For the purposes of brevity, in this section we will just highlight the particularly noteworthy results. Again, please consult the raw performance data if you wish to examine it for additional factors. Readable content enhances user experience, encouraging visitors to stay longer on your site, which reduces bounce rates and signals to Google that your content is valuable. By focusing on what the audience is searching for and providing comprehensive, relevant information, you increase the likelihood that search engines will rank your content higher. Instead of using generic file names like IMG1234.jpg, using descriptive names helps search engines understand and rank the image appropriately. Alt text (alternative text) provides a textual description of images, which is essential for search engines to understand the content and context of the image.
Read on to explore some of the most relevant facts and figures that show where SEO is in 2025 and where it may be going. They’re constantly tweaking their rubrics for assessing content—not to mention the many outside influences. From semantic search to featured snippets to AI results, the space keeps evolving. Imagine someone nearby searching “best your service near me.” They’re looking for a business just like yours, ready to book an appointment, stop by, or make a purchase. But if your business isn’t at the top of Google Maps, they won’t find you — they’ll find your competitors.
- HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language used to structure your webpage and content.
- After the exact match domains algorithm update, the value of exact match domains has decreased considerably.
- Because of that, getting more social shares does help your search engine rankings, if only indirectly.
Focusing on the factors in the table above should help provide a useful starting point for the tasks needed to optimize for local searches. Though, with more than 100 individual factors to choose from, it’s highly advised to focus on a broader set of tasks – with some improvements necessary in most of the grouped factors. In the table above, you can see what Whitespark’s expert survey respondents said they believed were the most important ranking factors to local pack and localized organic results.
Getting a local business to rank highly on search engines is becoming much more difficult. Local SEO has become increasingly competitive as more and more businesses recognize that they need to optimize for local searches – both for the local pack, and for localized organic rankings. Meeting users in these new places starts with understanding the ranking factors powering these AI experiences. Since 2023, our team has been researching how these platforms and language models generate responses and how to improve an organization’s visibility in these responses.
Monitoring and Maintaining Your Site’s Health
Lots of AI-generated content on your website can lead to a ranking drop and even have your website labelled “unhelpful” by Google. The overall authority of the domain also has an impact on how your page ranks. Syndicating content is fine, but make sure you are linking back to the original source and pray the syndicated content doesn’t outrank you. This will prompt Google to re-crawl your content and reevaluate its BHS Links rankings in the SERPs.
Citation Signals
We recommend not simply adding links to existing text, but adding context around the new links, which can boost both the relevance and the freshness of the new links. Links are a powerful ranking signal, but remember, not all links are equal. Since we’re now linking our topically related pages together, we now want to make sure to optimize our linking strategy for maximum SEO impact. Regardless, at this point you have all the tools you need to create high-quality content.
This resulted in a number of algorithm updates, each resulting in a smarter Google that was more capable of understanding the relevance of a page. Although websites have been around for a little while longer, people started optimizing their sites for search engines in the mid-1990s. The algorithms that search engines used were way less advanced and relied on ranking factors like keyword density to determine the relevance of a page. The ‘trick’ back then was making sure the keyword was being used enough times throughout your page and in your meta tags. By focusing on Google ranking factors 2025, businesses can improve SEO performance and dominate search results. There are the key determinants or SEO best practices that you should be implementing to ensure that your content gets the most visibility, organically on the search engines.
The more help you can give to Google to understand your content, the more likely your page SEO rank will increase in your niche. One negative SEO ranking factor to be aware of is duplicate content. And if you have similar content, tell Google which one should be ranked as most authoritative using canonical URLs. As our keyword research guide said, Google’s search algorithm relies on keywords. These are the words and phrases searchers use when seeking information. You can check domain authority or page authority with Open Site Explorer.
Mobile Optimization and Responsive Design
It is rated very positively by the YouTube algorithm if a video is the first to be viewed in the current session, e.g. if the video is accessed via an external link. This video finally leads the user to the platform and if this ideally leads to a longer session, the video will be ranked higher. When someone searches for a business or place near their location, they’ll find local results across Google in places like Maps and Search. For example, you can probably find local results if you search for “Italian restaurant” from your mobile device. We try to show you the kind of nearby restaurant that you’d like to visit. In our research, we’ve found a correlation between Perplexity’s and Google’s rankings.
In general, you can assume that the higher a website is ranked, the more relevant the search engine believes that site is to the query. Monitoring your links should be a regular part of your SEO strategy. Broken links create bad user experiences and negatively impact search crawlers, so you should replace them with working links or redirects as soon as possible. But the days of keyword stuffing to game the algorithm are long gone. In the age of natural language processing (NLP), search engines want content that provides value to visitors.
