Google started to highlight dates in search results, especially for searches where dates matter. Google looks at how often you are publishing new content on your website and if you are updating old content. They use this metric to determine if your website is still alive and give a lot of credit to sites that frequently publish articles. Many studies have proved that the longer your content is, the better it will rank in Google. To determine the quality and relevancy of a website, Google uses more than 200 metrics. Read all about these and other off-page SEO factors in our article about off-page SEO.

Optimizing for these factors is the key to ranking higher, attracting more customers, and staying ahead of competitors. Next, we’ll walk through 12 proven strategies to improve your rankings in Google Maps SEO and get more customers through your doors. Whether you’re a single-location shop or a multi-location retailer, the right strategies can help you rank higher, attract more customers, and turn local searches into sales. Google Analytics complements your SEO efforts by providing comprehensive data on user behavior. You can track metrics like bounce rate, session duration, and conversion rates to identify how traffic interacts with your site.

Which Local SEO Ranking Factors Does Google Care About?

In fact, ensuring the “completeness” of your Google My Business listing has become even more important this year. In addition to the session duration, the end of a session indicates when the user leaves YouTube. If users quickly jump off the video after watching it, the YouTube algorithm will take a negative view and this will have also a negative effect on YouTube SEO. The session duration shows how long users stay on YouTube after watching a video.

• As this can influence rankings, Google typically takes steps to demote pages with over-optimized keywords.
• If you don’t tell Google the original page you want to rank by using canonical tags, your pages will compete with each other and this affects your SEO negatively.
• By adding schema markup to your website’s HTML, you provide search engines with explicit clues about what your data means.
• Tools that show GMB profiles and business names on a map as part of a grid tracker can make this process a lot easier.

Internal links

All it means is that as you’re doing research, you should only pull from reliable sources with high domain authority. To be honest, for your users’ sake, you should probably be doing this anyway to ensure you provide the most value. It’s also important to include terms related to the main terms people are searching for.

Google considers the distance between the searcher and your business when determining local search rankings. While you can’t change your physical location, you can focus on targeting keywords that include your city or neighborhood to improve local rankings. As we wrap up our exploration of the top SEO ranking factors for 2025, it’s clear that all these SEO ranking factors play a crucial role in determining your online visibility and success. The goal of ensuring your website is mobile-friendly should not be limited to ranking well in search engines. Mobile friendliness BHS Links is also about making the website more flexible and accessible, to provide a positive user experience, reach a wider audience, and keep visitors engaged to reduce bounce rates. Recognizing and catering to the search intent behind target keywords is fundamental to connecting with your audience and enhancing your website’s visibility and relevance.

The evolution of search results

How people search, whether as a consumer or business buyer, is changing. Announced in and given the nickname of the „Penguin Update“, it was integrated into our core ranking systems in 2016. RankBrain is an AI system that helps us understand how words are related to concepts. It means we can better return relevant content even if it doesn’t contain all the exact words used in a search, by understanding the content is related to other words and concepts. We regularly improve our ranking systems through rigorous testing and evaluation and provide notice of updates to our ranking systems when those might be useful to content creators and others. When you include structured data, it can give your content an additional opportunity to rank near the top of search results.