For example, examine your site’s architecture, eliminate or reduce redirects, enable caching, and optimize images. You can employ several tools, including Google PageSpeed Insights to test page speed. It shows them which pages are related to one another and SEO Anomaly helps crawlers discover new pages. They can also pass on link juice to underperforming pages, helping them rank higher in SERPs.

By studying your competitors, you can gain valuable insights into industry best practices, identify gaps in your strategy, and uncover opportunities to capture a larger market share. Start by brainstorming broad, relevant topics and terms related to your business, products, or services. SEO is a dynamic field that demands extensive knowledge of algorithms, user behavior, and industry best practices. Gain valuable insights to increase your website’s visibility, engagement, and revenue.

Analyze Competitors’ Keywords & Rankings

Google’s quality raters are instructed to look at a site’s off-site reputation. Make it easy for Google to know WHO wrote a particular piece of content. In fact, Google employs thousands of “Quality Raters” to measure how well the search results satisfy search intent. If you want to rank for a keyword, you need to use that keyword on your page. But if it regurgitates information that’s already out there, it’s probably not going to rank well.

Structure your FAQs around common questions related to your industry, products, or services, and provide clear, concise answers. Manual penalties result from a human reviewer at a search engine determining that a portion of your site does not comply with their quality guidelines. Unlike algorithmic penalties, manual actions are explicitly communicated to webmasters through Google Search Console. Leverage tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and the Web Vitals Chrome extension to monitor your site’s performance in terms of UX and Core Web Vitals. These tools provide actionable insights, helping identify areas for improvement. RankBrain is a machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) system Google uses to process search results.

Google Ranking Factors for 2025 (The 10 Most Important)

And it’s hard to concretely argue with them because, again, no one truly understands Google’s complex ranking algorithms. But it’s not that suddenly your page will rank number one for competitive queries just because you’re making it very easy for Google to understand your content. “So obviously there’s a little bit of overlap there with regards to… Google understanding my content better and me ranking better for the queries that I care about.

If the domain has been in trouble with Google in the past through link spam or bad neighbourhoods it will be harder to rank. It’s important to note that Google doesn’t look at just 1 ranking signal. Violating the search engine guidelines harms your trustworthiness and can get your site penalized or even taken down entirely. You need to produce long-form quality content consistently on your website to keep the visitors flowing. So the bounce rate would be pretty high, but you’ve satisfied the searcher’s intent. Paul Hart, CTO at Spark’n, says “it’s really un-sexy but understanding and deploying cookie consent (and similar) is important for Google of late for data collection & privacy.

Therefore, depending on the search query, properly updated content may or may not get a boost in the SERP from Google. Since the launch of Google’s freshness algorithm, pages with trending topics may get higher rankings if they were updated recently with new, interesting content. High-quality and original content play an important role in Google’s ranking algorithm. Besides the relevancy signals mentioned above, Google also uses a special algorithm when evaluating the content relevance – RankBrain. Imo if the text around the image is relevant, leaving the alt attributes blank is sorta ok.

• Overall, contextual links’ inherent relevance and organic nature make them more valuable for users and search engines.
• Breadcrumbs also appear in search results in some cases, increases crawlability, and provides better navigation for users.
• When that’s done, you can start looking at site structure and the content on your pages.
• However you should not be worried about having the odd broken link.
• Title tags are one of the most important on-page SEO factors of your website.
• For example, you can probably find local results if you search for “Italian restaurant” from your mobile device.

If a website links to many competitors, it’s probably a directory where you can also add a listing. This will show you sites linking to one or more of your competitors, but not you. Reviews have also grown in their perceived importance for map pack rankings over the past few years. Reviews refer to the quantity and quality of reviews on your Google Business Profile and elsewhere online.