20 Most Important Google Ranking Factors For 2022

20 Most Important Google Ranking Factors For 2022. Content is the King. If you want to rank well on Google’s search engine result pages for a keyword, your website must have original, unique, and well-researched content that is a valuable addition to the user. If they don’t know what you are showing them, they won’t come back to your site. 

Moreover, your bounce rate will be high. Have the search intent of the user in mind and think of the different queries they may have about a topic. In reality, Google has now begun a new featured snippet to deal with multi-intent search queries. 

Do a careful keyword analysis using paid tools or Google’s Keyword Planner(free) to chalk out effective Search Engine Optimization strategies for different search topics. Keeping a check on what the competition is doing also helps extremely in this thought. Make sure to analyze local, mobile, and voice search keywords too.

HTTPS 

HTTPS stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, It’s become a Google ranking factor in 2014 while 2017 saw Google strongly support websites to go secure. Now websites without the secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure connection are shown as ‘not secure’ in the address bar of the browser, a definite eyesore to website visitors. Therefore, not making the transition to HTTPS can lead to enhanced bounce rates. But be informed, you can face canonicalization hurdles if you do make the change. 

Domain factors

If you have a domain that includes the target keywords, then you have a powerful organic search advantage. Nevertheless, it is not always possible to target all-important keywords this way. 

Furthermore, studies have unveiled that consistently high-ranking, older domains do better in an organic search result than new brands – this is because Google has observed their activity for extended periods and views them as reliable.

A Mobile-friendly Website is a Must

Search engine like Google has now implemented mobile indexing first, meaning that a mobile-friendly website is more important than a website version. This means that if you want to stay in the competition, you will have to assure your website is mobile-responsive. If you have a mobile-friendly site, Google can instantly and perfectly index it, rather than having to refer back to its desktop version.

Mobile usability has been a prime Google ranking factor since 2015 and to provide this mobile-first index rule sufficiently, your mobile and desktop websites must have the same content. 

Website page speed

Recent researches have decided that the bounce rate doubles for every two-second delay in page loading. There have been situations of large online businesses losing millions of dollars in revenue with just a second delay in page loading. You can increase page speed by reducing your JS, CSS files, HTML, diminishing page redirects, image optimization, resolving server performance issues, etc.

Additionally, for increasing mobile pages speed, you can use Accelerated Mobile Pages(AMP) to decrease any bottlenecks. You can measure your web page speed by using the Google PageSpeed Insights tool. 

Make User Experience Top Priority

Google continually observes user behavior when they visit a website. The time spent on your website, the number of users who leave the website after seeing only one web page, the number of other pages users, etc. are all crucial SEO ranking factors.

Work on your website structure to assure that users can navigate easily from one page to another page and find what they are looking for easily.

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO is a very crucial term in ranking factors. It is the method of optimizing search engine optimization elements on a web page, to improve their search ranking and generate more relevant users on websites.

Many on-page SEO factors help in increasing websites’ health. The Important factors are,

• Site Speed
• Mobile Responsiveness
• Keyword Research and Usage

An on-page SEO strategy helps you get a better organic ranking on the search engine result page. Even technical Search Engine Optimization techniques like getting rid of broken links, duplicate content, optimize URL structure.

Backlinks are a Vote of Confidence

Backlinks are the important search engine optimization factors.

If you have many popular websites linking to your website, it indicates to Google that you are a popular and reliable source of information.

Target quality over quantity here and engage in link-building exercises like guest posting by experts, case studies, industry surveys, infographics, and pairing up with famous bloggers within your niche.

Brand Authority 

If you can draw attention to your brand and target more brand keywords or search terms, it sends a powerful signal to Google that you are a big business. This will in turn improve your Google rankings and get you more website traffic. The studies have found that more 50% of users will click on a result if they see that the brand is making a show in multiple organic search results on a Search Engine Result Page. 

Social Signals

Becoming an impressive social presence comes with its own set of perks. Choose a social media platform that perfect for your brand voice and has your target audience actively engaging with you. 

Make collaboration with influencers within your niche so you can tap into their followers base too. Share engaging post, quality content regularly so that your followers regularly have something to look forward to, and address their concerns and queries.

Although SMM is not a standalone Google ranking factor, it, united with brand power, can help you see positive organic traffic growth.

Technical SEO

Of course, this is one of the most important ranking factors of Google in 2022. Without having a good technical website, you cannot think of ranking a website on Google. Technical SEO includes the overall health and score of your site. Within technical SEO, factors like site eros, sitemap, robots.txt file, crawl error and a lot more. 

