Google ranking factors in 2023

It’s no secret: Google’s ranking factors change constantly, so much so that it sometimes becomes difficult to keep up with them. In SEO, what was true yesterday isn’t necessarily true today. The cards are regularly reshuffled with each algorithm update. Even so, some factors persist and are even becoming increasingly important. What are they and how much influence do they have? In this article, the Semji team offers an overview of the Google ranking factors that really matter in 2021.

The 3 types of factors that influence rankings on the SERP

Among the hundred or so factors that influence how search results are ranked on Google, we can identify 3 types of factors that are neither more nor less than the 3 pillars of SEO:

• Content: is the page’s content relevant to the user’s query?
• Popularity: are the page or the website frequently cited through links from other websites?
• Technical: does the page use the right HTML tags? Does it display well on mobile?

The relevance and originality of the content on the page

We can never say it enough: content is king and quality is queen! When a user searches for a keyword, Google will favor pages whose content provides all the answers to the initial query. That’s why it’s important to create complete, comprehensive, high-quality content that thoroughly answers users’ questions and/or needs.

Why is this so essential? Because users turn to Google to find answers, so it’s crucial that search results are relevant in terms of content and aligned with their expectations.

For example, if you search for “Why do yoga,” Google highlights a search result titled “Yoga: 9 good reasons to practice.” This content turns out to be highly relevant and complete for the user’s search.

When Google presents search results on the SERP, the user gets to choose between several sites offering different content. Imagine clicking on 5 search results and finding the exact same content every time. Google will therefore favor “unique” content and avoid highlighting “duplicate” content.

There are solutions that let you analyze the intents of search engines and users behind a query. Semji is one of them. Thanks to its AI, the platform identifies users’ topics and questions and issues recommendations.

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The popularity of the site and page in relation to the searched keyword

The algorithm relies in part on an element called “PageRank.” This PageRank, also known as PR, is defined as the link-analysis algorithm that contributes to the ranking system for web pages used by the search engine. Google assesses the popularity of a website and a page by counting the number of relevant links from other websites. For example, webmasters often link to a Wikipedia article so that the user can get more information on a topic. This largely explains why Wikipedia articles are often found on the first page of Google for certain keywords.

Mobile-friendly content

The smartphone remains the most widely used device for browsing the internet. The numbers speak for themselves: according to a study by BroadBandSearch, traffic from mobile has increased by +222% over the past 7 years. It currently accounts for half of global traffic. The user experience is now at the heart of the customer journey on the web, so it’s critically important for websites to display content that’s suited to smartphone screens.

Source: https://www.broadbandsearch.net/blog/mobile-desktop-internet-usage-statistics

In 2021, Google is extending Mobile First Indexing to all websites. In other words, responsive design is no longer an option but a necessity if you want to keep your rankings.

UX

Last May, Google unveiled the Web Vitals program, focused exclusively on UX. The goal? To establish metrics designed to measure performance and user experience. Overall, the factors that will be taken into account are load time, interactivity, and the visual stability of the page’s content.

Along the same lines, Google has also launched a major update based on UX factors called Page Experience, which includes the Core Web Vitals metrics.

Source: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2020/05/evaluating-page-experience.html

The internal popularity of the page

Each website can encompass several thousand or even millions of pages. However, not all of these pages carry the same importance: a page that’s always accessible from the menu is far more visible than a page that’s 5 clicks away from the website’s homepage. This is how Google calculates an internal popularity score for each page of your website: it’s therefore important to properly highlight your strategic pages on your site through internal links.

Topical expertise

When a user searches for a keyword, Google will favor websites that offer a body of expert content on the main topic.

Take the example of the query “adjust your bike saddle.” Here, the main topic is cycling, and it’s the players specialized in this field, offering content around this topic, that grab the top positions. With more than 300 pieces of content around the topic of cycling, Decathlon manages to rank among the top search results for the keywords “bike,” “electric bike,” or “hybrid bike.”

The page’s load time

A customer who waits is a customer lost, and on the internet even more than anywhere else. The immediacy of the search engine’s response therefore stands out as one of the most important factors. A study conducted by Enabler Spac confirms this trend: a load time of between 1 second and 3 seconds implies a possible increase in the bounce rate of +32%. A wait time of between 1 second and 5 seconds risks causing an increase in that same rate of +90%.

Source: https://www.enablerspace.com/digitalmarketingtips/paving-the-path-to-speedy-success-with-google-amp/attachment/mobile-speed-load-times/

Content that answers the query (BERT)

Landing in late 2019, BERT caused a genuine tsunami in the world of SEO. Behind this acronym lies one of the search engine’s most important updates: “Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers,” which is akin to the principle of deep learning. Google is now able to detect the context of a query and understand which search intent lies behind it. Once again, high-quality content marketing is rewarded.

The integration of voice search

Even though voice search hasn’t exploded as much as expected, it shouldn’t be overlooked in SEO practices because it’s evolving quickly. With nearly half of voice searches performed from a smartphone, the best way to optimize your content is through structured data.

Netlinking and internal linking

Links, whether woven within a website or from an external site, carry significant weight in SEO. The strength and breadth of the external link profile a site enjoys allow Google to judge its relevance, reputation, and popularity. As for internal linking, it reveals to Google how many related pieces of content exist within a single site and allows the bots to move easily from page to page during their crawl. Links are therefore not to be taken lightly in 2020, and we can safely imagine that this factor will retain its importance in the coming years.

If the way Google prioritizes results is so relevant, it’s undoubtedly because the American giant fully intends to maintain its leadership position in the SEARCH market. The many updates to its algorithms each year and the integration of RankBrain and then BERT fit naturally into its action plan. The goal? To be at the cutting edge of technology in the field of Natural Language Processing in order to deliver ever more precise and refined results and get as close as possible to the search intent.

How to take your ranking strategy further

According to an Ahrefs study, 90% of content gets no traffic on the web! A disaster for companies that are investing more and more resources in this area.

Thanks to Semji, companies can now:

• prioritize their content optimization/creation actions (which content should they work on first for quick wins?)
• produce content that truly answers users’ search intents (choice of keywords, topics to cover)
• organize their team around editorial production challenges (where do we stand? who’s doing what and by when?)
• track all their performance indicators in a single place (traffic gains, conversions, etc.)

Request a demo and discover how to cut your content production time by 6.