Complete SEO Checklist for 2023: 100 Google Ranking Factors

100 Google Ranking Factors (Complete SEO Checklist)

The core of what Google is about, is bringing information to people. And Al is probably the most important thing humanity has ever worked on. ~ Sundar Pichai

We have published the most comprehensive guide on Google’s 100 ranking factors. In this blog, I’ve shared the complete SEO checklist for 2023 to rank your website on the first page of Google. This blog also gives you insights on new trends and strategies that will work great for you this year.

Brands can implement these 100 Google ranking factors or even download this complete SEO checklist for the organic growth of their online businesses.

SEO is a long race, not a sprint. If you are trying to grow your qualified search traffic, you have to combine your content marketing with your SEO efforts.
~Neil Patel, Co-Founder (Crazy Egg, Hello Bar and KISSmetrics)

Google’s 100 Ranking Factors to rank on First Page

SEO Basic Background Checklist 

1. Set up Google Search Console

Install this program on your site as it improves the efficiency of indexing your website and web pages. The Google Search console hooks site’s ranking by giving you specific data about index status, crawl status, HTML improvements, structured data, sitemap submission, site errors, links to your site, search analytics, and more. 

2. Install Bing Webmaster Tools 

If someone talks about ranking, traffic, or SEO, then Google is the most common search engine that comes in our mind. 

If you also think the same, it’s not wrong! It drives enormous traffic than any other search engine on the web. Most people even do not think about using any other search engine except Google. 

But in order to get extra benefits, Bing is also open for you. It has more than 20% market share in USA and more than 9% market share worldwide. 

As per Microsoft, Bing has an astonishing 33% market share which is around 5 billion searches on the web. 

Hence, you can install Bing Webmaster Tools, index your web pages, and improve your site’s performance on search. It will add traffic to your site just like a cherry on the cake. 

3. Set up Google Analytics

Google Analytics is free, and one of the most powerful data analytics software. It gives you an access to analyze the data in detail and with this, you get valuable insights. 

You can track the performance of your site such as session time, bounce rate, traffic, behaviour, demographic, geographic, and other in-depth detail.

You can also understand the information of your audience in terms of their age, gender, interest, device, and location. To improve the performance of organic search and marketing campaigns, marketers often use Google Analytics for their search analysis. 

4. Install Rank Math, Yoast, or All in One SEO Plugin

This section is for WordPress Users Only. You can install Rank Math SEO or Yoast SEO to do On-Page and Technical SEO. You can also use All in One SEO plugin for On-Page SEO that can be used along with the necessary pre-built plugins (Schema markups, etc). But, I highly recommend Rank Math as it contains the free features that Yoast SEO has in premium, and it has also proven to be an amazing plugin, even referred by market leaders.

5. Short Tail and Long Tail SEO Keyword Research

In one report of Ahrefs, it was revealed that 90.63% of the pages get zero traffic from Google because of not choosing the right keywords. Choosing the wrong SEO keyword can take your site to marshland. It results in either very little traffic or zero traffic. 

Apart from this, if your site is new into space, then selecting a short tail SEO keyword such as BUSINESS, MARKETING, ADVERTISING, MONEY can be super competitive, and it may take more than a year to rank. 

Instead of selecting a highly competitive short tail SEO keyword, you can choose a long-tail SEO keyword such as “how to make money”, “how to make money online from home”, or “how to make money on social media”. Selecting such keywords that are less competitive with decent search volume is accessible to rank and can drive enough traffic to your website.

6. Best SEO Keyword Tool to find the right keywords

You can use SEO keyword research tools such as Semrush (Get Exclusive FREE 14-Day Semrush Pro Trial), Ahrefs, UberSuggest, Google Keyword Planner, Serpstat, or Moz to analyze Search volume Keyword difficulty, CPC, Trends, Estimated visits, Rank difficulty, and more. 

Other Excellent Platforms to find the right keywords

Wikipedia, Amazon, Reddit, Quora, forums, and other online communities are excellent places where you can select the appropriate keywords for your blog posts.

SEO isn’t about ‘how do I get keywords into Google; it’s about understanding how many people search for information and finding a way to get in front of them.
~Danny Sullivan, Co-Founder of Search Engine Land

7. Create Profiles on Social Media Accounts

Create profiles on top social media platforms to enhance the brand’s visibility. With an increase in shares, comments, pins, tweets, etc., your ranking also improves across SERP (as social media engagement gives positive signals to search engine crawlers) 

Content Front (SEO and Content Marketing)

The best successful SEO is to prefer 100 % Quality over Quantity. And Longer content helps you rank better for your target keyword and brings in more long-tail traffic … a win-win!
~Brian Dean, Founder of Backlinko and Exploding Topics

8. Create Amazing and hybrid Content

Along with text, if your blog post contains screenshots, graphs, Interactive polls and quizzes, visuals, infographics, audio, and video content, then such posts are known as hybrid content. They create a fantastic appeal to the audience with maximum user engagement. 

If you create such a nice blog post, then there is a high possibility you will get a better ranking, more clicks, and more social traction and shares. 

9. Chunk Content to Maximize Readability

Do not clutter the sentences. Give proper breathing space. Do not use complicated words to impress the audience, as it can backfire. 

Always use simple words that are easy to read and understand. Your audience should not pull their hair while reading your article. 

Also, write in an active voice and keep sentences short. One sentence must not exceed more than 20 words or 2-3 lines. 

Use subheadings after 150-300 words where you can place the visuals after every 100 words, if needed. Also, try to put quotes, and add call to action to bring credibility to your content. 

