Search engine ranking factors: What Are They?
Subject: Organic SEO
Author: Digital Tailors Bristol
Date: 15/07/2025
When some businesses attempt to improve their search engine optimisation, the business owner may read numerous SEO articles, such as those on Moz for example.
This is where you will often read that Google algorithms take into account over 200 distinct and separate ranking factors in order to calculate how strong a businesses SEO is.
However, before you think, ‘Our business doesn’t have the time to improve over 200 ranking factors,’ there is some good news.
Most businesses don’t have to concentrate on optimising all 200 signals; often, you can focus on the more important ones.
That’s unless your business is in a hypercompetitive niche, such as a solicitor’s practice within the magic circle.
In hyper-competitive business sectors, such as large solicitor practices, you may have to pull every lever to improve your business’s SEO.
For most businesses, however, we would say that the vast majority can concentrate on optimising the main ranking factors.
For example, you may want to focus on:
– Writing high-quality content marketing
– Building quality links
– Improving your technical SEO
When you do this, you can start to see your business lift Google’s organic rankings.
What are the leading search engine ranking factors your agency thinks of as the most important?
In terms of content marketing quality, we believe that the most critical ranking factor Google considers is the quality of the content marketing.
Google uses E-EAT to determine whether a page is of high quality or not.
For example, if the content marketing is high quality, has a very high Google EEAT score.
Therefore this normally means the page is written by an expert. It is likely to rank much higher within the Google organic search engine results pages (SERP’s).
We would say the most important ranking factor is content marketing.
What makes content marketing high quality?
The length of the article.
There has been considerable research into this matter, and many leading SEO consultants widely believe that pages with a much higher word count tend to rank higher on Google.
Therefore, pages that offer more helpful information, typically due to a much higher word count, and tend to rank higher in Google’s organic results.
However, there is no point in having 10,000 words of utter mumbo-jumbo; the written work must be of high quality, and you must dispense valuable and helpful advice.
Google has rolled out a significant and vital update, called the “Google Helpful Content Update”.
Essentially, if the content marketing is of high quality (Google EEAT), it will rank higher in Google results.
Additionally, if the article offers helpful advice it will also rank higher in the SERPs.
Google E-EAT
If each piece of content marketing can demonstrate that the author has a lot of experience in terms of what they are talking about, then this written work can rank higher in Google’s organic results.
The work should demonstrate real-life experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.
This is what the SEO experts across the world referred to as ‘Google E-EAT’.
Therefore, if you can demonstrate that you know your stuff and they truly understand what you’re talking about, this will shine through in your content marketing and help you rank higher.
Referencing
If you attended university, you would most likely have written a dissertation?
When writing a dissertation, you will most likely cite many different sources.
You may have been asked to use the Harvard referencing system?
Its important to know that Google’s original algorithm, when Google first created by Larry Page, was called “Google PageRank”. This first algorithm revolved around using backlinks to dephicer how important a page was.
The idea was that backlinks were a type of reference, referencing the way you researched your information.
This is exactly like when writing a university dissertation; you can’t just write 10,000 words of waffle. You often need to support your argument by citing the work of others, typically using the Harvard referencing system.
Now, you should utilise this for your content marketing, as citing other quality sources and researching information can help Google rank your page higher because it shows you have researched what you are talking about.
For example, throughout this article, you will likely see many outbound links.
The reason is so that we can highlight some of the places where you found high-quality information to write this article.
This, therefore, shows Google that the article has been adequately researched.
Good on-page SEO
A page could have a massive amount of text, this means that sometimes it becomes challenging for Google bots to understand what the page is about.
However, if you use the following on-page SEO methods, you are sending an obvious signal to Google about what that page is about.
For example you could use:
- Page title
- H1 through to H6 tags
- Alt text
- Anchor text
- Meta title and meta description
All of these can send a clear signal to Google about what that page is about.
Therefore, use good page structure and ensure that the content marketing is logically laid out using H1 through to H6 titles.
It is beneficial for readers as well using page titles, such as H1-H6, as they can skip the sections of content marketing that they are not interested in.
Unique, not duplicated
The text should be unique; it should not be duplicated in anyway.
What we mean by this is say that you were to say copy the text from another company, this can act to the detriment of your business’s SEO.
You have to be the best.
Put yourself in Google’s shoes for just a second.
Its job is to serve the best possible answer to any query.
Therefore, regardless of the products or services being offered, the shopper expects a very relevant page to appear on first page, in regards to what the shopper wants to buy.,
Now think of it from Google’s perspective,Google has millions, if not billions, of pages that it can choose to place on the first page.
Why should you choose your company?
Why should you choose your particular piece of content marketing?
Let’s say that you’re writing about car waxes.
Why should Google place that page at the top of the search results?
Which business currently occupies that position on Google right now?
Is your page better? Does it offer better quality information? Why should it rank higher than the current business?
These are the sorts of questions that the top SEO agencies ask. That is how they can supply a better answer. How can we offer a comprehensive answer to the customer?
For many people, the only way they purchase goods and services is on their smartphone.
People appreciate the convenience of purchasing items directly from their smartphones.
This means that your company website needs to be mobile-friendly.
Additionally, your SEO company should also focus on enhancing the user experience. They should make your mobile website version simple to use.
Backlinks
That is undoubtedly the case; if your business has a large number of high-quality backlinks, this can have a significant impact on your business’s SEO performance.
Domain authority
Domain authority is simply a score that is assigned to your whole website by an SEO tool such as Moz.It’s calculated by the strength and quality of your business’s backlinks.
How fast is your website?
You may be shopping around for a website hosting service.
However, we wouldn’t recommend just going for the cheapest price, that’s because how fast your website hosting is now affects your business’s SEO performance.
Therefore for your business to rank at the top organically, especially those businesses that rank at the top on mobile devices, they will have fast website.
We hope this article has been helpful.
Digital Tailors is an established SEO agency situated at the heart of Bristol.
We work with businesses of all sizes.
We work with a wide range of businesses, situated throughout Bath as well as throughout Bristol.
