What Google looks at when it ranks your website.

What Google actually says

Word to the wiseThere’s no official list of ranking factors with weights against them. Google uses lots of signals, changes them regularly and keeps the detail to itself. Any “top 10 ranking factors” list is someone’s opinion, including the one we used to have on this website.

What Google does publish is Search Essentials: the technical basics a page needs to appear at all, the spam policies that can get you removed, and the best practices that help. Source: Google. Everything below comes from that and Google’s other documentation.

Helpful, people-first content

Google says its ranking systems are designed to put helpful, reliable information made for people ahead of content made to manipulate rankings. Source: Google. In practice, a helpful page:

• Answers the question someone searched, properly, without making them dig for it.
• Shows real knowledge. Your own experience, examples and photos of your own work all help.
• Makes it clear who wrote it and who’s behind the business.
• Leaves the reader feeling they don’t need to search again.

Pages written mainly to squeeze in keywords, or rewritten from other sites without adding anything, are exactly what Google is trying to push down.

Using the words people search with

Google recommends using the words people would use to look for your content, and putting them in prominent places like the page title, main heading and link text. Source: Google.

That doesn’t mean repeating a phrase over and over. Keyword stuffing is against Google’s spam policies. Source: Google. Write naturally, and make each page clearly about one thing.

Making sure Google can find your pages

A page can’t rank if Google can’t find it, crawl it and index it. The basics:

• Link to every important page from somewhere else on your site.
• Have an XML sitemap and submit it in Google Search Console.
• Don’t block pages you want found with robots.txt or a noindex tag. It happens more often than you’d think when a new website goes live.
• Use HTTPS, so your site is secure.

Google Search Console is free. It shows which of your pages are indexed, and why any others aren’t. Source: Google.

Links from other websites

Google says it uses links as a signal when working out how relevant a page is, and to find new pages. Source: Google. A genuine link from a respected local or industry website is worth far more effort than a pile of links from sites nobody visits. Buying links, or swapping them in bulk, breaks Google’s spam policies.

Links within your own site matter too. Clear, descriptive link text, rather than “click here”, helps people and Google understand where a link goes.

Page experience

Google says its ranking systems reward pages that give a good page experience, and that Core Web Vitals are part of that. Source: Google. Its “good” targets are:

• Loading (LCP): the main content appears within 2.5 seconds.
• Responsiveness (INP): the page reacts to taps and clicks within 200 milliseconds.
• Visual stability (CLS): a score of 0.1 or less, so things don’t jump about while the page loads.

Google also says relevance comes first: a great page experience won’t lift a page that doesn’t answer the search. Source: Google. Treat speed as something you shouldn’t lose points on, not a shortcut to the top.

Google mainly uses the mobile version of your site when it indexes and ranks it, so check your pages on a phone, not just a laptop. Source: Google.

Location

For searches like “electrician” or “web design Widnes”, where the searcher is matters, and Google shows local results based mainly on relevance, distance and prominence. Our guides to local SEO and getting on Google Maps go through it.

What about AI search?

Google says the same SEO best practices apply to its AI features, like AI Overviews and AI Mode, and that there are no extra requirements to appear in them. Source: Google. Clear, helpful pages that answer questions directly are the ones that get picked up, by Google and by other AI assistants.

Things you can safely ignore

• Meta keywords. Google doesn’t use the keywords meta tag in ranking. Source: Google.
• A magic word count. Google says the length of content alone doesn’t matter for ranking. Write as much as the topic needs, and no more. Source: Google.
• Keywords in your domain name. Google’s starter guide says they have hardly any effect. Source: Google.
• An “E-E-A-T score”. Google says E-E-A-T isn’t a ranking factor in itself. It describes what trustworthy content looks like, which is a different thing. Source: Google.
• Posting for the sake of it. Freshness matters for some searches, like news, but one useful page beats ten thin ones.

Getting help

This is the everyday work of our SEO service. If you’d like someone to look at why your site isn’t showing up, get in touch. Our free written website review covers most of what’s on this page.