Although Google doesn’t disclose what is precisely its on-page SEO ranking factors, we have put together what are the top 10 most important ones.
Below is a list of the 10 Most Important Google On-Page SEO Ranking Factors:
- Secured Website – having HTTPS is now critical as cyber-attacks have a negative direct impact on visitors’ experience on a website, especially when their personal information is hacked
- Metadata Keyword Optimization – ensuring the proper target keywords are optimized within all the key metadata elements such as title tag, meta description, header tags, image alt tags, schema markups, and more are essential to any website’s organic keyword ranking performance
- Content – they say content is king, which has consistently stayed true today and most likely for the future. Still, it’s all about the unique topic you select, the structure and layout you choose to present the information for voice and visual search, and most importantly, should be spelling/grammar free, easy, and natural to read for visitors.
- Navigational Architecture – the entire website blueprint or how you categorize and lay out the navigational linking structure for your top-level to bottom-level pages will determine how search engines will prioritize the ranking importance of your content.
- Mobile Friendliness – this is a no brainer but making sure your website is user-friendly for mobile devices including phones and tablets so that visitors do not bounce out and not come back to your website
- Page Speed – yes, this is important for SEO because when people don’t have time and may lose patience especially when they are about to use their credit card to pay for something, they want to make sure their information does not seem like it’s getting lost somewhere.
- User Experience – how you make it easy for visitors to find and get to where they want to receive their information and accomplish their goals is self-explanatory. It’s just like customer service. The better your service or experience, the more likely they will return to you, and Google’s ranking factors will correlate to better keyword ranking performance.
- Internal and External Linking – this is the key to Google’s winning algorithm versus all the other search engines. They built a linking system where it’s almost like a voting system. The more links or votes with proper anchor text means more entities recognize your authority and trust your expertise in whatever information, products, or services you have to provide.
- URL Structure – having search and keyword friendly is important and making sure you use subfolders to categorize your content pages will make it easier for both crawlers and users to know how to navigate your website
- Social Media Amplification – this marketing channel is a growing channel due to influencers’ backing and great features added to new social platforms. In the same way, both social media and SEO can work together to gain more “votes” from audiences that may not only use search and help drive them from the social space. Some of them allow content to be search engine friendly as well.
Summary
The 10 most important SEO ranking factors are security, metadata, content, navigation, mobile friendliness, page speed, user experience, links, URL, and amplification.