10. Create 100% Original and In-Depth Content Only

Google prefers those pages to rank on the top, which has covered every aspect in-depth than the pages that has partially covered the topic.

For our OnCrawlers, technical sanity, freshness, content quality & int/ext popularity are the best way to rank.
~Erle Alberton, Marketing Specialist

Comprehensive blog posts have a direct correlation with Google’s ranking. That is why you should first focus on content formats. Long content (more than 2000 words) is preferred by Google more than short content. An industry study found that content length is also one of the most important ranking factors. 

Long Content gets more backlinks and social shares, thus also helping in giving signals to search engines to help it rank higher.

11. Google December 2021 Update on Product Reviews

Over time, Google started receiving feedback from users regarding the usefulness and trustworthiness of review content. Users told Google that they trust reviews with evidence of products actually being tested. They also conveyed to Google that they prefer to have more options to purchase the product. 

Therefore in December 2021, Google rolled out two new best practices for product reviews.

Now if you are writing reviews on any products, then, you should;

• Provide evidence such as visuals, audio, or other links of your own experience with the product, to support your expertise and reinforce the authenticity of your review.
• Include links to multiple sellers to give your reader the option to purchase from their merchant of choice. 

Now you need to describe key choices in how a product has been designed and their effect on the users beyond what the manufacturer says. How a product has evolved from previous models or releases to provide improvements, address issues, or otherwise help users in making a purchase decision. 

Pro Tip: To make on-page SEO more effective, include links to other useful resources (your own or from other sites) to help a reader make a decision. 
In short, Google product reviews algorithm update says, “the overall focus is on providing users with content that provides insightful analysis and original research, content written by experts or enthusiasts who know the topic well”.

12. Use Schema Markup

Schema Markup is among the most powerful evolutions in SEO. Schema markup uses a unique semantic vocabulary in microdata format to add to your HTML to boost your website rankings in higher SERPs. 

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13. Improve Site’s Dwell Time

Dwell time is the amount of time that passes when you click a search result and subsequently return to the SERPs. Google measures how long people are spending time on your webpage. Dwell time is an important Google ranking factor.

14. Update Outdated Content

If you have enough content on your website (over 500 blogs), then how many pieces of content a blogger should create in a week? 5, 7, or more than that? 

Actually, producing one content in a week is enough for your site. 

Globally recognized marketing experts like Neil Patel and Brian Dean also advise producing one new content in a week and updating at least three old and outdated content. It brings high engagement and traffic on search engines such as Google, and Bing. 

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15. Delete Zombie Pages

Zombie pages are those dead pages that are driving zero traffic and slowing down your page speed. If a few blog posts are having thin content and do not drive any results, delete all these pages as soon as possible. 

For example, e-commerce product pages with zero sales, Archive pages, Thin content or boilerplate content, and old services pages are also considered Zombie Pages. Keeping these pages on your site can hurt your ranking badly.

Always remember, Google prefers one strong page over 100 thin pages. 

In one experiment, Proven.com deleted 40,000 zombie pages from their site, and as a result, their traffic boomed by 88.3%.

16. Do Noindex for the Category and Tag Pages

If you are on WordPress, I highly recommend you not index the category and tag pages to avoid duplicate issues. These tags do not bring a significant amount of relevancy to the readers so that you can Noindex them easily. 

So, Noindex is the right strategy for category pages that add little or no value to your website.

17. Engagement, Comment, and Bounce Rate

If your content has a low bounce rate and gets more comments, Google receives positive signals that this particular content is super engaging and people are liking it. So, let’s rank it better. 

So, yes! getting more comments and engagement can hook your web page’s ranking. 

SEO is not just about the webpage anymore; it’s about the content within the apps and content within your featured snippets like the structured data.
~Barry Schwartz, Founder of Search Engine Roundtable

On-Page SEO Factors in Google Ranking

Now, the question is how to optimize your content for SEO? So here are the best practices for on-page SEO.

18. Include Keywords in the URL

In on-page SEO, placing keywords at the right place is very essential. Including focus keywords in the respective URL is another way to optimize your content. Though Google verified, it is a minimal factor in Google’s ranking. But still, it provides the right information to Google about your blog posts and more credibility in the eyes of users. 

Also, adding a keyword in the subdomain boosts the ranking related to that keyword.

19. Use Short URLs

The URLs of your blog posts play a very crucial role in Google ranking. Google officially verifies that the short URLs do well.  

Try to mention your pillar page and main keyword in the URLs. The ideal length of a URL limit should be less than 75 characters.

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20. Front-Load Keyword In Title Tag

Putting main keywords in the title has a direct relation with keyword’s ranking. It is one of the best on-page SEO practices. Suppose you want to write a blog post on “LinkedIn Marketing”, and main keyword for this blog is- “LinkedIn Marketing Strategy”, then suggested title for this blog would be: LinkedIn Marketing Strategy for B2B [2023 Complete Guide] (Here you front-loaded your title tag with the main keyword)

Title (with comparatively slow search results): A Complete Guide on LinkedIn Marketing Strategy for B2B in 2023

21. Make Short and Non-Descriptive Title

Though in an interview with SEJ, John Mueller said, maximum title length can be up to 65 characters. But do not make your title descriptive. 

Another most common on-page SEO mistake is adding an extra name after the brand name in the title. Hence, you should not add extra words after the company name. It can dilute your ranking. Every word you use after your brand name can dilute the meaning of search engines like Google.

22. Embed Title Tag Modifiers

If you are embedding modifiers like Top, Best, Guide, Checklist, Review, it helps to boost site’s ranking for long-tail keywords. One study also found that emotional titles had a relatively high CTR.

