SEO Audit Checklist

Domain Age and how to check it 

In a very old article I read that Matt Cutts has stated in a webmaster video that domain age does not play “very much of a role” in search ranking. In addition, John Mueller himself has stated that domain age does not play a role in search rankings. While they do state it does not, this does show Google uses it in some way, at least for minimal reasons. Go to godaddy.com/whois, Type in the domain and Look up the age of the domain.

Keyword Appears in Top Level Domain

Notice until recently how Google bolded keywords that appear in a domain name? This isn’t exclusive proof that it’s used in ranking, but it makes sense that having the keyword in the domain would be a relevancy signal.

Keyword as First Word in Domain

Moz’s 2015 Search Engine Ranking Factors Survey has most SEOs placing domain-level keyword usage at a minimum influence on rankings nowadays, compared to Moz’s 2011 survey which has a very high correlation of SEOs placing domain-level keyword use at high influence on rankings. While this appears to no longer be a high-influence ranking factor, it may be worthwhile to check when creating a new site.

Domain Registration Length

Google’s patent states the following about domain registration lengths: “Valuable (legitimate) domains are often paid for several years in advance, while doorway illegitimate domains rarely are used for more than a year. Therefore, the data when a domain expires in the future can be used as a factor in predicting the legitimacy of a domain.”

Domain History

It’s likely that a site with a volatile domain history can negatively impact your SEO efforts if you purchase that domain. When purchasing a new domain, investigate factors such as its link profile, previous owners, and previous activity.

Exact Match Domain

While in the past, having an exact match domain with the exact keyword you want to use was a heavy ranking factor, an EMD update was launched in September 2012. The intent of this update was to stop poor quality sites from obtaining higher rankings just because they had domain names that matched their primary targeted keywords. Sites that have an exact match domain but are a higher quality site will likely see a benefit from this.

Identifying Pages With Thin Content

If the site has a heavy menu like 150 words, has a heavier footer at 200 words but not much else, and there are 3,500 words of content on the page, you can generally assume that 3,150 of those words belong to the meaty article on that page. If you aren’t sure, dive deeper into the page with the Word Count extension from Google Chrome, and count how many words belong just to the meaty article.

Page Load Speed via HTML

Page speed, in recent times, has become a critical ranking factor to get right. In fact, Google’s John Mueller quite recently gave a legit number for Google’s Page Speed recommendations: He recommends that you keep your load time to less than 2-3 seconds.

Major Ranking Factors of Google

It's no secret that a 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 recipe 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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

Multiple Sites for same services - is It Hurt or Help SEO?

In India so many entrepreneurs has been suggested by their SEO experts to book more n more domains for their business, like domain.com, domain.org, domain.in domain.co.in etc, as they feel that if more than one site appeared on google for the same keywords than there is a big numbers of clicks their business can get, they are right as if only one site is their the click probability is 1 out of 10 but if 2,3 or 4 sites of same company ranking on 1st page than the probability will be 2 out of 10 or 3 out of 10 or 4 out of 10, so this concept is very fine .

How more than one site rank

SEO persons are sometime lives in a virtual paradise their they think they are able to ranking more than one site with the same efforts, but their is one official site that having a long and good history, and if some new sites they launched, those new sites also needs same time and great efforts to rank on search engine, [but if you have good team extra team than this experiment is very good for business] so need to give high focus on main site and can create some more sites start work on those side by side .

Is google loves more than one site?

Not sure! Google have not problem with your multiple domain or single domain, what every you like you can do, you can book and work on single domain or you can book 100 domain and work, you are free from Google's side, but Yes, google loves to show different domains on SERP in place of 2-3 URLs of same domain, so more than one site with unique content is always a better option for business, but you need to do very hard work to bring website on search .

Link your website with each others

Your brand is the credibility of your business, so do not merge it with the extra domains and site, just place a heading in the footer like our network and give links of each site, so that people get a message about the brand credibility, because so many times so many visitors leaves a site just because of unknown brand and have doubt about credibility.

PPC Marketing KPIs

1. Clicks

Every conversion starts with a click. That’s why clicks are an early indicator of PPC campaign success.

This KPI measures how many people clicked on your ad.

Campaign managers often check in on accounts throughout the month to pause ads that are not performing and even increase the bids on ads that are.

Clicks are a great KPI for that mid-month account performance checkup; however, the success of a campaign shouldn’t be determined solely by clicks.

2. Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Similar to measuring how many clicks your campaign generated, CTR is a key metric for campaign performance.

CTR is measured by dividing the total number of clicks your campaign got in the month (or period being reported) by its total impressions. This equation tells you that out of say 1,000 impressions, your ad was clicked 100 times and your CTR is 10 percent for example.

