What is the most important Google ranking factor?

There is an extremely huge list of all the factors that are a part of your rank in the Google Search Engine. Google even has its own search quality evaluation guidelines that are frequently updated and worth to check out. However, having this big list it’s really hard not to lose your tactics and know what to look for to improve your ranking. So in between hundreds of all the factors, here are the main ones I would exclude that need more attention:

Page quality

Google itself indicates the most important factors of the page quality. How to know if your website can be highly rated?

The Purpose of the Page - Google cares about the growth of the internet and the benefits of the websites in it. Common helpful and beneficial page purposes include sharing information that could even be personal or social, sharing any forms of media, files and software to download, sharing original opinion or point of view, entertaining, selling products or services that are on demand, allowing discussions. Any helpful pages are most liked by Google and those that have a potential of spreading hate, cause harm or misinform users can receive only lowest rating.

E-A-T or Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness - an important characteristic for all beneficial pages. It includes the expertise of the content creator, the authoritativeness and the trustworthiness of the content creator and the website itself. The standard for the expertise depends on what the topic of the page is.

Main Content Quality and Amount - the quality of the content depends on the accuracy of the topic, entertainment or the ease of use. Content also includes the features and functionality of the website, so it is important to test them out. To create this type of content it should take a huge amount of at least one of the following: time, effort, expertise, and talent or skill. The amount of the content as well depends on the purpose of the page.

Website Information and information about who is responsible for the main content - high quality pages should have clear and detailed information about the website, so the users of it could feel comfortable trusting the page.

Website Reputation and reputation of who is responsible for the main content - for the high quality ranking in Google, the website should be highly rated in the well trusted review websites for example in Google reviews.

Website security

Google is really happy if your website has HTTPS - it even gives you a padlock on Chrome and indicates that your website is secured. It is good not only for the padlock, HTTPS comes only with SSL which creates a secure connection between the website and the browser. This is a big indicator that can encourage users to register to the website and even make a payment. As HTTPS is giving you more trustworthiness, it is also helping you to rank higher on Google Search Engine.

Another thing to note - from the beginning of July 2018, Google announced that Chrome will display a “not secure” warning on every website that doesn’t have SSL. It’s time to get one if you haven’t already!

Page speed

Another important Google ranking factor is your website speed. Starting from July 2018 the mobile page speed has also become a crucial thing for mobile search results as up to 70% of search comes from mobile phones. Google gives some tools to improve your page speed and lets you test your website on both - mobile and desktop - and find the main options how to make it load faster.

For WordPress users I recommend checking out Hostinger tutorials on How to Improve SEO by Speeding up Your WordPress Site and The Ultimate WordPress Performance Guide For 2019. As it not only gives you better ranking in the Google Search Engine but also improves your website’s user experience, the speed is worth working on.

SEO optimization

Well-optimized SEO will lead you to better ranking on Google Search Engine. The main question is how to start with SEO? One of the best ways optimizing SEO is doing a keyword research for your website. You will get to know what are the popular keywords, what people search for and how many competitors you have. Then you will be able to decide what keywords are the best to use. Google has a Google Keyword Planner that I recommend to use for keyword ideas and more insights.

Next step is optimizing your website with off-site SEO and on-site SEO.

Off-site SEO is anything you can do to get traffic from different channels as links, social media, social bookmarking and more.

On-site SEO is optimization of different parts of your website, including content.

In this case on-site SEO is more important to Google and I recommend to focus on it more in the first place. You can start improving on-site SEO by adding title tags and meta descriptions with your main keywords in it, header tags, that would make your content an easy-read piece, and alt text for images to describe images on the web, so if the image was searched in Google, it would lead to your content.

Here you can find 30 WordPress SEO Tips to Increase Search Engine Ranking that can be used not only for WordPress users.

External and internal links

Off-site SEO is an amazing tool to promote your website and improve its ranking by backlinking, however, while focusing on the external links, we often forget to do internal linking. Google uses both - internal and external - links to set the value of the website and if there are a lot of links to a page, Google will decide that this page is important and will rank it higher. Internal links is a way to keep your visitors on your website and also to improve the Google ranking.

External links that are leading visitors to your website are also very relevant here but it is crucial not to forget the quality of those links. It is important to keep them relevant and included in an authoritative site, links from low-quality domains won’t do any good here.

Social signals

It is important to know that Google is not identifying Twitter or Facebook shares the same as the links from the authoritative pages. However, all the higher rankings on Google are the ones who are getting more social shares than others. In this case it is proven that social media presence is also helping to get a higher rank on Google Search Engine, still, it is important to engage with your visitors and make the content easy to share.

To keep your content shareable add visual elements that would make people click on, use hashtags to make your posts more discoverable and know your audience - from this you will have to decide what social platform to use and what is the best way to communicate.