems understand which types of keywords are trending, which allows them, in turn, to favor more up-to-date content or information as they believe this will be more useful than older information. For example, some companies (including us) have published dates in their URLs.
Even though it seems contradictory to regularly update these URLs, it’s not as Google’s crawlers will see this change and perceive your information to be more up-to-date (and helpful to the user). In this example, be wary of only updating your URL, as this might seem spammy in the sense that Google might think you’re trying to manipulate the SERP without updating the content.
4. Updated Content
As mentioned in the previous example, Google will view your page as trying to manipulate the SERP if you only update your published date. So, ensuring that your content is regularly updated will help Google see that your content is helpful and not outdated. This is true for trendy and non-trendy content.
2. Organic Traffic & Organic Positions (Top 20)
There is no surprise here; it is obvious that the more organic positions you’re ranking highly for (in the top 20 positions), the more likely it is that your important pages are going to achieve high rankings in search engines. Again, this is true for your domain and your individual URL.
Alongside this, another factor influencing your organic positions is your general domain traffic share. Your domain traffic share is just the percentage of visits that your website gets out of the total visits to all sites in your category or niche. To calculate your domain traffic share, you can use the following formula:
Steps to Get Organic Traffic & Organic Positions Right
1. Pillar & Cluster Pages
We’re going back to old-school SEO strategies with this action item. In order to improve your rankings across your domain (and target pages), it will be beneficial to cluster your content (build content around a central topic into pillar pages). This will certainly help you establish topical authority.
I like recommending planning your content out quarter by quarter; with each new quarter, you get to take external ranking signals into account. For example, in Q1 of 2024, your DR was, let’s say, 35. It wouldn’t have made sense for you to write about “hard topics,” as your content probably wouldn’t have ranked. Starting with easier-rank content and adjusting this as your external signals change is the most efficient way to improve organic traffic and organic positions.
Here are some steps you can take to achieve this:
- Research keywords: Identify relevant keywords to your topic cluster and audience – remember to take your ad hoc signals into account addressed in this article.
- Content audit: Review your existing content and adapt your strategy after you’ve identified gaps and opportunities for improvement.
- Core topics: Identify your core topics while conducting your content audit. Add all your pillars in an organized manner, like by using Miro, for example, and make notes for the team on what needs to happen before you can dive into a specific cluster.
- Internal links: Execute an internal linking audit and strategy after completing the above-mentioned steps. This will also pass along the authority to your target pages while, of course, keeping the user at the top of their minds and making navigation easier for them.
3. Page & Domain Authority Score
After Google identifies if the search intent matches the users’ query, Google systems aim to prioritize the content that seems most helpful. Again, their systems take certain signals into account to determine which content demonstrates expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
One of the main ways Google’s systems do this is by establishing whether other prominent websites refer to or link to the content. According to Google search, this has often proven to be a good sign that the information is well-trusted. To further refine their process, aggregated feedback is taken into account to evaluate the quality of information.
Let’s take a look at how you can get this specific ranking signal right.
Steps to Get Page & Domain Authority Score Right
1. Number of Referring Domains & Backlinks to Domain & Page
As mentioned, authoritativeness is very important to the ranking algorithm. It was interesting to learn that for a specific page to rank better, there is a correlation between the number and quality of referring domains (and backlinks) and the page and between the number of referring domains (and backlinks) and your domain.
Consider the following:
- Take your whole domain authority score into account, not only that of the page for which you’re trying to improve search rankings.
- Implement a true quality over quantity approach. Google is purposefully vague when communicating ranking factors. However, they did note that, and I quote, “One of several factors we use to help determine this is understanding if other prominent websites link or refer to the content.” The key information here is prominent websites. It hurts more than it helps to get backlinks from sites with low domain authority scores (usually ranking for spammy keywords).
- One of the best ways (according to Google) to build organic, high-quality backlinks is to create great content. One way to do this is actually to solve the issues users (your target audience) might experience.
- Ensure that your valuable content is “linkable.” What I mean by this is, ask yourself the question: “Is someone going to want to bookmark my page?” So, while focusing on addressing users’ issues, find ways to provide great value. For example, an easy way to do this is to add downloadable content offers, a summary infographic, etc.
- Focus on building relationships with authoritative sites in your niche. Google’s systems (and more importantly), the users will notice if you’re pursuing black-hat techniques like adding a link from an external site with unnatural anchor text. I don’t like it when I’m fooled by the link I just clicked, and neither do you, so let’s not do it!
