The 2023 Google Algorithm Ranking Factors
First Page Sage began conducting a continuous study of Google’s algorithm 14 years ago, and for the last several years has published its results publicly. As the?largest SEO firm?in the US, it has a sizable data set on which to base its understanding of the factors that comprise Google’s search algorithm.?
Below is the 2023 update, along with a description of each factor and a summary of changes from the past year.
2023 Updates in Google’s Algorithm?
The updates and changes Google made to its algorithm in 2023 that differ from 2022 are as follows:?
When reading this report, note that certain factors such as Keywords in Meta Titles remain prerequisites for ranking. Optimizing your site for these factors will only improve your rankings commensurate with the factor’s algorithm weight; however, Google will disproportionately penalize your site for falling below a minimum threshold. These factors are: Keywords in Meta Titles, User Engagement, Trustworthiness, Mobile-Friendliness, and Page Speed.
The 2023 Google Algorithm Ranking Factors, Explained
Consistent Publication of Engaging Content
It’s been five years since engaging content surpassed backlinks as the top factor in Google’s search algorithm. The past year confirmed without a doubt that Google tests newly-published content to see if it responds well to the search intent of the keyword. If the searchers’ behavior indicates that they’re getting their intent satisfied through the page’s content, it is promoted. As a general rule, Google’s AI prizes?high quality content?produced?at least twice per week.
Keywords in Meta Title Tags
Inserting the keywords your page is targeting into its meta title tag has been essential to ranking since the late 1990s. While this fact is obvious to any experienced SEO marketer,?keyword strategy?is a rigorous intellectual task that can easily take 20-30 minutes per page. It’s also worth noting that the?placement and concentration of keywords?within a title tag are important. Ideally, your title tag would contain only your targeted keyword; but in reality, adding articles and adjectives around it are important for readability.?
Backlinks
Backlinks were the original foundation of Google’s algorithm, as laid out in the?research paper that founded Google. However, in 2018, they began to lose ground to the two factors above: Consistent Publication of Engaging Content and Keywords in Meta Title Tags. While backlinks are still a major factor in Google’s decision of where to rank a website in its search results, content quality should be your primary focus as it attracts links organically while simultaneously being the most important ranking factor in and of itself.
Niche Expertise
In mid-2017, Google began favoring websites that it perceives as niche experts. In this context, being a niche expert means having a cluster of 10+ authoritative pages revolving around the same?“hub” keyword. For example, the keyword “crm software” could be the hub keyword for a CRM company that has industry landing pages targeting “crm software for small business” “crm software for real estate” and “crm software for manufacturing”; and FAQ landing pages targeting “crm software pricing” “crm software advantages” and “best crm software 2023”. The consistency of the hub keyword across the pages of the website creates a kind of magnetism: the site attracts traffic from any Google search containing the hub keyword.
User Engagement
The biggest change to Google’s algorithm in the last five years is the increased importance of?User Engagement, which was integrated into the ranking algorithm in 2016. Google used to be wary of giving weight to an on-site factor that could be easily manipulated by site owners. But Google’s increasingly-sophisticated technology—borrowed from the?click fraud?detection side of its advertising business—has made user engagement a sizable part of its algorithm.?
User engagement is related to the #1 overall factor, Consistent Publication of Engaging content. Engagement, which combines bounce rate, time on page, and pages per session, is a good indicator of the content’s quality. Keep in mind, however, that searches have different?intents?behind them, some of which indicate that the searcher wants to quickly look up a piece of information; more is not always better.
In 2022, Google reconfirmed its commitment to User Engagement with its?Helpfulness?algorithm update.
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Trustworthiness
In the past 2 years, Google increased its scrutiny of content to ensure users aren’t encountering misinformation or disinformation. Examples of its efforts include its?Your Money, Your Life algorithm update?and its?joint patent with IBM?on detecting factual information in a document. To optimize for this new factor, ensure that your content is free of provably false claims and contains citations from academic, government, or other trustworthy sources.???
Mobile-Friendly / Mobile-First Website
If you want to reach visitors in 2023, your site needs to be easy to navigate on mobile phones and tablets. The standard used to be “mobile friendliness,” but Google has shifted to a?mobile-first?world, meaning it expects mobile visitors to be the primary target of your web design. Ideally, a desktop version of your website shouldn’t even exist. The site should look exactly the same on mobile and desktop: the layout should be fairly simple and the site navigation optimized for a mobile user experience.
Internal Links
Google put much greater emphasis on this factor, which is often discussed alongside?hubs, in 2017. The greater the concentration of pages with the same keyword in their title tags, the higher the site will rank for that keyword, as long as there are internal links connecting them. Publishing 25 articles on different aspects of a subject and linking all of them back to one authoritative page would be a powerful expression of that page’s value, and would confer higher ranking ability onto that page.
Note: The most comprehensive and effective SEO strategy in 2023 remains the?hub and spoke approach, which combines Keywords in Meta Title Tags, Niche Expertise, and Internal Links.
Page Speed
Google has?always tried to prioritize user experience?above all else, hence its investment in thousands of datacenters around the world so that it can serve search results in milliseconds. Your site should take a page from Google’s book and focus on site speed. You want pages to load as quickly as possible. With each additional second it takes for your site to load, ranking ability is lost. You can test your page speed on Google’s free?PageSpeed Insights tool.
Site Security / SSL Certificate
As the web has become more central in our lives, hackers have become more sophisticated. Google’s nightmare would be serving up sites that are harmful to its searchers. At the end of 2017, Google began flagging sites as unsafe when they lack or have improperly configured SSL certificates (indicated by the “s” at the end of “https”)—and diminishing their ranking ability accordingly. An SSL certificate is usually free and can be?obtained from your registrar?quite easily.
Schema Markup / Structured Data
A modern version of meta tags, schema markup is code that you can add to your website’s pages to help Google serve more visual search results such as?snippets. If you’ve ever seen search results that are longer and list out a site’s main pages; or highlight an important piece of data; or contain a 5-star ranking system or list of events, then you’re familiar with schema markup. Google favors pages that use schema markup because it makes those pages’ search results more useful to searchers. As a bonus, they also cause search results to stand out from the rest of the others on the page.
Keywords in URL
A remnant of old-school SEO from the 2000s, putting the keyword(s) you’re targeting in the URL of the page is still a best practice, although its weight in the algorithm is minimal.
Keywords in Meta Description Tags + 21 Other Factors
There are 22 other factors that our team has found to make some difference in a website and/or page’s ability to rank – for example, placing keywords in meta title tags and header tags, offsite mentions of your brand, and anchor text keyword density. Although a website that is battling a competitor to move from the #2 spot to the #1 should be looking at every opportunity to improve, the majority of marketers don’t need to think too hard about them.
Conclusion
In 2023, the complex algorithm that Google Search once maintained has settled into a shorter list of factors that require attention but not obsession. Owing to its continued eradication of low-quality SEO—an effort that first took shape in 2009 and is now all but complete—Google is much better able to fulfill its mission of creating the best possible search experience for its users by serving those users fast, relevant, and high-quality search results. What this means for marketers is that you must have?proper strategy?guiding your SEO efforts, with each page targeting a different keyword that a prospect for your business would search. Each page should be the best treatment of the subject you can possibly deliver. From there, links, engagement, trustworthiness, and other important algorithm factors should organically accrue in your favor.
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