Search Engine Ranking Factors 2017

Search Engine Ranking Factors 2017

The top Google ranking is made up of 200+ components, or "ranking signals". But while it's definitely useful to know what all of those are, the entire list is a very time-consuming (and frankly, a little depressing) read. It's somewhat vague in terms of the impact of each individual factor, and all of those things don't seem doable if you try to get each one right. With the news about another Google update or algorithm change rolling out every other week, how can anyone keep up, ever?

But long-time SEO-ers have their tricks of the trade. The thing is, the 200+ ingredients in Google's recipes aren't all equally important. In the cheat sheet below, you'll find the 9 most important ranking signals that multiple studies have found to have the biggest impact on rankings today. The cheat sheet is based on our own research at SEO PowerSuite, as well as this year's ranking factors studies by SearchMetrics and Backlinko.

1. Number of backlinks and linking domains (18%)

A few years ago, link count was perhaps the major quality signal for Google. Over time, the search engine has learned to identify the so-called link schemes, or low-quality links created solely for the purpose of obtaining higher rankings. Since then, it's often said that quality comes before quantity for Google — but this is only partly true. The number of pages and domains linking to a site still has a massive impact on your ranking potential; it's just that you can't afford to have any low-quality links in your profile anymore.

In several of its patents, Google suggests that a site's overall link score (arguably the biggest ranking signal) is made up of individual quality scores passed on to it by every incoming link. That literally means that more links will result in a higher score as long as they aren't linked schemes, of course.

SEO is an ever-evolving industry. In the past few years, we’ve seen Google make a steady push for rich content, quality links, and a perfect mobile experience. Other ranking factors are certainly important and will play a role in your rankings, but if you prioritize improving elements of your website related to these factors, then you’ll come out ahead of the competition.

2. Link authority (14%)

The talk about link quality has been on for years, and most SEO-ers agree it remains one of the strongest ranking signals for Google. While high quality links can boost your site's link score (and therefore rankings), lower quality backlinks can get your site penalized (and even out of the SERP completely).

For the latter not to happen, make sure you run regular link audits so you can spot any dangerous links early and have them removed in time. To acquire more high-authority links, it's a good idea to look at your competitors' profile and try to win some of their links for your own site.

3.Link anchor text and its diversity (9%)

In general, you want your links to be coming from pages whose topic is similar to that of the page you're optimizing. But how can Google identify relevance, exactly? Primarily, from the backlink's anchor text. The title of the backlink page can also help to tell what the page is about, although it is a much weaker signal than anchor text.

The concept of relevance is tightly linked to that of diversity. While your backlinks are expected to be semantically relevant to the topic of your page, it's important to note that too similar anchor texts can get yours under Google's Penguin penalty.

Understandably, there's no universally right ratio of different kinds of anchor text in your link profile. However, below you can find some averages to give you an idea of what a natural link profile typically looks like.

4.Content relevance (19%)

Not surprisingly, your content has to be both original and relevant to the search phrase to rank well in Google. It doesn't even matter much what your site is about — starting from blog posts and on to e-commerce product pages, you need to bring unique value to the table if you are aiming for top rankings. Backlinko's found that focused content that covers a single topic significantly outperformed content that didn't cover a topic in-depth.

5. Content length (3%)

In its search quality guidelines, Google mentions the length of content as an important criterion for the page's quality — and therefore its rankings. Clearly, there's no ideal content length you should aim for; still, the SEO world is full of misconceptions like "Longer content ranks better" and "your copy should be over 2,000 characters long to rank in top 10". These assumptions do have their ground, but it's important to understand that the elusive "ideal content-length" may vary a lot from niche to niche. For a realistic reference on the right size for your page's HTML, it's best to look at the pages that already rank well for the keywords you're targeting.

6.Click-through rate (11%)

A click-through rate, or CTR, is a ratio of the number of times a given search listing was clicked on to the number of times it was displayed to searchers. Numerous patents filed by Google along imply that SERP click-through rates can have a massive impact on rankings. SearchMetrics' ranking factors study even found that CTR has the highest correlation with rankings out of all factors examined.

True, correlation doesn't always equal causation. But with real-life experiments showing that an increase in CTR can literally boost a site's rank in real time, it is more than likely that Google uses click-through rate as a factor in its ranking ago.

For every query, Google expects a CTR in a certain range for each of the listings (e.g. for branded keywords, the CTR of No.1 result is around 50%; for non-branded queries, the top result gets around 33% of clicks). If a given listing gets a CTR that is seriously above (or below) that range, Google can re-rank the result accordingly.

7. Social signals (7%)

The discussion on whether or not social signals affect rankings directly is ongoing, but multiple real-life experiments prove that pages with more social shares rank better. SearchMetrics' study also found that Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and Google+ mentions strongly correlate with search engine rankings.

8.Mobile friendliness (12%)

Over a month ago, the news broke that Google's starting the "mobile-first indexing of the Web", meaning that they are beginning to index the mobile version of websites, when available, as opposed to the desktop version. The less obvious but perhaps even more important implication of this change is that Google will now also analyze mobile pages against the ranking signals to determine how a site should rank in both mobile and desktop search results.

If you think about it, it makes sense. Google's previously said that over half of search queries globally come from mobile devices. From a nice-to-have, mobile friendliness has turned into a must — if your page isn't optimized for mobile devices, it's likely to be discarded from mobile search results completely. If you already have a mobile page, then you should focus even more on improving it in 2017 than ever before.

9.Page speed (7%)

Google has officially confirmed that it uses page speed in its ranking algorithm. Page speed can also influence your SEO indirectly, as search engines will likely crawl fewer pages if your site is slow due to the allocated crawl budget. This, in turn, could negatively affect your site's indexation. Load time can have a massive impact on user experience, too. Slower pages tend to have higher bounce rates and lower average time on page. Research shows a 1-second delay in page load time can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.

So what's the page speed you should aim for? Google's mentioned they expect pages to load in 2 seconds or less. The most common culprit for slow pages is an abundance of uncompressed content on the page, such as scripts, images, or CSS files.