Freshness isn’t simply about the content itself, but about the entire SEO experience to continually deliver the most relevant result to the user. Many SEOs understand that freshness is a ranking signal, but they mistakenly believe that it only applies to the content itself. E.g. updating the publish date and refreshing the content every couple of years. The same way you can leverage your competition to find the most profitable keywords, some of the easiest link building opportunities you will find will also come directly from your competitors. Finally, after you’ve created a new page and linked to other pages on your site, you have one more step to go. Now it’s time to update your older pages with links to your new page.

7 Image Optimization

Some factors become more or less important, and some factors are introduced or removed. It’s important to stay up to date on the latest ranking factors and regularly use an SEO audit tool to scan your site to ensure that you’re following the most up-to-date SEO best practices. For example, John Mueller, a prominent Google Search Advocate, has stated that domain age isn’t a ranking factor. However, the Google algorithm leak confirmed that domain authority does impact rankings. When you want your content to rank at the top of relevant search results, the ranking factors above are important to keep in mind. Yet some SEO experts also consider somewhat controversial factors.

If you’re offering advice or a service, make sure your website showcases your experience and expertise. Social media signals might not have the direct ranking power that backlinks do, but they’re becoming more important. Search engines look at your social media activity to gauge brand relevance and authority. SEO is critical for small businesses in 2025, where online visibility can make or break success. Search engines like Google are the gateway to most online experiences, with 68% of all website traffic coming from searches.

To monitor keyword optimization, use a tool like Clearscope as you write. It automatically performs basic keyword research like identifying variations and secondary keywords. Use these signals as a guide to aim for higher rankings in Google search results. We tapped Sonya Gonzales, SEO and SEM manager at HawkSEM, for expert insights on ranking signals and getting more value from SEO. Below, she’ll help us cover 11 signals that matter most to the Google algorithm.

Page Speed & Performance

As well as this, it’ll be important to produce more video content as discovery platforms integrate these more into their SERPs. SEO is both the art and science of improving a website, and pages within, to be as visible as possible for when people search for a relevant topic within any search platform. Dive deeper into the Bing ranking factors and Bing ranking algorithm to craft a winning strategy in 2025. While Google often dominates the SEO conversation, Bing shouldn’t be ignored. Understanding Bing ranking factors is essential for a comprehensive SEO strategy. For the most useful data on your local SEO results, use tools you can trust to give you a genuine average local ranking.

Tools

• The horizontal axis measures the position of a page in the search results, while the vertical axis is the median time captured across all 2,000 different search terms used in the study.
• This is the fastest way to destroy your search rankings and traffic.
• Here’s a continuation of the 200+ SEO factors, covering more in-depth areas like content quality, user experience, technical details, off-page strategies, and algorithm-specific elements.
• If your site contains outdated or irrelevant information, it may drop in the rankings.

Mobile-friendliness refers to how a website looks and performs when someone views it on a mobile device. Mobile-friendly sites provide a good user experience by using a responsive design that adjusts the content so that it looks good on every screen size. There are 200+ SEO ranking factors that help search engines determine which sites should show in search results and how they should rank. If you want your site to claim the top spots on SERPs (search engine results pages), you need to optimize your online presence to cater to these factors. Google ranking factors are signals that determine a webpage’s position in the search results for a relevant query.

Other powerful All in One SEO features include schema markup, smart XML sitemaps, robots.txt editor, SEO health check, and more. Since people get the answer to their questions directly, they may have no reason to continue to the content. That means you may have 100,000 people see your slot in the answer box, but only 10,000 actually click through to the article. While writing more words to stretch out the size is never advisable, if a subject calls for depth, give it depth. Now let’s dig down and see what optimizing content for SEO really means. The downside is that you need to make another version of your site following AMP’s guidelines.

You can utilize various tools and platforms for tracking your site’s visibility in search results. This section covers BHS Links practical questions to give you insights into effectively checking and interpreting your SEO rankings. XML sitemaps and robots.txt files are essential for guiding search engines through your site. Additionally, structured data can enhance how your pages appear in search results, potentially leading to higher click-through rates. Addressing these components can significantly impact your rankings. Use tools to analyze monthly search volumes for relevant keywords.

Anyone who argues otherwise is denying what exists in front of their eyes. But personalization doesn’t play much of a role in either local pack or local organic rankings – and there’s very little you can do to optimize for this. When looking at local organic factors, the quality of links is by far the most valuable factor affecting rankings. Keywords in the anchor text of links is also very important, while diversity, and quantity of links from industry-specific or local sites also sit in the top 15 local organic factors. Whitespark’s survey sees the authority of inbound links to the domain being the 6th most important ranking factor affecting local pack results. The quality of links to the landing page URL named on the Google My Business listing is also important.