The 2022 Google Algorithm Ranking Factors

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Consistent Publication of Engaging Content

It’s been four years since engaging content surpassed backlinks as the top factor in Google’s search algorithm, and while content maintained its proportion of the algorithm in 2022, links decreased. 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.

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Consistent Publication of Engaging Content

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 thought leadership content produced at least twice per week.

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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

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Keywords in Meta Title Tags

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. 

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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

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Backlinks

Google’s decision of where to rank a website in its search results, content should be your primary focus as it attracts links organically while simultaneously being the most important ranking factor in and of itself.

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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

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Niche Expertise

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”.

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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

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Internal Links

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.

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Mobile-Friendly / Mobile-First Website

If you want to reach visitors in 2022, 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

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Mobile-Friendly / Mobile-First Website

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.

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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-

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User Engagement

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

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User Engagement

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.

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Page Speed

Google has always tried to prize 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 page speed. You want pages to load as quickly as possible, no longer than 3

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Page Speed

seconds to receive full ranking credit for this factor. Although Page Speed lost some ground in 2022 because Google no longer gives extra weight to super-fast pages (<1 second load time) or very fast pages (1-2 seconds load time), quick load times continue to matter.

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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. As a corollary, if your domain is even vulnerable to being hacked—if, say, your site lacks an SSL certificate (indicated by the “s” at the end of “https”)

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Site Security / SSL Certificate

—it will lose ranking ability.   An SSL certificate is usually free and can be obtained from your registrar quite easily.

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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

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Schema Markup / Structured Data

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.

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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.

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Keywords in Header Tags

Including keywords in a page’s H1, H2, and H3 tags is a best practice that makes a small difference in a page’s ranking ability. You shouldn’t overdo this practice, but it’s worth keeping in mind.

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Keywords in Meta Description Tags + 19 Other Factors

There are 20 other factors  to make some difference in a website and/or page’s ability to rank – for example, placing keywords in meta title 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

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Keywords in Meta Description Tags + 19 Other Factors

improve, the majority of marketers don’t need to think too hard about them.

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