30 May 5 SEO Ranking Factors to Increase Web Traffic in 2025

You can sign up for a free Google Search Console account if you don’t currently have one. With this tool, you can submit sitemaps for your site and monitor how many submitted pages have actually been added to Google’s index, among other things. Google has confirmed that it uses page speed as part of its page experience evaluation, which means you need to be aware of it for your site. It’s also what is used to provide featured snippets, ratings, carousels and other types of rich results in search results. Alt text is important for a number of reasons, most notably for accessibility, in that it describes images to visually impaired visitors. This score is essential to your site’s reputation from Google’s perspective.

Fix Structured Data Errors

If you’re offering advice or a service, make sure your website showcases your experience and expertise. Social media signals might not have the direct ranking power that backlinks do, but they’re becoming more important. Search engines look at your social media activity to gauge brand relevance and authority. SEO is critical for small businesses BHS Links in 2025, where online visibility can make or break success. Search engines like Google are the gateway to most online experiences, with 68% of all website traffic coming from searches.

The Top 3 Google Ranking Factors That Really Matter

Make sure that customers leave happy and that this experience is positive, offline and online. Although your activity there does not directly impact rankings, it pays off to be in contact with your audience there as well. And provide a similar (positive) experience through these platforms as well. Search engines work by using algorithms to evaluate websites by topic and relevance.

This means the mobile version of your site is the primary basis for how your content is ranked and indexed. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, you’re missing out on a significant opportunity to rank higher and engage users. Note – while product schema is an important optimization for this ranking factor, we’ve categorized it under a separate ranking factor, structured data.

“Follow” results in bots following the links on your page and passing link equity through to those URLs. Or, if you elect to employ “nofollow,” the search engines will not follow or pass any link equity through to the links on the page. Once you’ve ensured your site has been crawled, the next order of business is to make sure it can be indexed. That’s right — just because your site can be discovered and crawled by a search engine doesn’t necessarily mean that it will be stored in their index. In the previous section on crawling, we discussed how search engines discover your web pages.

• This can significantly help Google understand your business better and match it to relevant local searches.
• Here’s a beginner-friendly overview of what these practices are, why they’re problematic, and how to ensure your SEO strategy remains ethical and effective.
• You want a diverse mix of link types coming from relevant and authoritative sources.
• This led to people questioning whether Google changed its direction regarding secure domains.
• Most likely, the number 200 originated as a PR attempt by Google to portray its algorithm as complex and having multi-factors.