Example: Best SEO Tools for Keyword Analysis, SEO Backlinks, and Domain Authority 

Few brands also use Date, Numbers, Call To Actions, and Questions in their title to get more clicks. It is also another way of SEO to drive traffic.

Other Examples:

• How to do Email Marketing: Step by Step Beginner’s Guide 
• Best Actor Oscar Nominee 2022
• 26 Weight Loss Tips That Are Evidence-Based

23. Include Keywords in the First Paragraph or First 150 Words

Google crawls the content at the top of your webpage the most. So try to optimize your focus keywords and synonyms in the first paragraph or first 150 words. 

24. Optimize H1, H2, or H3 Heading with Keywords

Google considers H-1 as a second title tag and secondary relevancy signal to understand your page. 

According to John Mueller- a Googler and Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst says, if you insert focus keyword in H2 and H3 subheadings, it helps Google to better understand the page’s structure and content. 

Therefore, try to optimize H1, H2, or H3 heading with focus keywords to boost ranking and traffic on your web pages. 

Most CMS-like WordPress automatically wraps H1 to your blog post title. Hence, check your site’s code to ensure that the H1 tag is wrapped with your Title tag.

25. Optimize Images for SEO

Google has a dedicated section for image search in its search result. Hence, images are vital for an SEO perspective to impress Google and make a presence on the web.  

Most of the time, users search for something, and they hover the mouse into the image section of Google, especially the sites based on Travel, Fashion, Food, Design, news, and the like. 

Therefore, optimize the images well with descriptive file names, helpful alt text. You should also include a keyword-friendly title, caption, image description, alt text, and Describe content that talks about the image for better search engine optimization. You should make sure that you have an image sitemap. Also, make sure the size of the image is compressed to optimize the page’s load speed simultaneously. You can use tools like Short Pixel, Imagify to compress images.

26. Use Synonyms and Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) Keywords

You should sprinkle the LSI keywords in the title, description, and blog content to optimize your site for Google. LSI keywords are advanced level of on-page SEO practice.

You can use tools such as LSIGraph and Answer The Public to find the best LSI keywords. It will show the most relevant keywords based on searches. Based o content length, you can use from 20 to 100 LSI keywords to support the main keyword. 

Related Article: How to do Email Marketing: Step by Step Beginner’s Guide

27. Use External, or Outbound Links

External links are the hyperlinks that link to the pages of other domains. If you mention some facts referring to some authentic reports or research paper, then support that statement by linking to referring document. It brings more authenticity to your blog post. Because people can verify those particular facts on the spot, and you can establish trust in the eyes of viewers.

In any of your content, do not create hundreds of outbound links as it can increase bounce rate. Because when somebody clicks on these external links, it drives him away from your web page. Also, Google said, they do not use external links as a ranking factor. 

28. Use Internal or Inbound Links

Internal links are hyperlinks that refer to the pages of the same domain; means URL of another blog that is published on the same site. 

Using internal links gives the signal to Google about your site’s structure because it connects your content pages and boosts your site’s SEO.

It shows the relevance of your page to the other related pages. If the internal links are from high authority pages, it creates a higher impact on ranking than those pages that do not have internal links or great ranking. 

29. Bold Important Pieces of Text

On November 12, 2021, Google’s John Mueller confirmed that bolding important pieces of text in a paragraph can improve a webpage’s SEO. When you highlight any important text in a para, Google understands your content better.

30. Use Unique Meta Description

Meta Description is a concise summary that talks about webpage and increases click through rate (CTR). Google displays meta descriptions in the search results. Most web pages use the ideal length of 160 characters snippets as it is ideal for Google. 

Do not copy and paste the description from other websites. It is spam. Always use a unique and articulate description for each blog page.

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Off-Page SEO Factors in Google Ranking 

The most common and often asked question in off-page SEO is where to get backlinks? and how to do SEO link building?

 

 

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31. Build Powerful SEO Backlinks with Guest Posting

There is no SEO without backlinks. A backlink is the top 3 ranking factors of Google. Creating powerful backlinks through guest posting is the best SEO practice and a part of white hat SEO practice. You can reach out to those websites that allow guest posting in your niche and post content as per their guidelines. 

Most of the websites allow do-follow SEO backlinks. If you do it in the long run, it can increase your website’s authority and drive massive traffic. 

If you are a beginner and your website has less than 20 DA, try to approach those websites with DA in between 20-70. If you are a brand, you can reach out to the market players who are having more than 70+ DA.

The content you share with the world needs to offer a distinct benefit, otherwise, no one will care. As far as making backlinks are concerned- don’t build links. Build relationships.
~Rand Fishkin, CEO & Co-Founder of SparkToro

32. A number of Referring Domains

The number of referring domains or the lining root domains is one of the most important Google ranking factors.

The total number of linking pages also determines your ranking even from the same domain. 

Research by Ahrefs: 

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33. Do-follow vs No-follow Links

Google officially announces we do not count no-follow links. As it is the most controversial topic in SEO, but having a certain percentage of no-follow links is okay. But, a higher rate can have a negative impact and affect your ranking too.  

34. UGC, Sponsored and No-Follow Link Attributions

In 2019, after 15 years, Google changed how nofollow works. Google also added two brand new attributes, rel=“ugc“and rel=“sponsored”. Now the question is, which link attribution should your use?

Webmasters should use the new attributes based on links. Use the sponsored attribute (rel=“sponsored”) strictly for paid or sponsored links. Affiliate links are also considered sponsored links. Use the UGC attribute (rel=“ugc”) for all user-generated content.  