- Lastly, a holistic backlink strategy should be considered in order to create a strong backlink profile. Building links through a social strategy is a great way to do this, as it is often easier to link to video content or embed other social posts.
4. Content Quality Score
Google’s content quality score is a metric that measures how relevant and valuable your content is to your target audience. A high content quality score indicates that Google perceives your content to be better than competitors writing similar content. Google evaluates this in various ways, including the expertise of the author, authority of the content (backlinks), and trustworthiness of the information provided.
Steps to Get Content Quality Score Right
1. Content Quality
The first thing that comes to mind is experimenting with artificial intelligence and mass-producing content. Even though there are ways you can use AI to improve SEO, scaled content abuse is not the way to do it. I won’t go into too much detail about this as everyone has a different perspective, and this topic has been covered a million times. However, the proof is in the pudding with all the sites that received manual penalties (yikes) after openly promoting that they started to rank by mass-producing content with AI.
Even though you might use tools like SEMrush to get a good content quality score, I would recommend doing a human content quality evaluation to determine whether the content would meet the expectations of Google.
Here is a content quality evaluation guideline to better evaluate content quality (without using tools).
Think about it: everything that Google has been preaching and other webmasters have been saying based on the data they have access to is that you have to create original, valuable content. What generative AI tools are doing is scraping content and producing something that’s paraphrased. This goes against Google’s spam policies and the search engine views this as scaled content abuse.
“Examples of scaled content abuse include, but are not limited to:
- Scraping feeds, search results, or other content to generate many pages (including through automated transformations like synonymizing, translating, or other obfuscation techniques), where little value is provided to users.
- Using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value for users
- Stitching or combining content from different web pages without adding value
- Creating many pages where the content makes little or no sense to a reader but contains search keywords.”
In summary, provide value to users, stop using the skyscraper technique, add value, and prioritize the user experience.
Something else to note here is that Google has repeatedly said that word count is not a ranking factor. Even though I didn’t believe it at first, it sort of made sense. I was thinking from the perspective that the higher your word count, the more easily you’ll be able to improve keyword coverage. However, this thinking is spammy and inconsistent with what Google is saying.
The truth behind Google saying word count is not a ranking factor (which is supported by the data of various sources, internally & externally) is that the word count of your specific page would depend on the keyword. So it wouldn’t make sense for Google to let a 300-word article on how search engines work rank in the first position – but not due to the word count. This would be due to the fact that this article is not in-depth enough (even before reading the article) to cover everything the user might want answered.
The same goes for a specific word count for meta descriptions. However, it’s best practice to keep within the recommended word count (160 characters) to prevent Google from rewriting your description (or losing out on clicks)!
The last factor that added to your content quality score was images and video count (also the number of times these had alt text present). Again, adding relevant, supporting visuals will only help you rank higher, as these are golden tickets for getting backlinks and satisfying the user intent.
2. Keyword Coverage
We’ve just seen that the search giant frowns upon keyword stuffing. After establishing that your content follows the above-mentioned guidelines, take a hard look at your keywords. I recommend using a tool that will show you which keywords are blacklisted from your article. For example, in Frase, you can filter by blacklisted keywords and see your overall keyword score.
You can also view a heatmap of keywords top-ranking content has included in their articles to get a better idea of which keywords you might be missing in order to portray better what your article is about to Google.
Other things to look out for when looking into keyword coverage are avoiding the following:
- Cloaking: This is when you only insert text or keywords when the user that is requesting the page is a search engine and not a human visitor.
- Keyword stuffing: This includes keywords that are placed unnaturally throughout your article in an attempt to manipulate search engines.
3. Trustworthiness
I like explaining what Google views as trustworthy alongside the concept of the perfect click. The perfect click is the moment a user clicks on a page and is satisfied thereafter. Put more simply, the user won’t go to other alternative pages after visiting your page. Not only will obtaining the perfect click help you rank higher organically, but it will also help your rank in Google AI overviews.
Some factors that influence the perfect click are search intent, content quality, user satisfaction, and brand credibility. As we’ve already discussed the previous factors, we’re going to zoom in on brand credibility.
Of course, brand credibility can be improved by having testimonials and awards featured on specific landing pages. However, the factor that stood out while pulling data for this article is that there is a correlation between the percentage of pages with author schema markup and the ranking position on Google.
