If your keyword is missing from those areas, you’ll be prompted to add it. Lastly, ensure your shopping cart checkout has minimal steps and is easy to use. Make sure all sign-up forms and interactive elements work, on both desktop and mobile. Site owners can use Google PageSpeed Insights to assess their site speed and performance and compare it to competitors. Popular content management systems (CMS), like WordPress, provide a blank space for you to add alt text.

• By using this toolbox, the industry can make informed decisions based on our intensive research across a wide spectrum of criteria.
• We deliver compelling digital experiences to drive brands forward, engage target audiences, and drive results.
• But their perceived importance for “map pack” rankings has stayed roughly the same.
• The focus points of SEO in 2025 are still high-quality content and technical factors like site speed, security and mobile parity.
• While search engine algorithms are constantly evolving, it’s important to keep a pulse on which ones have the most impact each year.

Tracking your local rankings progress

Now, we know that there are almost 200+ SEO ranking factors that determine if your website is ranking or not. Some of them have a major impact, while others are essential, but not necessary. In summary, Conversion Rate and Click-Through Rate are critical metrics for assessing and improving the performance of your SEO and content marketing strategies. Google Search Console (GSC) is a free tool provided by Google that helps website owners, webmasters, and SEO professionals understand how their site is performing in Google Search. For beginners looking to harness the power of SEO, mastering Google Search Console is a crucial step.

5 Relevance of Links

Note that these factors are not “proof” of what search engines use to rank websites, but simply show the characteristics of web pages that tend to rank higher. Combining this understanding with both experience and knowledge of search engine algorithms can help lead to better SEO practices. As mentioned above, quality content is a critical ranking factor, and there is no better blueprint to tell you how to achieve that than the E-E-A-T guidelines. Building a credible reputation as an expert within a field supports Google’s aim and provides a good user experience.

SEO is a dynamic field that demands extensive knowledge of algorithms, user behavior, and industry best practices. Gain valuable insights to increase your website’s visibility, engagement, and revenue. Once you’ve ensured your site is optimized for crawlability, the next order of business is to make sure it can be indexed.

If you pick the wrong categories — or don’t add enough — you could be missing out on potential customers. Once your Google Maps presence is primed for search engines, it will keep working for you. No monthly costs or pay-to-play — just a powerful, cost-effective way to make sure the right customers find you at the right time.

These elements align with other search engines and their ranking factors, like Google. Next to content, backlinks are often considered to be the second most important SEO ranking factor. To attract search engines to your content, you also need to consider on-page SEO factors.

We regularly improve our ranking systems through rigorous testing and evaluation and provide notice of updates to our ranking systems when those might be useful to content creators and others. When you include structured data, it can give your content an additional opportunity to rank near the top of search results. The results above appear both on the recipe card at the top of the page and as standard search results. To confirm that your website provides a good experience for users, start by checking your Core Web Vitals.

To confirm that all your webpages use HTTPS, check Google Search Console. You can fix this issue by securing an SSL certificate for your site. Google allows a few different options for creating a mobile-friendly site. One of the most common methods is using responsive design to display your website content appropriately for the device’s screen size. But that isn’t the only reason mobile friendliness is so important.

These are metrics Google uses to measure the health of your website. The three key areas are loading speed, visual stability, and interactivity. Additionally, this chapter highlights a broader shift as Google moves away from rewarding technical optimizations like HTTPS in favor of high-quality, helpful content. Do these websites rank highly because they have better back-end infrastructure than other sites? Or do they need better back-end infrastructure to handle the load of SEO Anomaly ALREADY being ranked higher?