Use the nofollow attribute (rel=“nofollow”) to tell Google that you don’t endorse a particular link and would not like to offer them ranking credit.

35. Participate in Interviews and Events as a Speaker

Building relationships is an integral part of brand building. As a blogger or marketer, you should keep looking for opportunities in an event or appear in interviews. 

As you get backlinks, social shares, and opportunities to talk about your website and work. Thousands of people listen and search your website organically.

Linking out sends trackable traffic, it makes your site a more valuable and scalable resource.
~Rand Fishkin, CEO and Co-Founder of SparkToro

36. Boost Brand Being Podcast Guest

If you are doing a podcast, the people who are listening to you may not visit your site via a given link; preferably, they search for your website on Google. 

That’s all you need. It helps to boost your brand searches on search engines. And very soon, you will notice an enormous growth in your organic traffic.

37. Mention Influencers in Blog Posts

Mention influencers of your niche in the blog post, tag them, and outreach via email/social media channels by asking for social shares or link back to their site. 

It is also a fantastic backlink-building tip. But keep in mind that if your brand is not that big, try to mention small or medium influences, as they would be more responsive. Try to avoid mentioning famous influencers, as they generally ignore your email because they are already getting colossal publicity from big media giants.  

Linking out to other blogs is critical to growth.
~Brian Clark, Founder of Copy Blogger

38. Social Reputation Shares, Likes, and Links

You should have a business account on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, Pinterest, Instagram, and Quora. It increases your content’s credibility, likes, and social shares. The post reaches the maximum number of people where few of them link your blog in their upcoming blog posts. 

By regularly participating over some time (after 2-5 years) you can drive massive traffic and bring more sales from social media. 

The best way to get engagement on social media is to be engaging on social media. And 99.9% of great bloggers are not awesome on day 1. Their awesomeness is the accumulation of the value they create over time.
~Darren Rowse, Founder of ProBlogger and DigitalPS

39. Email Outreach as an External Influencing Ranking Factor

Email marketing is one of the most prominent marketing channels across all digital platforms. Through email marketing, you own subscribers list and have a direct connection to your audience. 

When you reach out to your audience through email marketing, they click on the web page links provided by you (in mail/signature), then it gives the external signal to Google that this post is getting more engagement; let’s rank it higher. 

Also Read: How to do Email Marketing: Step by Step Beginner’s Guide

40. Bookmarking and Listing

Social bookmarking and business listings are types of off-page techniques. Business listings are the contact details of your practice or business listed online. It helps Google know that your business is authentic. Social bookmarking helps you improve your site’s traffic and provides the opportunity to make your content go viral, and helps to acquire quality backlinks from authority sites. If both are done correctly, you get SEO benefits like faster indexing, targeted traffic, lead generation, generating high DA backlinks, and improving keyword ranking on SERP. 

If done correctly blog commenting can lead to hundreds of new site visitors and countless future link building opportunities
~Matthew Woodward

41. Google Link Spam Algorithm Update

In August 2021, Google rolled out its link spam update and conveyed a strong message by saying that“Focusing on producing high-quality content and improving user experience always wins out compared to manipulating links.” Google may not penalize those websites that were involved in heavy link building spam but will nullify all the spam links. On 24 August 2021, Danny Sullivan confirmed “The link spam update is now complete via the Google Search Liaison account.

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42. YouTube Channel

Video content is the most engaging form of content marketing. People like to watch videos. And YouTube is the king of video marketing.  

After watching a branded video, 65% of business decision-makers decide to visit the marketer’s site. The number is so impressive that it can give your website a tremendous reach and organic growth by driving traffic to your homepage. 

You should invest in YouTube and boost your site’s Brand Signals by doing SEO for Youtube Marketing. 

(Especially branded searches)

43. Featured Snippets

Featured snippets designed to answer the search queries. It appears on Google’s search results, and the content is automatically pulled from web pages in Google’s index AT #0 position as it appears above the # spot.
In one study of Search Engine Land, the featured snippet gets 8% of clicks. And I think this number is enormous to get organic CTR.

Steps to optimize your content for featured snippets

• Create a list of pages and keywords that you already rank for.
• Now, find the keywords and questions that are already ranking for featured snippets on Google. (Use an amazing Keyword Research Tool- Semrush (Use this EXCLUSIVE Link to Get 14 Days Semrush Pro Account for FREE)
• Format your content for different types of Featured Snippets:

Paragraph Format: Add a 40-60 words paragraph block in your content

Tables Format: Create a clear responsive table on your web page to make it easy for Google providing the exact information

List Format: Use Bullets/Numbers or Include your lists in H2 or H3 subheadings

Technical SEO Factors in Google’s Ranking

44. Google’s Core Web Vitals Update

In May 2021, Google announced Core Web Vitals update to be considered in one of the priority ranking signals, that combines existing page-experience-related signals, along with existing UX-related signals (mobile-friendliness, safe-browsing, HTTPS-security, and intrusive interstitial guidelines). Therefore, make sure to optimize your website that should include 3 specific web page experience metrics:

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Core Web Vitals were introduced earlier and designed to measure how users actually experience the loading speed, site responsiveness, and visual stability of a page. 

There are three specific web page experience metrics in Core web vitals that Google considers super important

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): The time it takes for a page’s main content to load (Ideal measurement is 2.5 secs or faster)
• First Input Delay (FID): The time it takes for a page to become interactive (Ideal measurement is less than 100ms)
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): The amount of unexpected layout shift of visual page content (Ideal measurement is less than 0.1)

Also, Google confirms that based on users’ behavior and experience, they will incorporate even more page experience signals on a yearly basis. 

