Trying to enter the world of SEO but feeling overwhelmed?
With so many things to optimize and metrics to track, it’s easy to feel choice overload about how to begin.
As SEO continues to change, it can also be difficult to keep up with all the latest updates.
Still, you need to keep up with what search engines like Google and Bing consider the most important ranking factors for content.
That’s why we spoke to experts all over the world to see what they consider the most important ranking factors to look out for in 2024.
What is an SEO ranking factor?
SEO ranking factors are the indicators Google uses to sort results whenever someone conducts a search. The more important Google believes a ranking factor to be, the more important it is to optimize for that factor.
With over 200 ranking factors that Google’s algorithm considers, it’s important to know which ones to really focus on.
10 SEO ranking factors that matter in 2024
We asked experts what the ONE most important ranking factor to pay attention to in 2024 was, and here are the 8 they told us to focus on:
User Experience
You want to make sure that your site is easy for users to use, and that they have an overall positive experience.
According to SEO Consultant, Phillip Stemann, here are some ways to improve your UX:
- Quickly answer the query in the content.
- Ensure some of the content is visible on the screen before people start scrolling.
- Ensure images are 9:16 so they look good on phones. If I want to take it a step further I make images for both desktop and mobile and hide/show depending on the screen size reading the content.
- Hide irrelevant elements on mobile that make the experience poor; that could be a table of contents.
- Add engaging elements where people can expand a section to read more. This is a positive sign to send to Google that people are engaging with your website.
Dmitrii Kustov, Marketing Director at Regex SEO recommends checking your businesses Google Search Console report on mobile usability to help identify any issues affecting your website’s performance on mobile devices.
He says that a way to test this to access your website on your phone using mobile data, not Wi-Fi. If nothing loads within the first few seconds, your site likely has issues with mobile loading speeds. You should at least see some elements—be it any color or a button—within those first few seconds. Next, note how different users, such as your grandmother or a child might interact with your site on their phone. If they struggle to click on non-clickable elements or can’t find what they’re looking for, you have a UX problem.
He mentions that other indicators of UX issues include small, unreadable text, poor zoom functionality, and unclear pop-ups. With mobile devices having smaller screens, capturing the user’s interest quickly is crucial.
Aleksa Filipovic, Content & SEO Manager at Two Spouts says, “Providing key takeaways or definitions at the beginning of paragraphs or the article itself can make all the difference. This way you’ll satisfy both impatient users who need the TL;DR section and those who want to go in-depth.”
Core Web Vitals
The SEO metrics for Core Web Vitals consist of three specific page performance measurements Google uses to score a user’s experience when loading your webpage :
“Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). LCP measures the load time of the main content on a page, FID assesses the time it takes for a page to become interactive, and CLS quantifies how much the content shifts during the load time. Improving these metrics is essential as they directly affect the user’s experience by ensuring the site is fast, interactive, and stable.
Optimizing these specific elements can yield significant benefits for businesses aiming to enhance their SEO rankings through Core Web Vitals. For instance, reducing server response times, enabling better caching, and removing unnecessary JavaScript can improve LCP scores, while minimizing third-party scripts and using a web worker can enhance FID scores. Addressing CLS by ensuring images and embedded resources have dimensions can prevent layout shifts. By prioritizing these adjustments, companies can boost their SEO rankings and provide a smoother and more engaging user experience “, Vaibhav Kakkar from Digital Web Solutions says.
David Lovett, VP of Organic Marketing at Rocket55, says “Core Web Vitals are the biggest change from years past.
“If your SEO strategy was buttoned-up and good to go and you feel confident in it, that’s not good enough now without consideration of how Core Web Vitals plays a part in ranking these days.”
Rony Mattar, Partner and SEO Manager at BlueEdge SEO, says “we give high importance to Core Web Vitals and website performance. Those two made a great difference for old websites and new ones.
We had a customer that has been in the market for 20 years and has a very powerful domain name which is his primary keyword, yet he was behind competition online.
We rebuilt his website with the same amount of images, using the same platform: WordPress (Woocommerce).
The performance is now perfect with 0 coverage errors; the results started showing immediately with new organic traffic and 2 big sales.
Good Core Web Vitals + Good website performance = Excellent User Experience, this is what Google is looking for in 2024.”
Data privacy
Data privacy is becoming more important, and having SSL or other data protection certificates for your site can help a piece of content rank in the Google search results.
Paul Hart, CTO at Spark’n, says “it’s really un-sexy but understanding and deploying cookie consent (and similar) is important for Google of late for data collection & privacy.
What Google cares about, you should too, as they’ll most likely start giving it further weighting as we lean into.”
Search intent
A user’s search intent is their specific motive behind inputting a query.
It’s how Google knows that “what should I feed my 3-month old German Shepherd” means you’re searching for “puppy food”.
