When people search for what you offer, they’re likely ready to buy — but if your business isn’t showing up at the top, they’re likely going elsewhere. Every spot you drop in the rankings means fewer clicks, fewer calls, and fewer customers walking through your doors. Three are many SEOs who have spread the misinformation that the quality raters guidelines offers a peek into what Google is using for ranking websites.

• Have you seen improvement in rankings after improving user satisfaction?
• BrightLocal’s study shows that 31% of SEOs deem links the most important signal for ranking on regular organic search.
• Also, use semantically related phrases (LSI keywords) to improve relevance and help Google better understand your content.

Which local SEO ranking factors does Google care about?

Like almost any other profession, you need to be equipped with the right tools in order to succeed. The following is a list of popular search engine optimization tools that are used by industry professionals. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a set of practices designed to improve the visibility and ranking of web pages in search engine results. Also, use semantically related phrases (LSI keywords) to improve relevance and help Google better understand your content. Topical authority is a website’s established expertise and credibility within a specific subject or niche.

Solutions for Improving Load Times

Google measures those votes and analyzes the quality of your links. Just enter your search term in the tool and look at Related Topics. These are trending queries that can help you add value to your posts. For instance, if you’re BHS Links writing about a global health crisis, you want to publish content that contains recent news and research. A simple way of finding the latest information to keep your content fresh is by using Google Trends. Google values transparency when it comes to businesses, meaning it wants clear, consistent, and easy-to-find information about your business details.

Dealing with Duplicate Content for SEO Optimization

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 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.

For more information on these techniques, check out our guide on How to Rank in AI Overviews. The Search Engine Cage team is on a mission to educate entrepreneurs. We make things easier for the small business owner, by writing articles that help them to understand SEO and Digital Marketing. If your site is slow, take steps to speed up your site by implementing website caching, compressing files, reducing the number of redirects, and taking other steps to speed up load time. Neural matching is an AI system that Google uses to understand representations of concepts in queries and pages and match them to one another.