Ever heard of a Google Ranking factor? 

If not, consult this short guide. I’ll give you the breakdown along with what I consider to be the top Google Ranking Factors, based on my experience. 

Understanding these can help you make meaningful changes to your website right now to increase impressions and visibility. 

What Is a Ranking Factor?

Simply put, a ranking factor is a signal that Google uses to determine the authority of a domain or URL and assign organic rankings. 

There are over 200 Ranking Factors. Don’t hold your breath. I’m not going to go over each one. 

I’m just going to break down what I think are the top Google ranking factors, specifically, the top 5. 

So, What Are the Top Google Ranking Factors?

With no further ado…

Content

I feel almost hackneyed writing this, but it’s true. There is no more important ranking signal than content, period. 

I don’t care what you read or what some other agency tells you. If you don’t have something worth reading or watching on your website, you’re not going to rank well, organically. 

Have you ever wondered why Wikipedia has page-one rankings for basically everything? It’s because they have valuable information. 

There are lots of ways to include valuable information on your website. You can blog, write product page descriptions, or even create dedicated CMS pages like FAQs pages and buying guides. 

You can also run a social media campaign and direct traffic to your actual domain, although that doesn’t work in quite the same way. It is still content, though, and it will improve your organic reach. 

Here are some best practices for producing good content: 

• Don’t go after extremely competitive keywords. You will likely not rank well for them unless you have a domain authority of 30+, and even then it could take several years. 
• Consider search intent. If you are trying to rank with the intention of selling something, go after transactional and commercial keywords.
• Answer common questions. If customers make repeated queries to you, answer them in a blog or a FAQs page. 
• Writing is not a one-time thing. You need to post and publish consistently to generate traction.
• Do not write fluff, it will not rank well. Content actually doesn’t have to be long to rank well. I’ve seen clients with blogs and CMS pages of ~400 words that rank on page one and get hundreds if not thousands of views. 
• Be patient. Organic growth usually takes more than 6 months. In fact, in my experience, content usually takes between 2 and 3 years to really start generating organic traffic.

Beyond that, get creative. There are no hard or fast rules about what works and what doesn’t, and sometimes the pages and posts you think are the least valuable end up generating the most visibility. 

On-Page Optimization

Next after content, page-level factors are probably the next in line of top Google ranking factors. This is related to content, though, since it hinges on keywords. 

What I mean by on-page optimization are things like: 

• Page blurbs (copy, which sort of makes this interrelated with content)
• Page headers and titles
• Page meta descriptions 
• Image alt text

Honestly, one of the laziest yet most effective things you can do to improve a page’s performance is to update the page structure to include target keywords in the headers. 

Do it, I nearly guarantee your impressions for those keywords will increase, just from that change alone.

Site Speed

Even though I don’t consider page speed as critical as content and on-page optimization, I’m including it because it makes a huge difference in user experience (UX) and it’s usually something you can address on your own. 

Google actually makes addressing page-level performance (in terms of speed) pretty easy to diagnose. 

Just use this link: https://pagespeed.web.dev/. 

Plug in the URL you want to audit, and Google will tell you how it fares in terms of performance. It will even break down what the issues (if any) are. 

In my experience, the number one issue with slow pages is large image sizes. High-quality imagery is important for SEO, but you should always compress your images before uploading to improve page speeds.

Compressing them will make your pages substantially faster and if done properly, you won’t even be able to tell the difference between the two. 

Another common problem with page speeds is when a website has inactive plugins installed or out-of-date plugins that need updates. Scrub your API and remove any that you don’t use and update those that you do. 

One final note is to remove excess code. If you have coding experience, inspect the page element and delete any code that serves no function, all it does is slow the page down.

Mobile Experience 

Your website’s mobile experience is also a huge ranking factor that Google will use to determine how good your website is from the standpoint of technical SEO. 

Even if the mobile experience of your website was not considered one of the top Google ranking factors, it behooves you to develop a mobile-friendly, responsive design.

This is because more and more users are accessing the internet on the go from mobile devices like phones and tablets. 

If most of your traffic comes from mobile users (that wouldn’t be surprising) and the website isn’t responsive, you run the risk of offering a bad on-page experience and potentially losing out on sales. 

This one is a bit trickier to optimize, especially if you aren’t a developer. With that said, most WordPress, Shopify, and BigCommerce themes are responsive and will scale their elements to suit the screen size. 

So, check out some of your pages on your phone. If it looks weird or is hard to navigate, the first thing you should check to see is that your theme is up to date. 

If it isn’t, update it, and if it’s really bad but an out-of-date theme isn’t the issue, consider upgrading a theme to one that looks like yours but which offers a solid mobile experience. 

Internal Links 

It might seem like a little thing, really, but in reality, improving your on-page experience by curating internal links can improve your SEO in more than one way. 

Internal links improve your website from a technical standpoint because they can show Google’s crawlers that your website has a logical structure with funnels from one relevant product category (or CMS page) to the next. 

This in turn positively impacts SEO, but it is more significant than this. 

Internal links also direct traffic, giving you the ability to curate the user experience according to your own expertise. 

This not only can improve the customer experience, but it can make it possible for you to create opportunities for cross-selling and upselling. This is particularly the case when you link from one product to another that people with similar interests buy, or to two products that are commonly bought together. 

Really, backlinks are more valuable (all in all) than internal links, but you can change your on-page experience with internal links right now, whereas backlinks must be earned and that takes time.

There You Have the 5 Top Google Ranking Factors (from My Perspective/Experience)

These are only 5 of the top Google ranking factors from my own experience working in SEO, but remember, there are nearly 200 others.

By making adjustments to these ranking factors, you will likely be able to improve your eCommerce website’s current organic rankings, but remember, this is just a start. 

To do it right and reap long-term success, you have to commit to ongoing keyword research and making optimizations as opportunities arise 

Otherwise, you can do it – so start digging.

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