It is important to start optimizing pages based on all the page experience signals. Based on the study in August, less than 15% of sites are optimized well enough to pass a Core Web Vitals assessment. 

Note that, you should have “0 poor URLs” in the Core Web Vitals, while improved URLs are even better, if not Good, in the Google Search Console. 

45. Increase of Visual Searches

You must have been optimizing your content based on searches in Google, but do you know, the trend to visual searches has been increasing and been analyzed to take off in 2023? 

So, it is super important to optimize pages for visual searches in Google lens results. Also, start creating “concept visual” content. Just like video, visual content is growing fast. A recent survey found that 87.5% of marketers use visual content in the majority of their content marketing efforts.

In order to optimize your site for Visual Searches, you should make sure

• All pages are mobile friendly (Run a mobile-friendly test for individual pages as it has a huge edge over everything)
• Images are optimized with traditional “Image SEO Techniques”. (Explained in Image Optimization section) 
• Your site and pages have high-authority. (Explained in Off-Page SEO section)
• Your pages contain unique, relevant, and 2000+ words of content. 

Optimization for visual searches is helpful especially for shopping, recipes, translation, reviews, Directions, identifying landmarks, nutritional information, recognizing similar products, and more!

46. Google Passage Ranking

Earlier, Google used to feature blogs to specific questions in its SERP. 

Now, in Oct 2020, Google announced that along with webpages, it will now index every individual passage from the pages. 

As users are searching for specific queries that can sometimes be single-sentence answers buried deep in a web page. Therefore, with this new passage understanding technology,  Google evaluates content sections independently from the webpage and will rank its specific passage in the result window.

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With this update, you get more opportunities to rank on Google Now! 

You can optimize web pages for Google passage ranking by creating long-form content and organizing the content into discrete sections. It means creating every page like mini web pages where all the sections are headed with H3 sub-headings.

Now, creating passages by including queries that are most asked in search pages will give you an edge to rank if answered appropriately.

47. Video Featured Snippets

According to Cisco, online video will make up 82% of all online traffic by 2022. Therefore, you should not miss out on video marketing.

You must have noticed video featured snippets in search results.

This answers the user’s specific queries easily and thus, you may see more of the video featured snippets in 2023.

The most important things you can do to optimize your video content in the Featured Snippets are:

• Organize content in the discrete sections 
• Optimize video for SEO with keyword-friendly titles, descriptions, and tags
• Upload a transcript to help users understand words accurately
• Create and optimize content specifically for Youtube
• Embed your YouTube videos in blog posts

48. Importance of E-A-T for SEO

Now, Google also evaluates sites based on Expertise–Authoritativeness–Trustworthiness. 

As per Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines, E-A-T is now an important ranking factor than before and they will spend a lot of time evaluating your site itself.

In order to optimize your site and webpages for E-A-T

• You should get expertise or should hire an expert in the field of the context because Google wants to feature content that’s written by legit experts in their field. 
• Your site/pages should be transparent in terms of author bylines, references/external links to sources, about page, contact page, privacy policy, and terms of service page. 
• You should have off-site mentions in your field, no matter it is linked to your site or not. In other words, get cited or mentioned on lots of other trusted websites.

Now let’s also understand how to do an SEO audit and improve your site’s health.

49. Identify Crawl Errors

A “Crawl Error” means a search engine tries to reach a page on your website but fails at it. Google divides crawl errors into two groups, i.e., site errors and URL errors. So, when search engines cannot view your page, then the page cannot rank anywhere. You can easily find crawl errors in the Google Search Console’s Coverage report. Google recommends using the URL inspection tool in Google Search Console to debug your page. 

You may need to discuss crawl errors with your developers to determine the cause.

50. Find Out How Google Views Page

Check whether your web pages have the title, H1, H2, H3 headings, and description with the focus keyword or not.

Also, check the keyword frequency, and LSI keywords on your blog page. You should also check whether your blog post has proper subheadings and links that are describing the content on the page you are linking to or not. 

You can review your blog posts to check whether it is mobile and desktop-friendly or not, before running them live. 

51. Make Website Mobile-Friendly

Today, more than 58% of searches are done on mobile devices, and every year people are spending more and more time on mobile devices. So, it has a vast audience and market share. 

Making site mobile-friendly means optimizing site for smartphones, iPhones, and tablets for better user experience. 

Mobile optimization requires site architecture design, site structure, and page speed.

Do not use too large, or too small CTAs. You should also not use too many popups, as it increases the bounce rate. You can check your site’s mobile-friendliness from Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test Tool.

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52. Use Optimized Robots.txt to Control Search Engine Crawlers

The robots.txt file (robots exclusion protocol or standard) is a text file that tells web robots (most often search engines) which pages on your site are to crawl.

The robots.txt plays an essential role from an SEO point of view. It also tells web robots which pages are not to crawl. Using the robots.txt file, you can prevent search engines from accessing certain parts of the website, prevent duplicate content, and give search engines helpful tips on how they can crawl your website more efficiently.

53. Find and Fix Broken Links

A broken link is a dead link (that no longer works). It happens when a URL is either deleted or moved to a new location; which causes the server to show a 404 error page. The Google Rater Guidelines Document uses broken links to assess a homepage’s quality.  So, broken links can really hurt a site’s SEO. You definitely need to find and fix them. 

