Top Search Ranking Factors in 2023

Google’s search algorithm had constantly changed since its first Florida updates back in 2003. All-in-all, the search engine has over 200 ranking criteria on which it decides your website rankings. And regardless of how experienced and big, your SEO agency is, it’s near impossible to optimize for all of those SEO elements.

Ask any marketer, content creator, or SEO specialist, and they’ll tell you that there are some basic elements that need optimization; the rest will follow. And in a practical sense, that’s true.

High-quality content and backlinks, along with a positive user experience, are considered as the three vital factors for SEO success.

Why Do You Need to Follow Google’s Ever-Changing Ranking Algorithms?

As Google constantly updates its search engine algorithms, every brand, marketer, and content creator needs to adapt their SEO strategy to stay ahead of their competitors online. Following the search ranking signals are vital to keep your SEO campaigns alive and ensure the online visibility of your business.

As a marketer, adapting to Google’s algorithm changes helps you to gain: ● More Visibility ● Higher Organic Traffic ● More Leads and Conversions ● Brand Awareness ● Business Growth

In the early days of SEO, the emphasis was on quantity over quality. SEO experts included high volumes of keywords and backlinks with little to no regard for their relevance. But things have changed since, as the powerful search engine is constantly altering its algorithms in its single quest of providing users with the most relevant information for their query.

This blog will discuss the most important ranking factors that you should focus on in 2023 for ranking your content on the SERP.

Top SEO Ranking Factors

You can always start a paid search ad campaign and generate huge volumes of leads for your business, but that’s not a long-term fix. To achieve success and high visibility in the long haul, you have to work towards improving your organic rankings by optimizing the key factors that Google considers.

Let’s take a look at them:

• Core Web Vitals

The latest and most significant addition to Google’s algorithms, core web vitals, is an indication of the user experience that visitors have on your website. These core web vitals consist of 3 basic elements that determine the user experience of a web page.

Core Web Vitals consist of 3 main elements: ● Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) ● First Input Delay (FID) ● Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Optimizing for core web vitals is essential not just for ranking your site but also for online reputation management and getting your eCommerce site to rank higher on SERPs.

• On-Page Optimization

On-page optimization refers to improving the aspects in your web page that’ll positively impact site rankings. These on-page optimization factors are vital for SEO success and help attract and retain visitors to your site.

A major part of your on-page optimization includes updating the meta titles and descriptions of every web page. A well-written and organized meta description helps users and search engines to understand your content. This, in turn, helps in indexing your site on SERP.

• Search Intent Optimization

Google has been advocating for high-quality content as a major driver behind SEO success. For years it was about keyword placement and non-plagiarized content, but with the introduction of ‘search intent,’ Google has transformed the way it ranks content.

With the introduction of E-A-T principles, which stand for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, the search engine now looks at how your content fulfills the searcher’s query. Search intent means the reason driving the user to search for a specific query.

As a brand, accurate and trustworthy content is what you should aim for to satisfy Google’s ‘search intent’ guidelines.

So rather than just stuffing many keywords, the content that caters to the specific user intent with valuable information will be ranked higher in the SERP.

• Mobile Responsiveness

The volume of mobile searches has already exceeded searches by any other device and is projected to exceed 7 billion searches by 2025. Mobile search optimization is crucial for SEO because Google itself announced in 2019 that it would prioritize mobile searches over searches through any other device.

Mobile responsiveness of your site ensures that it easily adjusts to the screen size of mobile devices with all visual elements displayed. Mobile-friendly web design has a direct correlation with a seamless user experience and low bounce rates.

If your website is not fully responsive to mobile devices, you should hire a web designer or ask your SEO agency to mend the issues inhibiting mobile-friendliness.

• Backlinking

After content and user experience, your SEO strategy should include building high-quality links to your site. But be wary, as generating hundreds of poor-quality links will do no good to your SEO performance. These inbound links should come from a domain with high authority and be relevant to your niche.

If you have spammy or unnatural links to your site, Google recommends you to disavow those links so that they don’t affect your organic rankings.

Backlinking sits at the apex of your off-page optimization strategy. With quality links pointing to your site, it will automatically be indexed and ranked by search engine crawlers favorably in SERP.

• Featured Snippets

Featured snippets are the short excerpts that appear on top of Google SERP. These snippets occupy what we call  ‘position zero’ with the rest of the results placed below it.

Google extracts relevant content from a website source and displays it to the searcher in a concise format as featured snippets.

Does the question now arise how to have your content positioned in the featured snippets? The answer is simple: creating high-quality content with clear and accurate information that satisfies the user’s queries.

Having your content positioned in the featured snippets section has multiple benefits, including hyper-visibility, increased traffic, and brand reputation.

Make Your SEO Campaigns a Flying Success

These are some of the most crucial aspects of SEO in 2023 and should be focussed on for improving your search rankings.

Obviously, there are many different approaches you can take here to get improved rankings, such as optimizing your content to be displayed in the SERP features and tools. Doing so will improve your visibility and organic traffic. Also, many marketers will advise you to combine your organic SEO strategy with periodic PPC advertising to maximize results.

Brampton Web Design is a top digital agency for creating stunning websites and ensuring that they experience online success. Get in touch with us today to know more about how we can drive value to your business.