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.
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