SEO guru (link: https://moz.com/ text: Moz) has released the results of its (link: https://moz.com/search-ranking-factors text: annual search engine ranking factors survey).
The survey gives an insight into which factors are the most influential over a website’s search engine rankings. It’s not hard and fast evidence of how Google’s search algorithms work, but it provides a good indication from the experts who work within those algorithms every day.
This year, in addition to gathering the expert opinion of over 150 SEOs, Moz correlated the survey results with its data on high ranking websites and pages. Together, it’s a pretty accurate guide to the things you need to consider when aiming for the top in Google.
Here are the results in brief:
### 1. Website links (domain-level link-authority features)
The overall number of diverse, high quality and relevant links to your website.
### 2. Page links (page-level link-based features)
The number, quality and relevance of links to an individual page on your site, as well as the internal anchor links between the site’s different pages.
### 3. Content and keywords (page-level keyword usage features)
The presence of keywords on different pages and within the HTML code of a page, in particular the title, body content and URL, and the use of variations and synonyms of keywords.
### 4. Page optimisation (page-level keyword agnostic features)
Lots of web page elements come under this category, including:
– unique and refreshed page content
– mobile optimised pages
– the user experience of the page – such as content length and layout, use of images and video
– indicators of the usefulness of a page – load speed, bounce rate, time spent on the page and return visits
– indicators of relevance – click throughs from search in relation to particular keywords
### 5. Traffic and engagement (engagement and traffic/query data)
The overall number of visits to your site and those from search engines.
### 6. Brand mentions (domain-level brand metrics)
The volume of searches for your brand name and references to it across the web.
### 7. Domain names (domain-level keyword usage)
How keywords are used in the domain and subdomain names.
### 8. Site optimisation (domain-level keyword-agnostic features)
Like page optimisation above, the factors here are similar but relate to the entire site, for example:
– Uniqueness and newness of content across the website
– A mobile optimised and/or responsive site
– Number of click throughs to a site from search results
– Load speed
– Amount of time spent on the site
– Error pages
### 9. Social referrals (page-level social metrics)
The quality and quantity of links and references from social media, with Google+ and Facebook appearing to have greater influence over search ranking than Twitter.
As you can see, inbound links continue to be the most important factors when boosting a site’s performance in search engines. This extends to links both to the website as a whole, and to pages within it. After that, unsurprisingly, comes keywords and content.
With the exception of links, pages continue to come out as much more influential than sites. A well-optimised page is more powerful than a well-optimised site. It make sense of course; as we increasingly ask search engines more and more specific questions, it is the individual web pages over the site as a whole that provide the answers. And you can’t have a great website without great component pages
Want to know more about how to tweak your website so that it performs better in Google? (link: https://www.superdream.co.uk/contact-us/ text: Speak to one our friendly (and jargon-free!) SEO specialists.)