Knowing what CTR is and how to measure it is key to being able to indicate your performance, but keep in mind that there is no perfect CTR campaign managers should be striving for.

PPC performance varies by industry and a number of other campaign variables.

For example, WordStream analyzed the PPC performance on just over 2,000 U.S. businesses and found that the average CTR in search was 2.14 percent in the auto industry versus 3.40 percent in the dating and personals industry.

Campaign managers running campaigns in the U.S. could use the numbers reported by WordStream to benchmark their own CTR success, but should be wary of other variables not accounted for in the analysis like budget spend – but it’s a place to start.

Benchmarking and improving the CTR of different campaigns is important not just as a measure of success, but also because it can affect other KPIs like quality score.

3. Quality Score

Quality score is the most elusive KPI amongst PPC advertisers. It is a metric created by Google that tells them how relevant your ad content is, using metrics like CTR and other performance variables like landing page experience. Advertisers find it difficult to understand quality score because it’s less straightforward than other easily measured KPIs, like clicks.

Using the expected CTR, landing page experience, ad relevance, and ad format, Google is able to determine a campaign’s quality score. Google is transparent about how quality score is measured by their team and why it’s necessary. Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist, explains how quality score works in the AdWords auction in this popular video:

Google recently improved how quality score is reported in AdWords, but it still comes down to this simple fact:

A good quality score (between 7 and 10) means you pay less money to advertise with AdWords. A bad quality score (6 or lower) means you pay more money.

Google’s changes to quality score reporting made quality score easier for advertisers to use in AdWords and began providing historical data about the KPI as well. These insights give advertisers necessary information to make smarter campaign decisions.

Despite the confusion, advertisers remain extremely interested in improving quality score because it determines how much they pay for each click. In turn, quality score can affect other KPIs such as CPC and CPA.

4. Cost Per Click (CPC)

PPC advertisers know how much they can pay for an ad campaign because they typically have a predetermined budget. However, while they specify a budget and a bid when doing the setup of a PPC campaign, it doesn’t mean that this is what they will pay.

Advertisers outcompete competitors for ad positions with their bid, but pay the next highest bid price. The image below demonstrates this concept:

Google image of CPC bid versus actual cost in auction considering KPIs for PPC

Therefore the cost of putting up an ad and for the clicks it generates is largely determined by other competitors in the PPC auction.

CPC measures exactly how much an advertiser has paid. You can measure CPC by dividing the total cost of a campaign by the number of times the ad was clicked in that campaign.

If you want to manually check the cost of your campaign, you could multiply CPC by the number of clicks a campaign received.

5. Cost Per Conversion/Acquisition (CPA)

Similar to CPC, you can set a cost per acquisition (CPA) when you set up your advertising campaigns.

Google defines the average CPA as the price advertisers pay for every new customer they acquire, which is calculated by dividing the total cost of conversions by the number of conversions. Google determines the CPA based on your quality score.

However, there is a bit more to the CPA story.

While average CPA is pretty easy to digest, advertisers can also make use of Targeted CPA, a bidding technique applied during campaign set up. Targeted CPA helps advertisers set bids automatically to get as many conversions as possible, based on a set CPA determined by the advertisers’ budget.

However, to make use of targeted CPA you have to understand different bidding strategies, setup conversion tracking and have at least 30 conversions in the last 30 days. To learn more about setting up targeted CPA, see best practices on Google support here.

6. Conversion Rate (CVR)

Conversion rate is not only an indicator of campaign success, it is the reason PPC marketers are hired in the first place.

You can measure conversion rate in AdWords by dividing the number of conversions the campaign received by the total clicks. Since conversion rate is expressed as a percentage, if the campaign had 100 clicks and 10 conversions, 10/100 means that the conversion rate would be 10 percent.

While campaign managers always have an eye on conversions, they will often set up campaigns to optimize for clicks rather than conversions.

You can now aim for conversions based on CPA goals rather than focusing on clicks or impressions. However, to be eligible to optimize for conversions, your account must have had at least 15 conversions in the last 30 days.

7. Impression Share (CPM)

An impression occurs when a person sees your ad. It doesn’t matter whether they click on it.

Looking at how many impressions a campaign generated isn’t an indicator of success because it doesn’t express how many people found your ad effective. However, impression share does add context to the reporting story by stating how much of the total impressions your ad campaigns are getting.

Determined by dividing the total impressions your campaign received by the total number of impressions your campaign was eligible for, Google says:

“Eligible impressions are estimated using many factors, including targeting settings, approval statuses, and quality. Impression share data is available for campaigns, ad groups, product groups (for Shopping campaigns), and keywords.”
Impression share gives marketers indirect competitive insight. Knowing that you have 50 percent impression share for a keyword, tells you that your competitors own the other 50 percent.