By working on such factors, you can surely improve the overall health of your site as well as your ranking. Also, when the technical part of your site is up and running, Google will give a positive reward to your site by increasing its ranking on SERP.

For taking the technical SEO of your site to the new level, you can use websites or tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, Ubersuggest and many more. 

Freshness of content

Let us ask you a question. Will you like to read outdated or old content that has not been updated for years? Of course not, right? Then how can you expect others to read outdated content? Recently, Google has taken action against those websites that don’t update their content on regular basis.

With that in mind, we suggest you to keep on updating your old content frequently as it will surely shoot your website ranking up. Not only ranking, but updating content will also help you in increasing the website traffic in a quick time.

When you updated content, Google gets an indication that something new information is available on the web that needs to shown to the people. And then it will increase the ranking of your content as compared to others. 

Keywords in content

We have mentioned thousands of times on our blog that keywords are the most important factor when it comes to SEO. Without proper targeting of the keywords, you cannot think of increasing your website ranking on Google. So, if you are serious about dominating SERP in 2022, hit the proper keywords in your content. 

Generally, there are two types of keywords, long-tail keywords and short-tail keywords. If you are the newbie website owner, go with long-tail keywords as it will help you in ranking your content in a quick time. 

Once your site has gained some authority and credibility, start targeting short-tail keywords. For keyword research, we suggest you to use tools like Google autosuggest, Google keyword planner, SEMrush and many more. 

Title tag and meta

This is yet another Google ranking factor for 2022 which may skyrocket your website ranking in quick time. Still, most of the bloggers, SEO experts, webmasters ignore this factor and regret it later. We suggest including your primary as well as secondary keywords in the title and meta tags.

Here’s why

Including keywords in title and meta will help the Googlebot to understand the context of your content and also in improving the ranking of your site. Please don’t stuff keywords, make it look natural. If possible include an element of copywriting in your content.

Referring domain

Let us first understand what is referring domain is. It simply means the number of unique websites that have given a link to your content, web page or website. The number of referring domains is directly proportional to the website ranking.  

This means, the more referring domain you have, the better will be your website ranking. However, you should try getting a referring domain from high-authority websites that gets good traffic. Also, the website should be related to your niche to get maximum results in a quick time. 

Following are the ways by which you get maximum referring domains: Guest posting, link building, creating high-quality content, social book marketing, blogger outreach and press release. 

Domain authority

Domain authority means the actual strength of your website on a scale of 0-100. Higher domain authority means that your website is a good source of consuming information and might be getting more traffic as well. Nowadays, Google is giving a positive ranking to the websites with high DA and as PA. 

When a website has good authority, Google comes to know it is a credible source of information and it must be given preference over other websites. Therefore, Google always ranks those websites on top of SERP that are having amazing DA.

In order to increase the domain authority of your website, the following are things that can be done: Creating good quality content on regular basis, making more high-quality links and targeting the right keywords. 

Page authority 

Just like domain authority, page authority is an equally important ranking factor of Google in 2022. Domain authority measures the entire strength of a website, while page authority is about the total strength of particular web pages on the site. 

Domain authority can be increased by doing a bit of off-page SEO and page authority can be improved by doing on-page SEO. Elements like quality content, keywords, URL, internal linking can improve the page authority of your website. 

Spam score 

The next on this list of 20 Google ranking factors for 2022 is the Spam score. A low spam score is always recommended having on your site as it makes it look credible and authoritative as compared to high spammy sites. 

In order to maintain the spam score of your site, try to create quality content on regular basis. Also, make sure that you avoid any kind of negative SEO practice on your site. Too much negative SEO will ruin your site from top to bottom and you won’t be able to rank it on Google. 

However, publishing quality content can also help you to reduce the spam of your site. 

The credibility of the site

If you seriously want to rank your site on top of Google, then make sure that you create a credible site.  Generally, .edu and .org websites are credible in the eyes of Google. But beware of sites that use these suffixes in an attempt to mislead. 

Nonprofit websites may also contain reliable information, but take some time to consider the organization’s purpose and agenda to determine if it could be biased.

Conclusion:

Follow these 20 factors religiously and you will surely see a spike in your rankings.

If not, then contact us right now and we will help you with increasing the website’s ranking, DA and PA as well.

Also, if you feel that we are missing out on another important Google ranking factor then please comment your thoughts below.