What affects your site’s SEO ranking on Google?
Every person that wants to promote their website asks themselves what factors –both on page and off page – exactly have the greatest influence on the position of the site among Google SERP. What is even more interesting is what factors will play a major role in the future? The team of the Moz SEO company published a study in which they revealed main factors that affect ranking. The study consists of two parts: an expert survey with more than 120 participants and a deep analysis of more than 14,000 requests.
It should be noted that the purpose of the study was to find correlation between certain site characteristics and its high position in results Google. The results do not mean that these factors probably are used in the ranking algorithm of a search engine.
Main factors
So, according to the survey of SEO experts, website positions are most affected by the following factors (in order from the most affecting to the least affecting):
1. The credibility of links on the domain level (external links leading to the site);
2. The credibility of links on page (external links leading to the page);
3. Key words and content (the use of keywords in titles and meta tags);
We also recommend
5. Mentioning of the brand's name on the Internet: in mass media, on Wikipedia, on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter;
6. Traffic/Requests (CTR, bounce rate, etc.);
7. Social indicators of the page (tweets, sharing, comments, social networks, likes);
8. If keywords match the name of the domain;
9. The indicators of the domain, which are not associated with keywords and external links (the quality of the content on the site, the bounce rate for certain keywords, the default error page indexing, domain age)
Prognosis for the future
As for the future, according to SEO-experts, traditional ranking factors such as anchor text, exact match of keywords in domain will start to lose thir influence over site positions. Search engines will be applying even more sophisticated mechanisms and switch to deeper analysis of the value of the website to users, authorship, structured data and social signals.