SEO Specialist from Irresistible Me, Kate Ross says search intent can be categorized mainly into four types: informational, navigational, transactional and commercial. Understanding and optimizing for search intent means creating content that answers the needs of users at different stages of their search journey. For example, someone looking for ‘how to tie a tie ‘ is seeking informational content, possibly a step-by-step guide or video tutorial, whereas a search for “buy silk tie” indicates a transactional intent, where the user is likely looking to make a purchase.
This is how Kate suggests optimizing your website for search intent:
- Emphasis on Quality Over Quantity: Use keywords that match different intents and use them to guide content creation. These are a set of specific factors that Google considers important for a webpage’s overall user experience, including loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability.
- Create content that addresses the specific needs of users based on the identified intent – whether they’re looking to learn, navigate to a particular site, or purchase. Plus, acquiring high-quality backlinks from reputable sites in your industry to boost credibility and authority.
- Make sure the content is easy to navigate and provides value efficiently, which can decrease bounce rates and increase the likelihood of meeting user needs. These are a set of specific factors that Google considers important for a webpage’s overall user experience, including loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability.
Fabio Hallwyler, SEO Specialist, says to “respond accurately and quickly to user’s search intent and retain the user in the website. Avoid pogo-sticking.”
Pogo-sticking is when users visit your site and bounce between others as well, preferring other pages from the SERP over yours) would be a more reliable concept to be considered a ranking factor than trying to achieve an arbitrary Bounce rate number.
Site loading speed
How quickly does your website load?
It’s important for search engine optimization, since the highest e-commerce conversion rates occur between 0 and 2 seconds, with an average of 8.11% under one second.
Logan Shooster, VP of Marketing at Shooster Holdings, says “Take one basic website speed fact: the first five seconds users spend waiting for a landing page to load significantly impact conversion rates. The best you can do for your business for conversions and SEO performance is to get those load times under around 2 seconds. Any later than that, your conversions will drop by nearly 5% for each additional second waited.
What is the importance of this statistic? Well, conversion rates generally aren’t the most significant metric businesses track–not every website visitor will inevitably buy a product. In general, any company wants the most optimal conversion rates because it helps improve the odds that are generally against you–in terms of traffic and profits, you want the largest cut of the most relevant users to see and stay on your website.
On top of that, a slow-loading, bloated landing page will significantly impact your SEO health. Google considers users’ bounce rates and dwell times when factoring in “domain rank” or, basically, how visible your site is for relevant keywords. The more thought and effort you put into users’ experience, the more your SEO score will improve. If users are all leaving because they don’t want to wait for your site to load, that will also be reflected in your visibility on relevant SERPs.
Common site speed solutions can include image optimization/compression, browser caching improvement, server response time improvement, and JavaScript minifying.”
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Check out our list of the best SEO free tools to audit your site speed. |
Bounce rate (beware)
Bounce rate is possibly one of the most misunderstood performance indicators when it comes to search engine’s ranking algorithm.
The bounce rate of a website shows how many people came to your site and immediately left without interacting whatsoever.
While a few people listed this, bounce rate as we see it in Google Analytics in and of itself isn’t a ranking factor.
Google by no means looks at a page’s bounce rate and determines if it should be ranked higher or lower. That’s because a higher bounce rate isn’t always a negative signal if we take all the diverse kinds of queries into account.
For example, searchers landing on a page from a query like ‘what day is Christmas on in 2024?’ won’t stay on the page as soon as their problem has been solved.
So the bounce rate would be pretty high, but you’ve satisfied the searcher’s intent.
Dylan Stamer, COO of Perrfy, agrees. He says, “With so many algorithm updates and all the recent unpredictability, we should return to the basics: more clicks, more conversions, more engagement.”
When talking about bounce rates, one element Google considers when determining content quality and can be seen as a ranking factor, is searcher behavioral patterns.
One of them is long and short clicks – evident in this Google patent as well. This patent refers to a weightage system that evaluates pages based on how long or short a click has been and the outcome plays one role in ranking the pages higher or lower in the SERPs.
So, elements like pogo-sticking or a site’s click-through rate may provide a fuller picture for this ranking factor than just the bounce rate in isolation.
Quality content
Google, isn’t just some search bar anymore. It’s a super-powered librarian with a mind-reading degree.
Matt Little, Director at Festoon House says it wants to connect users with the absolute best answer to their question. That’s where quality content comes in. Creating informative, engaging content that solves people’s problems or fulfils their needs. It can’t a fluff piece stuffed with keywords – that era is over. People want valuable content, and Google rewards sites that deliver.
If the content you’re putting onto your site isn’t useful or relevant to your visitors, search engines know.
They’ll lower your ranking for it, too, because above all else, Google needs to keep its users satisfied. That happens when searchers are shown high-quality content that matches their search query.
Kushal Desai, Content Marketing Executive at Growfusely, says “The top-ranking factor that has been consistent in the last many algorithm updates is quality content.
You need to produce long-form quality content consistently on your website to keep the visitors flowing.
A lot of marketers are still focused on backlinks but there is no point in building backlinks if you don’t have quality content serving your core customers.
I believe content first and backlink second are the most important ranking factors you need to pay attention to in 2024.”