You can find broken links from SEO tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, and Google Search Console or free tools i.e DrLinkCheck.com

54. Add Breadcrumbs to Improve Navigation 

Breadcrumbs are links that allow users to track their path from the page they are currently viewing to the homepage of your website. They appear close to the top of your page and reflect the structure of your site. If breadcrumbs are properly used, it can reduce several negative factors that improve the user experience on your site and reduce the bounce rate. Breadcrumbs in search results give users an easy-to-understand overview of where the page sits on your site. 

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55. Secure Site with HTTPS

Google officially verified that using HTTPS is a ranking factor. So, make sure your website has a secured domain name with SSL Certificate. 

The meaning of HTTP is the HyperText Transfer Protocol. It is a virtual process that transfers information from a website to the visitor’s browser, whereas HTTPS is the secure version of this protocol, where S stands for “Secure.” It ensures Google that the indexing is safe for the users. 

56. Check and Improve Site’s Loading Speed and Uptime: 

Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon says, on every extra second delay in page load, there is a loss of 10% of customers. The audience gets frustrated if your website has terrible page load speed.  

Research by Strange Loop shows, on a mere 1-second delay of page load time, there is a loss of 7% in conversion. 

If a website is having less than 3 seconds of loading time, it is considered fast loading. Furthermore, a site that loads between 3-6 seconds needs improvement, and if it takes more than 6 seconds then it is a slow site and has horrible user experiences. 

To optimize the loading speed’s performance, compress images (using compressor.io and tinypng.com ) before uploading them to your CMS. Also minify CSS/JavaScript and HTML, leverage browser caching, and enable compression (Use GTMetrix or Pingdom to analyze page load speed). 

If there is a regular downtime due to site maintenance or server issues, it can hurt overall ranking, or even your pages can get de-indexed from Google. 

57. Anchor Text

The words contained in anchor text (link label or hyperlink on the text) help search engines determine the page’s ranking. Different browsers will display anchor text differently. Proper use of anchor text can help the page rank in search engines for those keywords. Exact-match anchor text influences Google rankings. But avoid unnatural overuse of anchor text as Penguin may penalize. 

58. Submit an XML Sitemap to Speed Up Indexing

The presence of a sitemap helps pages to index on Google easily. It improves the visibility of your website. You can also index your older pages if it is not indexed. If the webpage is blocked in robots.txt or by meta robots “no-index,” then it’s better not to be in your XML sitemap. 

Use XML sitemaps as “sleuthing tools” to discover and eliminate indexation problems. If you’ve got a big site, use dynamic XML sitemaps, which means don’t try to manually keep all this in sync between robots.txt, meta robots, and the XML sitemaps.

59. Make Website Architecture Responsive

The architecture of your site has a direct correlation with performance and Google’s ranking. When you launch a new website or plan to revamp the old site with the new one, you should get the right upfront and well-organized bright settings of title, slug, and URL. 

A nicely structured architecture of the site helps Google access and index website pages. It also improves user experience and hence, reduces the bounce rate.

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60. Create SEO-Friendly URLs

Do not put a name, date, or sequence number in the URLs. It confuses Google and gives the wrong signals. The URL of the blog post should only contain the focus keywords of that particular web page. For example

https://www.example.com/topic

https://www.theblueoceansgroup.com/best-wordpress-hosting/

https://www.yourtravellingstory.com/best-places-to-visit-in-india/

The URL length, path, and focus keyword of URL matter a lot in Google ranking. Using 1 to 5 words in your URL is perfectly fine.

An example of a wrong URL is: 

https://www.example.com/product.aspx?ID=11526&IT=5f7d3d.

Searchers and Google do not have any clue what this URL is all about. So, try to avoid making these pathetic URLs. It hurts the webpage ranking. 

61. Use Structured Data Especially for Mobile Devices

You should use schema structured data in mobile SERPs to leave an everlasting impression on searchers. 

A nicely presented data with rating, review stars, and recipe images can boost organic click-through rate. 

Especially if your company is dealing in food, fashion, or any luxury goods, Structured data can increase web traffic. 

62. Use HTML5 For Video and Animated Content

If you want to embed videos or fancy animations in your content to make it more appealing, code in HTML5. It makes web page light and ultra-fast to load. 

63. Fix or Remove Duplicate Content

Duplicate content means similar content appears at multiple URLs (locations) on the web, which confuses search engines. Duplicate content is among the top 5 SEO issues. Google has put its Panda Update into play to tackle duplicate content issues. Hence if you have 5 pages with the same content on your website, none of your content will rank. To resolve this issue, one should use a canonical tag to the original source.  

64. Delete Thin Content

Do not leave web pages without content or with thin content. Google officially verified that pages having thin content could not perform well on Google. 

54% of marketers find it difficult to produce engaging content; 50% of marketers cannot create content consistently; 49% of the brands are not able to measure and analyze the effectiveness of the content. Apart from all this, 42% of marketers are not able to produce a variety of content.  

As per the data analysis and findings of LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter, 3000+ words content get the maximum engagement and social shares. 

Another study from SerpIQ and HubSpot finds that the sweet spot for the blog’s post length is from 2,332 to 2450 words.

Though the blog post length varies from industry to industry, the ideal blog post length for the finance sector is 2,100 – 2,500 words; technology niche needs 2,000 – 2,150 words; manufacturing, 1,700 – 1,900 words; sales industry, 2,500 – 2,700 words; retail requires 1,500 – 1,700 words whereas the real estate requires 1,800 – 1,900 words to get the maximum engagement and social shares. 