If you increase your impression share, you are in turn decreasing the amount of times your competitors ads are shown. If you’re looking to increase their impression share you’ll have to increase your bids and/or budgets.

8. Average Position

Google balances both paid and organic search results for almost every search query entered.

Ads on Google or Bing can show at the very top of the search engine results page (SERP) in position 1, right underneath the next ad shown is in position 2, and so on.

Average position tells advertisers which position their ad is shown in most of the time. Google can’t simply give the highest bidder the first position all the time, so they determine average position based on ad rank.

Ad rank is calculated by multiplying quality score by an advertiser’s max cost per impression (CPM). However, since average position is indeed an average, even knowing how to calculate it isn’t the full story since if your average position was 3, you may have been in position 1, 4 and 6 earlier that day.

Since the first 1-3 ads are shown before even the organic search results everyone worked so hard on, many businesses advertising on Google would like to be visible right out of the gate in position 1. It makes sense to want to be in the first position, but the aim to do so is mostly one of vanity, since being in first position doesn’t necessarily mean results.

Some advertisers may have more conversions in position 4 than position 1 for whatever reason. You should use average position to provide context around campaigns and campaign reporting, but it shouldn’t be used as a target indicator.

9. Budget Attainment

Paid search marketers are almost always given a monthly budget to run ad campaigns with. Budget attainment measures how closely that agency or individual came to achieving the budget they set out to.

Most PPC marketers don’t consider budget attainment when it comes to measuring their PPC performance, despite how much information it provides on how campaigns are being managed.

The reason why marketers tend to over or under spend the budget every month is because it’s difficult to bid consistently and maximize results with ongoing fluctuations in the PPC auction – a task that requires ongoing oversight and optimization (without the use of machine learning).

Regardless, I’m making the case that budget attainment is a KPI that PPC marketers need to think about.

10. Lifetime Value

LTV is a broad indicator of account health and of a PPC marketer’s abilities.

But calculating customer lifetime value for paid search is complex.

Companies that retain customers acquired via paid search longer will make significantly more revenue.

While LTV is a measure of a business’s customers lifetime with their product and/or services, it can be measured in different ways.

For example, in the case of a martech provider LTV could be measured simply by looking at the number of days, months, or years a client stayed with the platform.

In the case of a large company like Starbucks, measuring LTV can actually be quite complex. There are numerous considerations (e.g., average customer lifespan, customer retention rate, profit margin per customer, and applied discounts).

While PPC marketers typically wouldn’t take on complex calculations of LTV like Starbucks, knowing how this KPI is measured in other departments could certainly come in handy. Just be aware that LTV means slightly different things to different marketers, but is fundamentally the same across all of them.

Reporting on PPC KPIs

KPIs are not mutually exclusive.

It’s unlikely that the performance on one indicator is the best it has ever been while others are the worst.

For instance, you wouldn’t expect to have a super high CTR and a low quality score because the two are related. They tell different parts of the same story.

Improving CTR can positively impact quality score, and improving quality score can positively impact cost per click and cost per acquisition, in turn creating more profitable PPC campaigns for customers who stay longer.

With all of this in mind, it’s important that advertisers begin improving their performance at the level of clicks, while also making sure to not get caught up in one single number and remembering to take a step back and look at the KPIs that paint a more complete picture, like LTV.

While it’s nice to report on every metric included above, KPIs should be assigned to a campaign based on what makes the most sense for the client and their goals. Stick to what clearly indicates progress according to your clients’ standards and don’t overload them with extra KPIs just to look good – less is more when it comes to client reporting.

Know some Key Elements of Customer-Focused Web Content

Part of your job is to become an expert on the services or products of the company that you work for. While this expertise is extremely valuable, it can actually hurt you when it comes to creating content that relevantly speaks to your customers. We often tend to become so knowledgeable about the features and technical specs of what we’re trying to sell that we feel that all of our customers want to know about all of these intricate details.

The hard truth is that most of your potential buyers don’t care about these things, but instead care about how it makes their lives better and how it fulfills their wants and needs. The first step to creating better content that converts is to learn how to take your vast feature knowledge and turn it into believable benefits.

How to Convert Features Into Benefits

We all know a lot about the awesome features of whatever it is we are trying to sell, but how do we convert those into benefits that truly resonate with a potential customer to help them see what they get out of it? When it comes to converting features to benefits, here is a great five-minute-check you can follow. This check includes taking the last persuasive piece you have created for your company (blog post, landing page, sales copy) and listing all of the features you talked about.