Regularly publishing high-quality new content is one of the most surefire ways to improve your search engine ranking.
“Quality content is and always will be one of the most important parts of any website. Not only does content inform, educate and persuade, but it is also a huge element of any SEO strategy, providing simple yet necessary ways to incorporate keywords, phrases, imagery and PR opportunities. Without the base content, none of the wider SEO strategies will follow.
As technology and trends develop, so does the user’s idea of valuable content. For example, modern-day users are looking for quick, efficient results which offer instant knowledge, whether that be through a video, graphic or interactive slideshow. When crafting content for a website, marketers must be aware of what their demographic wants and are attracted to”, says Annie Everill, Digital Marketing Executive at Imaginaire.
Making sure that your URLs are SEO-friendly is a quick way to draw crawler’s attention to your keywords when indexing your site.
Don’t underestimate the importance of visuals either. According to Colm O’Regan from Science Copywriting, using infographics, charts, graphs, and images make your article look more credible and improves UX.
Related post: SEO Hacks: 9 Easy Fixes That Make a Tangible Impact on Rankings
Link building
Link-building is one of the most difficult parts of SEO. That’s because you need to show up and put effort into the relationships you build to do it successfully.
Cache Merrill, Founder at Zibtek, mentions 4 key points about link-building:
- Emphasis on Quality Over Quantity: The focus has shifted significantly from the quantity of backlinks to the quality of those links. Search engines now prioritize links from high-authority, relevant sites over those from low-quality, spammy sites. In 2024, having a few high-quality backlinks from well-respected and relevant websites is far more beneficial than having numerous poor-quality links.
- Strategic Link Building: To leverage this ranking factor effectively, businesses must adopt a strategic approach to link building. This involves creating valuable, high-quality content that naturally attracts backlinks from reputable sites within the industry. Additionally, engaging in guest blogging, collaborating with influencers, and participating in industry forums can also help earn quality backlinks.
- Monitoring and Managing Backlink Profiles: Regularly monitoring and managing your backlink profile is crucial. Using tools like Google Search Console, Ahrefs, or SEMrush, businesses can track who is linking to them and assess the quality of these links. Disavowing links from questionable sources through these tools can prevent potential penalties from search engines for untrustworthy links.
- Integrating with Broader SEO Strategy: Quality backlinks should be part of a broader SEO strategy that includes technical SEO, on-page optimization, and excellent content. Integrating all aspects of SEO ensures that efforts to build backlinks do not occur in a vacuum but support overall site performance and user experience.
Practicing black-hat SEO strategies such as buying backlinks is one way that websites build a bad link profile.
Violating the search engine guidelines harms your trustworthiness and can get your site penalized or even taken down entirely.
Gabriel Armillas Carbonel, an SEO Freelancer, says “You will need gasoline for your project to increase authority, this is achieved with backlinks – my advice is that you try to get backlinks of a related subject and if they have better traffic.
You can get these links by looking at words that have searches for your related topic but do not have direct competition with your URL, and by contacting the first 20 results in the SERPs.”
Internal linking
Internal linking is vital to your SEO strategy. In fact, we think it’s just as important as external linking. These links show the crawl bots a content trail to follow, allowing more pages to rank and your overall website to perform better.
Carmen Santaló, Freelance SEO Consultant, says “It is difficult to choose only one ranking factor because SEO is about many different elements on the site.
However, if I have to choose one, I will say that internal linking is still one of the most important ranking factors. Internal links help search engines index and understand your site giving information about what pages are more important for your business.
It doesn’t matter how good your content is if Google cannot find it.”
Internal linking today does what everyone thinks external backlinks do—if you’re trying to figure out how to move your page from position 9 to 1, for example, simply creating more content around that topic and adding links to your money page will help.
Building a large network of content-led internal links helps you rank far more quickly than most other tactics.
Having a process for internal linking—not only adding links to old relevant pages on new blog posts, but also going back to old blog posts and adding links to new ones, will show you significant results and higher rankings.
Local SEO
Technical SEO
Technical SEO involves adjusting a website so that it meets the technical standards of today’s search engines, aiming to boost its organic search rankings. Key aspects include ensuring the website can be easily crawled, indexed, and rendered, along with organizing its structure effectively.
This might be daunting to some, so let’s simplify it. Kimberley McConnery, Link Building Manager at Sure Oak breaks this down for us:
Page titles: Use proper keywords that precisely describe the content of your page
H1, H2, and H3 for your title and subheadings: Clearly structure your piece according to headings and subheading
- Short meta-descriptions: Provide your audience with a short description of the article
Alt text for images: Use this to describe your images in detail
Accessibility widgets: Make your website disability-friendly
Use schema markup: Let Google know what kind of content are you producing
Takeaway
With hundreds of ranking factors to choose from, it can be difficult to focus on the ones that matter most for your SEO strategy.
That’s why having an expert’s opinion on which ranking factors have proven most important in 2024 can help.
By focusing on these 8 ranking factors, your content will easily increase in rank in the search engine results.
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