Home and garden websites need 1,100 – 1,200 words; tech sites, 800 – 1,000 words; gadgets require 300 – 500 words; whereas marketing and advertising companies like The Blue Ocean Group, HubSpot, Neil Patel, Backlinko, Moz need 2,500 – 3,000 words of content to get the maximum traction on Google and social media platforms.

Other industries such as Healthcare need 2,000 – 2,150 words; fashion, 800 – 950 words, and food niche require 1,400 – 1,900 words to get a better ranking and drive more quality traffic. 

Here’s another massive industry, i.e., travel and tourism. According to Statista, the best blog length for travel and tourism is 1,500 – 1,850 words get a considerable engagement and better ranking on search engines. Some of my favorite travel blogging sites are Your Travelling Story, Travel Triangle, and The Blonde Abroad. They are doing amazing in their space. 

65. Use HREFLANG for Multilingual Websites

The hreflang tag (rel=“alternate” hreflang”x”) is a technical solution for websites that have similar content in multiple languages. The website wants search engines to send people to the content in their respective languages for a better user experience. Also, using the hreflang tag for multilingual websites prevents the problem of duplicate content. 

66. Use Rel Canonical Tag

A canonical tag is a way to inform Search engines that a specific URL represents the master copy of a page. rel=canonical element (canonical link) helps webmasters prevent duplicate content issues. It specifies the webpage as the original source. Choosing a proper canonical URL for every set of similar URLs improves a site’s SEO because the search engine now knows the exact page as the original source (canonical). It can count all the links pointing at all the different versions as canonical versions. Setting a canonical is similar to a 301 redirect, only without actually redirecting.

67. Resolve 404 Errors and Create Effective 404 Pages

404 pages occur on Google when you delete a web page without redirecting it on 301. To resolve 404 errors, either you can permanently delete that URL from Google Search Console or redirect it to 301 code. If you don’t redirect links to broken pages on your website to relevant locations, you won’t be penalized or anything, but you will miss out on the link equity (link power). However, it’s not the actual 404 pages that hurt SEO, but the links that contain URLs pointing to the 404s. 

Also, set the default 404 pages to take back the user to the working pages. For e.g.example, set the menu page display so that users can visit the page according to their requirement, or show the latest articles/ trending Articles on the 404 Page display.

68. Set Correct 301 Redirects

These are the majority of codes you will see throughout your research. 301 redirects are fine as long as there are only one redirect and no redirect loop. 

When people change the URLs of their web pages, and they do not want to affect their rankings on Google, then they use the 301 redirect error code. 301 redirects move the link permanently to the new specified URL (Recommended for SEO). It passes between 90-99% of link power to the redirected page.

69. Avoid Using 302

If you want to redirect any Page URL for a short time, like less 3 months, you can use the 302 redirect error code. 302 redirects move the link temporarily.

You can see 302 error codes quite often on e-commerce websites when a product is out of stock. 

70. Fix the Common HTTP Error Messages

Fix the common HTTP error messages as they irritate users and result in the website’s bounce. Common HTTP Errors include: Error 401, Error 400, Error 403, Error 404, Error 500, Error 501, Error 502, Error 503.

I see more people lose rankings due to improperly transitioning to HTTPS vs improving rankings from moving to it.
~AJ Ghergich. Founder at Brado

Local SEO Factors for Google’s Ranking in 2023

The critical factors of local SEO are local SEO backlinks, localized content, consistent NAP, presence on Google My Business, Google Maps star rating for your business, and social media presence.

To deal with the local SEO, you can get the top local SEO tools and management tools for your business.

71. Search-Location of the Person

If a customer is searching for the best products and services near him, then he wants a quick answer.

Google revealed, “near me” has grown by 150% compared to the searches that do not include “near me.” Also, 74% of customers visit a store that day when they search for something local (Google Mobile Shopping Trend).  

Furthermore, as per Google, 20% of all Google searches done on mobile are now voice searches.

Now, the point is- Is your brand prompt to show up when customers search for your category product or service. 

72. Name, Address, and Phone Number Citations

Another, critical local SEO factor and ranking signals are NAP (Name, Address, and Phone number) citations.

Google uses NAPs to check information about your business. With correct and consistent NAP citations, Google and users find your business more bonafide. 

You need your NAP data to be 100% consistent everywhere such as;

• On your website
• On your GMB profile
• On business directories
• On local listings sites. 

In short, NAP data should be present across all platforms. 

73. Google My Business (GMB)

Another essential component of local SEO is GMB. Try to put the exact information you mentioned on your website about name, address, and phone number during listing on Google.  

But it’s a red flag to Google if the address listed in their GMB and the website are different.

Also, consistency in GMB is very important, as Google finds it more legitimate with all local info matches up.

To get reviews from Google in a natural way, you can go to the dashboard of GMB; there’s a card called “get more reviews” with a secure short link. You can forward it to the customers. It sends them straight to your business review page!

So there’s no need to worry about going through multiple steps to get your business’ place ID in a long URL.

74. Optimize Google My Business Profile

Once you have listed your website on Google My Business Listing, optimize your Google My Business profile with keywords.

Like I mentioned above, claiming your business listing in Google is super important for ranking in the local results.

75. Online Reviews

The sentiment of online reviews plays a critical role in improving CTR. Getting a positive review brings more traffic to your site (As Google ranks it higher). Apart from it, a negative or bad review can hurt your CTR and overall traffic on your website.

In one study of Moz, it was found that replying to a review (either it is positive or negative ) by the business owner increases the trust in the consumer’s eyes and finally helps the business to drive more traffic by boosting local SEO. 

The perfect example is the hotel industry.

Even keywords used in online reviews is an effective factor of local SEO. 