By doing this, the new phrases will be something like this:

Our powerful analytic reports are created with the simple click of a button, so you can save time showing your boss impressive analysis without ever firing up an Excel sheet. The sleek design of our hearing aid makes it virtually unnoticeable, so you can feel confident in how you look while also being able to more fully interact with your family and friends. We take pride in our no-questions-asked return policy, so you can order worry-free. This fantastic exercise changes your thinking from you and what you offer and switches it over to thinking about them and what they gain from it.

Don’t Oversimplify Benefits

 As content marketers, it is in our inherent nature to simplify text and messages into compact and concise points to save time, words, and space. This practice often hurts the conversion ability of our content as it takes some of the emotional storytelling away from the features and benefits we are trying to sell.

Stop Trying to Think for Your Customers

At some point in time, we’ve all sat in a room with our co-workers to hash out a profile/persona of our customer base. While it’s relatively easy to find out basic information about your customers such as age, geographic location, medium income, etc., it’s not as easy to guess how they think. Yet we all do it! We sit in a room and talk about what possibly could frustrate the customer, what they are worried about, or what they wish our product/service could do, but it’s all a complete guess and a completely pointless exercise. 

Instead of guessing what your customers are thinking, just ask them! Some of the most common mediums of getting information from customers are: Customer interviews Email surveys Review and testimonials Chat logs All of these mediums are incredibly valuable as they can give you the truth regarding how customers feel about what you are providing. If you want to embark on creating a customer survey, it’s important to make sure you ask the right questions in order to give you the right information.

Google Algorithms update but Unchanged Ranking Factors

There are many other factors Google includes in its 2017 algorithm, but most of them are negligible unless it is having trouble finding enough search results. You would have to be in an extremely obscure industry for these factors to matter. However, here are a few just for your interest: domain history (whether the site been bought and sold a lot); keywords in h1 tags; user time on site; trustworthiness of outbound links; and truthfulness of claims (for political, health, scientific, and technical sites).

Back Links
Inbound links have been the primary currency Google uses to determine its level of trust for a website since the search engine established itself in 1998. The weight of links in Google’s algorithm hasn’t changed much compared to last year, but since 2010 or so, the naturalness of those links is what really matters. By “naturalness” we mean the degree to which that link occurred without your influence. Links that are paid for, traded for, or added by your company (as in the case of social media or Wikipedia pages) do not count in Google’s algorithm – and of course, there is a penalty for attempting to influence Google’s algorithm with links.

Consistent output of thought leadership content
There is probably no subject we write about as frequently as the importance of publishing excellent quality posts weekly. That’s partially because ghostwriting best-in-class content is what our company does for a living. But it’s also because people don’t seem to fully get it. Many people think content marketing – the regular publication of reasonably good content on a blog – is all you need to rank. In fact, content marketing is useless more times than not. But creating the best piece of content on the Internet about a given subject, and doing so with regularity – a process known as thought leadership –  is the most valuable online marketing strategy we know of. Google feels the same way; it eats up excellent content within hours of the time it is published, rewarding the businesses that post it.

Keyword-rich meta titles
If links and thought leadership content tell Google that it ought to trust your site enough to send traffic to it, meta titles take that crucial next step of telling them what kind of traffic to send. Simply put, the words you place in the meta title of each page on your website need to be the same words that people who buy what you sell would search. For example, if you own an Accounting Firm and one of your services is IPO Assistance, you would want the title tag of the page that describes that service to encompass all the things a potential client looking for IPO Assistance might search, e.g. “Experienced IPO Assistance, Consulting & Advisory Services” (Of course, it must stay under 80 characters.) For a more detailed description of meta title tags and how to use them check out our tutorial.

Mobile-friendliness / responsiveness
In 2015, Google elevated the importance of websites being “responsive,” i.e. easily viewed on a mobile phone or tablet. With people using their phones as web browsers more than they use their computers, Google felt that it made sense to reward websites that are easier for mobile users to browse and punish websites that require endless pinching and zooming. All websites should now be on the “responsive grid.” (In our web design department, the idea of a website being responsive is a given at this point, as it should be for every web designer.)

Highly specific landing pages
Google has always rewarded websites that respond to the exact query a searcher inputted. If someone types “red 2017 corvettes” into Google, the search engine would prefer not to return a page about just corvettes, or just 2017 corvettes, or just red corvettes. What it’s looking to return to a searcher is a page about 2017-model Corvettes that are the color red. If you sell red 2017 corvettes but don’t have a page dedicated specifically to this exact search term, you will likely rank lower than a site that does. Of course, it’s impossible to have a page for every combination and permutation of words someone might search; but the closer you get, the better. Specificity is a big deal to Google.

