YouTube SEO Study: Factors That Correlate With Top Rankings

More specifically the number of internal links and quality of those pointing to a given page on your site. Although outbound links have been widely believed as a ranking factor this is not the case. Check out this image SEO guide and infographic by SEO Sherpa to learn the exact steps for optimising images for search engines. The Google sandbox is a temporary filter that Google places on new websites for the first 3 to 6+ months.

• The more high-quality backlinks a website has, the higher it ranks.
• Page speed remains one of the most important ranking factors in 2025.
• Understanding Google ranking signals 2025 helps website owners, marketers, and content creators implement effective SEO strategies tailored to Google’s latest updates.
• If impressions are how often you appear, clicks measure how many people actually visit your site.

#۶ – Negative Reviews

If search engines are answer machines, content is the means by which the engines deliver those answers. This tactic made for terrible user experiences, and instead of laughing at funny jokes, people were bombarded by annoying, hard-to-read text. It may have worked in the past, but this is never what search engines wanted. Just as a crawler needs to discover your site via links from other sites, it needs a path of links on your own site to guide it from page to page.

All in all, backlinks from high-authority websites are more valuable and will boost your rankings more than links from lower-rated sites. Acquiring these links sends a signal to Google that your content is trustworthy, since other high-quality websites vouch for it. After content quality, our next critical Google ranking factor is backlinks.

In SEO, not all search engines are equal

When that’s done, you can start looking at site structure and the content on your pages. Search engines are working hard to get a better understanding of a user’s search intent, to show that user the results that fit their need best. Related to that, they continue to improve how information is presented in the search results, which can differ quite a bit per search intent.

Take a look at the top ranked sites for most any query and it’s highly likely you won’t see sites seeding heading tags with keywords. Review individual factors include keywords in Google reviews, high numerical Google ratings, and the quantity of Google reviews with text. Research finds that 64% of agencies and 23% of local businesses spend time fighting GMB spam – meaning that those that do so have a definitive edge. Tools that show GMB profiles and business names on a map as part of a grid tracker can make this process a lot easier. Link building, for example, is a time-intensive and ongoing task, whereas a lot of work with reviews or local citations can be automated or outsourced, freeing you up to focus on other factors. We’ll go into the individual factors in more detail below, after looking at how trends have changed over time.

And that source material or citation, at least at the moment, still comes from search. Your content might be amazing to human readers, but it also needs to be communicated in a way Google understands. If you’re looking to ground yourself in modern SEO practices, this list of SEO statistics is a great place to start. Read on to explore some of the most relevant facts and figures that show where SEO is in 2025 and where it may be going. They’re constantly SEO Anomaly tweaking their rubrics for assessing content—not to mention the many outside influences. From semantic search to featured snippets to AI results, the space keeps evolving.