Top 10 Google Ranking Factors (+ How to Optimize Them)

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Top 10 Google Ranking Factors (+ How to Optimize Them)
How do your customers find you? For modern businesses, the answer is simple: they go online. Specifically, they go to search engines like Google.

While paid search ads are a great way to get immediate exposure on this leading search engine, you should also work on building your organic rankings as well. With a strong presence in both paid and organic search engine results, you can increase your visibility, and no matter what type of business you run, having search engine visibility is crucial if you want to attract customers and generate revenue.

While you can’t control the way search engines ghana phone number data and operate, there is a lot you can do to increase the chances of your site appearing in search results. This is where the practice of SEO comes in, which is about aligning your website with Google’s various ranking factors. In this post, I plan to:

Explain the difference between technical, on-page and off-page ranking factors.
Talk about the top 10 Google ranking factors you can optimize your website for.
Accompany each ranking factor with an actionable suggestion to improve your ranking.
But first, let’s review the basics of ranking factors to establish our foundational knowledge.

Table of Contents view
What are ranking factors?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website to rank as high as possible in organic search engine results. When we talk about search, we use the term “organic” to refer to unpaid search results (Google ADS for example). This is different from pay-per-click (or PPC) advertising, which is a strategy that focuses on generating paid traffic.

Note the differences between organic and paid search results in the image below:

Google Ads Ranking Factors vs Organic Traffic
Both paid and organic positions on Google are determined by algorithms that take into account various characteristics and metrics that Google considers important, and these are your ranking factors.

We will never know all of Google's ranking factors, but we know many of them based on what Google has told us and what we discover through experimentation and empirical practice. We also know that while ranking factors and algorithms may change, the characteristics that Google is trying to analyze through them are quality, reliability, and performance.

Types of Google Ranking Factors
Before we get into the top 10 Google ranking factors through which you can optimize your website pages, let’s first look at the different types. Marketers usually talk in terms of on-page and off-page ranking factors, but there are actually three groups:

Off-page ranking factors: These are measured by Google elsewhere than your site and primarily relate to backlinks .
On-page ranking factors: These are mainly related to keywords and the quality of information on your pages.
Technical Ranking Factors: These are also measured on your site, but have more to do with overall performance as a whole, rather than individual pages.
It is important to note that there is no single ranking factor that will improve or worsen your SEO. It is the combination of all your technical, on-page and off-page efforts working together to build an SEO-friendly website.

Now that we have the basic knowledge in place, let’s dive into the top 10 Google ranking factors, broken down into these groups, starting with the technical ones.

Technical Google Ranking Factors
Search engines work by crawling and indexing all the information on your website. For this to happen, there are some key technical elements that need to work properly. Think of these elements as the backend building blocks that make up your website and allow it to function as it should.

For many marketers, technical SEO can seem daunting. Knowledge of website structure and content management systems like WordPress is necessary to perform many of these ranking optimizations. For this reason, fixing technical SEO errors is commonly a joint effort between marketing and development teams.

While this may seem complicated, once your website is in good condition, there is not much maintenance required in terms of SEO. Here are technical strategies to improve your rank

1. Site and page speed
No one likes a website that takes forever to load, and if you could ask search engines what they think, they would agree. That's why having a website that loads quickly and smoothly is a critical component of technical SEO.