WebSite speed
In the same way that Google understandably gives preference to websites that are easier to browse on mobile devices, it also gives preference to websites that load more quickly. That’s why checking your site’s speed is an important part any web design phase, and should also be on the list of things checked every few months for your website. Generally speaking, if pages on your site load in 3.5 seconds or less, you’re fine; every half-second more than that can incur a loss of Google ranking credibility. The importance of site speed in a visitor’s experience has even spurred Google to promote AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), a way of coding mobile web pages so they load faster.

Clear labeling of information on a page
One of the most sensible, but least talked-about, ranking factors in Google’s algorithm is how clearly information is identified and labeled. Notice how in this article each ranking factor has its own section? That helps Google to understand what subject we’re talking about and gives it the signal to bring users searching for those concepts to this page. Clearly labeling (a) the subjects you’re discussing, (b) the graphics on your page, and (c) descriptive information like names, numbers, and addresses, is something Google really appreciates. Of course, Google’s robots can do the work without your help but they believe that web pages that are organized well serve users better. (And, as a writing company, we tend to agree.)

Clear labeling of the information on a web page is particularly important for Google Local (Google My Business), which relies heavily on finding and verifying local information about businesses. Another reward Google gives websites that contain clear labeling: Snippets – those featured boxes at the top of the Google results pages that highlight the answers to questions.

Schema markups Effects
This slightly-more-obscure element of Google’s algorithm is the “Part 2” of the previous ranking factor, a more official way to label the information on your page. Engineers from the Big 3 search engines – Google, Yahoo, and Bing – invented this tagging system in order to return “smarter” search results. When you see a search result that looks like this

If you want to stand out and gain a small boost in search ranking, use Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper to generate schema markup code to add to your site’s pages. Doing so will require you to identify the type of content on each page – Is it an article? A local business review page? An event page? – and then fill out descriptions of each element on the page. For example, in the case of an article, the Structured Data Markup Helper will ask you fill out the article’s name, author, date of publishing, image, publisher, and article rating (if available) on your site.

Keep in mind that Google will usually identify this information on its own if the page is clearly labeled and organized, but using schema markups is like being the good student who makes his teacher’s life easier. If your website is that student, it might find itself with just a teeny bit higher marks.

Social Media Signals
As best we can tell from our data, in the last 7 years Google has quietly backed away from social media as a ranking factor. While you will still see Twitter results when you search for celebrities’ names, for instance, most social media has no actual impact on search results. Google experimented with the concept of social signals in 2010, even attempting to purchase Facebook to obtain its trove of social data, but when Facebook rebuffed them and their attempt to start their own social network (Google+) failed, Google put the project aside in favor of new and more interesting frontiers like artificial intelligence and natural language search. The exception is YouTube, which is owned by Google – and the reason social signals even make up 3% of the algorithm.

YouTube’s role in Google’s algorithm is confined to searches where Google feels a video result is helpful. For example, if you search “how to tie a tie”, Google knows some people would like a video demonstration, so it includes a video in the search results. The video that appears will undoubtedly have a) a high number of embeds across websites, social media, and e-mail, b) a high number of favorites, and c) a high number of shares. View count and number of likes matter, but far less so than these 3 factors.

Age of WebSite
Once an important ranking factor because it indicated a business’ legitimacy, site age has decreased in importance substantially since the early 2000s. As Google has gotten more sophisticated in understanding the quality of websites (mainly, by inspecting their number and quality of links and whether they contain thought leadership content), it hasn’t needed to rely on a somewhat random factor like site age as much. But, with 2% share of the algorithm, it’s still a small indicator of a website’s trustworthiness.

Keywords in URLs
Another somewhat antiquated ranking signal is whether the keywords your audience is searching for appear in your URLs. Google cares far more about whether those keywords appear in your meta title tags, but it gives a small credibility boost if the same keywords appear in a page’s URL. For example, an airline price comparison website might have a page with the title tag “Cheap Flights to Orlando, FL.” It would be a good practice to make that page’s URL something like http://example.com/cheap-flights-orlando-fl/.

Other Important Factors
As a final note, this list does not include factors that could get your website demoted or banned from Google’s index. We left those factors out because they’re not positive signals that cause your site to rank higher; rather, they are negative signals that cause your site to rank lower. Also, they are all fairly commonsensical. For example, if your website has poorly written or stolen content; contains a lot of broken links; is affiliated with “bad neighborhood” websites; bombards users with pop-ups; or tricks users into going to pages they didn’t click, it will lose Google’s trust.