As a website owner, you know how difficult it is to get ranked on top of Google, considering the ever-increasing complexity of its algorithm updates. Despite the availability of paid marketing tactics like PPC (pay-per-click), it’s always best to secure organic clicks for your website. After all, it’s you attaining leads and conversions without bearing any cost. But how exactly to do it? SEO is the answer, folks. It is the practice of optimizing your website to enhance its visibility in search engine results.
For it, there are certain factors that you need to focus on and work on to rank higher on Google and other major search engines. User experience, content quality, technical SEO, and social signals are some of the factors that are relevant to it. But that’s not all for the ranking factors that Google considers while ranking a website on its SERP. The actual list is quite long, but to make it considerably easier for you to grasp every facet of the ranking elements, we’re going to discuss some of the most relevant factors that are deemed crucial by most SEO professionals.
Top Google’s Ranking Factors You Must Work On In 2025
It’s estimated that there are around 200+ ranking factors and signals that Google considers while generating the ranking results for a searched query. To provide users with the most relevant information, the search algorithm gives a certain weightage to these different factors and signals. While you can work all day tweaking and optimizing your site for each factor, achieving perfection in SEO is never possible and not even required. To aid you in working on what matters most, here we’ve compiled a list of the most important ranking factors of Google.
1. Content Quality
The crucialness of having high-quality content on your website will never fade. It’s the most important factor that you need to work on if you want to rank higher on Google in 2025. Regardless of how well your website is structured or how appealing it looks to visitors, if it lacks unique, original, up-to-date, high-quality, and relevant content, be ready to experience a downfall in your site’s ranking. Therefore, it’s advised to be consistent in posting high-quality content to indicate to Google that your site is a trusted source of acquiring information that users are searching for. Ensure you don’t engage in any kind of malpractice regarding content publishing, like using AI-generated or duplicate content, creating low-quality content, cloaking, hidden text, manipulating meta descriptions with misleading information, or doing keyword stuffing.
2. Backlinks Profile
Another Google ranking factor is backlinks, commonly known as inbound links. They are a sort of upvote, signifying Google that your site is a reliable and trustworthy source of information that an online user is searching for on the internet. For this approach, you need to focus on targeting websites with established authority and a base of regular visitors. Instead of acquiring more and more backlinks, focus on acquiring fewer but quality backlinks. While creating a backlink, aim to use keyword-rich anchor texts that send a strong signal to search engines that your site is worthy of being ranked at the top.
3. Mobile Friendliness
In 2019, Google made a significant shift in its indexation considerations when it began prioritizing a website’s mobile version for indexing and ranking—a process called mobile-first indexing. Additionally, the majority of online users rely on using mobile devices while searching for something online. With that in mind, you can’t afford to miss out on the potential traffic that you can secure by making your website mobile-friendly. To begin with, conduct an in-depth technical SEO audit to assess how your website performs across different screen sizes and devices. This way, you would be able to know the issues that might be interfering with your site’s mobile performance. You can use free tools like Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test, Google Search Console, and Page Speed Insights for more relevant results.
4. Website Security And Accessibility
Having a user-centric approach, at no cost, Google would think of dispersing the experience of a user. It needs to ensure it’s ranking a website that is easily accessible to both crawlers and visitors. Make sure your website has a clean code and has a robots.txt file and a properly made sitemap, allowing crawlers and bots to readily interact with your site. For security, your site needs to use an HTTPS protocol that works as an encrypter between your site and the visitor’s browser. Google marked HTTPS as a ranking signal in 2014 and in 2017, it started flagging websites as unsafe ones when they didn’t have a properly configured SSL certificate. So make sure you get an SSL certificate from a reliable Certificate Authority (CA) for yourself.
5. Website Structure
The whole of the framework/structure your website is based on is another crucial Google ranking factor. Having an ill-defined website architecture would cut short your site’s ranking scope, as search engines would not be able to crawl and understand what your site is all about. Unless required, have a clean and simple site structure free from too many subdirectories or subcategories. Doing so aids search engines to better comprehend your website’s content and helps it rank faster as well. Go for having a clean sitemap for your website that will make it easier for search engines to go through it more efficiently for indexing. Moreover, for all pages, use relevant URL structures and utilize internal linking as well.
6. User Experience And Behavior
Google also oversees the experience and behavior a user has with your website. It oversees the fact that how easy and enjoyable it is for the visitor to go through your website. Using untraditional scrolling techniques, heavy images, or unwanted visual designs is sure to affect a user’s overall experience. This in turn results in an increased bounce rate, reduced click-through rate, and dwell time for your website. To steer clear of all these risks, ensure your website has an optimal loading speed and responsiveness, allowing the visitor to readily consume the given content. Plus, focus on providing visitors with a well-optimized on-page experience. What you can do for it is include accessibility-inducing menus in your web pages and have a responsive site design that makes it easy for visitors to navigate through your offerings.
7. Domain Authority And Age
The term “domain authority” was first conceived by the SEO company named Moz. It’s a metric that gives your site a score based on its expertise built into a particular topic/niche. This score ranges between 1-100, wherein a higher score indicates more chances of ranking on Google for the targeted keywords. A great measure to build a higher domain authority for yourself is to acquire backlinks from reputed and trusted sources. In addition to it, domain age is another factor that influences your rankings on Google. Although it’s not a proven ranking factor, many SEO maestros still believe that buying and working on an established or old domain grants you more power to secure higher rankings on Google and other search engines.
8. Search And Content Relevancy
Another consideration that you need to work on is satisfying or fulfilling a user’s search intent. Every search done is different and you need to provide users with something that is in accordance with their searched terms. If you can convince Google that your content is adequately addressing the query that a user is searching for, Congrats! You have paved the way for yourself to get ranked higher on this search engine. To certify that your content adheres to these guidelines, focus on creating high-quality content and never work on something that’s solely prepared for search engines. Before beginning to write anything, have a clear understanding of what your target audience needs, understand the contextual relevance of the topic, and include keywords in your content that are relevant to the chosen category/niche.
Final Thoughts
Among all search engines available, Google is termed the giant. Calling it so is justifiable as it works consistently, bringing new updates and search algorithms every now and then to serve online users with the most relevant results. Google is all about serving users with the best answers to their search queries. By thoroughly understanding and working on the above-given SEO-related ranking factors, you can drive more organic traffic to your website and see it perform well on Google. Still, if you are finding it difficult to make your way through to the first page of Google’s SERP, DexDel is here to help you with it. By taking our custom SEO services, not just Google but you can easily top the ranking charts of all major search engines.