Schema markup, also known as structured data, is something that search engines use to understand the content of pages. Author schema markup is a property that can be easily added to inform search engines and readers about who wrote an article. By adding author schema markup, you’re helping search engines and users recognize the authority of a page. Again, the proof is in the pudding here, with 72.6% of pages on the first page of Google using author schema markup.
5. Featured Snippets Occurences (Domain & Page)
Featured snippets are highlighted excerpts of text that appear at the top of Google’s search results, providing quick answers to search queries. These snippets are pulled from the content of a web page and can significantly boost organic traffic and visibility.
Optimizing for featured snippets will also improve your answer engine optimization (AEO), increasing your chances of ranking higher in the future of search.
Steps to Get Featured Snippets Right
1. Optimize for Question-Based Queries
- Identify common questions in your niche using tools like AnswerThePublic or the “People Also Ask” section on Google.
- Structure your content to answer these questions concisely, preferably within the first 100 words of your article.
2. Use Structured Data
- Implement schema markup to help Google understand the structure of your content better. This can include Q&A, HowTo, and other relevant schema types.
3. Leverage Lists and Tables
- Google often pulls lists, tables, and bullet points for featured snippets. Ensure your content includes these elements to increase your chances of being featured.
6. User Experience
User experience (UX) is a critical ranking factor. It encompasses various metrics that measure how users interact with your website. Google uses these metrics to determine the quality of the user experience.
Steps to Get User Experience Right
1. First Input Delay (FID)
- FID measures the time from when a user first interacts with your site to when the browser responds. A low FID is crucial for a good user experience.
- Optimize: Reduce JavaScript execution time, use lazy loading, and minimize main thread work.
2. Total Blocking Time (TBT)
- TBT is the total time that a page is blocked from responding to user input.
- Optimize: Break up long tasks, optimize third-party scripts, and defer non-critical JavaScript.
3. Time to Interactive (TTI)
- TTI measures how long it takes for your page to become fully interactive.
- Optimize: Ensure critical resources load quickly, reduce JavaScript execution, and prioritize interactive elements.
7. User Signals
User signals provide insights into how users interact with your website, influencing its ranking on search engines. These signals include direct traffic share, time on site, bounce rate, and more.
Steps to Improve User Signals
1. Direct Traffic Share
- Increase Direct Traffic: Promote your brand through offline marketing and build a strong social media presence.
2. Time on Site
- Engage Users: Create engaging, high-quality content that keeps users on your site longer. Use multimedia elements like videos, infographics, and interactive content to boost engagement. Also, think about how you’re portraying the information on your page. Consider immediately satisfying the user with what they came for on the page instead of having a 1,000-word introduction and FAQs at the start of the page.
- Internal Linking: Strategically place internal links to guide users to other relevant pages on your site.
3. Bounce Rate
- Reduce Bounce Rate: Ensure your content matches user intent, improve page load speed, and make your site mobile-friendly.
4. Returning Visitors
- Encourage Return Visits: Use email marketing, push notifications, and social media to keep users coming back to your site.
8. Domain Age
While the age of content can impact its relevance, the age of your domain plays a crucial role in SEO. Older domains often have more backlinks, established authority, and a longer history of trust with search engines.
While this is all true, beware of using expired domains (especially after the March 2024 algorithm update) for the purpose of boosting the search ranking of low-quality content. Google will view this as misleading users into thinking the new content is part of the older site. Once again, this is considered spam.
Steps to Leverage Domain Age
1. Maintain Domain History
Ensure your domain has a clean history. Avoid using domains previously associated with spammy activities. For example, do a deep dive into keywords for which you rank organically. If you rank for spammy keywords, consider removing or optimizing those pages.
2. Build Domain Authority
Continuously work on improving your domain’s authority through quality content, backlinks, and engagement.
3. Update Content Regularly
Keep your content fresh and updated to maintain relevance, even if your domain is older.
4. Leverage Domain Age in Marketing
Highlight your domain’s longevity as a sign of trustworthiness and reliability to both users and search engines.
To the best of our knowledge and the data we could get our hands on, the factors listed above are currently the most important factors for ranking on Google in 2024. However, we realize that there is a sea full of SEO ranking factors that might be more obvious, which is why we created this handy list below to guide you when thinking about SEO effort prioritization.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed by all these ranking factors, don’t go in alone. NoGood has a team of experienced professionals (in various industries) ready to tackle any challenge.
All SEO Ranking Factors