Another easy way to get reviews is to create a short name after you’ve claimed your Google My Business listing. All businesses who have requested their short name in Google My Business have a shareable short URL directing customers to leave reviews. (Google)

You can send out the invites to customers with a review link, where you can get maximum reviews on your site and get engagement with your audience. (Can even create a barcode and paste it in your office so that your customers/clients can easily access your website without making efforts to type the URL)

Another simple and better technique that Google has made for you- all you need to do is send this: https://g.page/(yourgmbshortname)/review. 

76. Several Local Check-Ins

If you have a decent number of local check-ins, then Google receives a signal that this particular business is getting more engagements as there is an increase in footfall. It increases local SEO ranking. 

Brand Signals:

Brands are the solutions, not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool
~Eric Schmidt, Former CEO Google

77. The legitimacy of Social Media Accounts

If your website has official social media business accounts on sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Quora, Reddit, Pinterest, or Instagram with decent followers, it may influence site’s ranking on Google. 

78. Social Media Engagement Signals

Likes, retweets, and comments coming from social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Quora may give Google external signals about the web pages’ engagement and may influence the ranking.  

If your blog posts are getting retweets and shares from the Twitter or Facebook accounts with huge followers and high authority pages, it carries more weight to influence the ranking on search engines.

Analysis from Search Metrics:

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79. Official Page on LinkedIn and Employees Listing on LinkedIn

More than 92% of B2B businesses are on LinkedIn. Most of the brands use LinkedIn to leverage their marketing strategy. 

As per Rand Fishkin, if your employees or partners have a LinkedIn profile then it is a brand signal.

80. Get Mentioned on News Website

Websites get featured by the new websites to get the highest visibility. Many brands even have a dedicated page of Google News Feed on the first page for branding.

Google Penalties

The high-quality Google updates like Penguin, Panda, and Hummingbird are the algorithms to provide the best user experience to the viewers. The Google ranking algorithm works and believes in a specific set of rules and regulations to reward legitimate working websites and punish the frauds on search engines.  

Google also deployed human intelligence to review and rate the sites and web pages manually. The ultimate aim is to provide value to the bonafide people for the best user experience. 

Successful SEO is not about tricking Google. It’s about PARTNERING with Google to provide the best search results for Google’s users

~Phil Frost, Founder of Main Street ROI

If you are on the wrong side of the Google algorithm, it may act as a penalty. As a result of this, you can lose massive organic traffic. 

List of Spams and Black-Hat SEO Techniques:

81. Cloaking and Sneaky Redirects

Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to human users and search engines. Whereas sneaky redirects drive users to a separate page than shown to Google. Both the actions are a violation of Google webmaster guidelines.

Another form of Google guidelines violation through cloaking is when you show full content to Google but restrict your users to seeing the full content. 

Cloaking applies to images as well in 2 ways. 

i) If you are showing different images to Google and serving different images to users. 

ii) You are redirecting users away from the displayed image.

In all the cases mentioned above, you can get penalized in two forms. Either Google’s algorithm hit the portion of your site, or it can severely affect the whole website.

82. Hacked Site

Most often, hackers always look to exploit websites. They inject poison, ill-natured content, and links to the websites. Commonly, it is cloaked and challenging to find and fix. 

And when Google understands, it penalizes the whole site, and demotes your website on the SERPs.

83. Hidden Text and Keyword Stuffing

When you hide some web pages on your site and use keyword stuffing, Google can quickly discover it. Google will penalize a partial or whole site for being guilty of using hidden text or keyword stuffing. 

84. Pure Spam

Many websites aggressively engage with the combination of spammy techniques, like automated gibberish, scraped content, cloaking, and more. If you practice these SEO techniques, Google penalties will affect your website either partially or completely. Once a penalty is applied, it will take months or years to recover. Over Optimized meta description, using multiple H1 heading, subheadings, and content lead into the keyword stuffing are some of the most common spam used by SEO people. 

85. Spammy Free Hosts

Free seems very fascinating. But we must understand how anything can be Free. I do not support the concept of “FREE HOSTING.” 

To save a few bucks you risk your entire site. Free hosting companies generate spam popup ads and other server issues that you can not control. 

Google flushes these sites that are on bad hosting. If this happens then all your efforts go in vain. You can check the list of cheapest and best web hosting services in the description.

86. Spammy Structured Markup

If you are misleading your content and not following Google’s precious snippets guidelines, Google will penalize you partially, or it can affect your whole website. 

87. Thin Content

If the pages on your site have thin content that provides very little or no value to the audience, will trigger the penalty. Auto-generated, low quality, shallow pages, thin affiliate pages, spin content will also hook the penalty and your website will be poorly affected.

88. Unnatural Links/Buying Links

To boost organic traffic and ranking, if you are involved in selling or buying links or manipulating outbound links, Google will trigger the penalty, as it violates Google’s webmaster guidelines.  

Paying for links not only violates Google’s guidelines but also violates Bing’s instructions. So, practicing black hat SEO techniques can have dire consequences for your organic visibility.

89. Other Link Manipulation Techniques

If you are building webring to boost traffic on your site, it violates the Google algorithm. 

Guest posting to the unrelated niches, manipulating link profiles by increasing the number of inbound links using link bait and switch method links, and buying reviews also trigger the Google penalty and affect the site severely. 

Google penalizes for doing blog commenting aggressively to get backlinks or using shady 301 redirect code with link exchange.

90. Never Get Involved in Auto-boot or Auto Click

Most of the greedy bloggers want quick ranking and they start using Auto bots. In many cases, to keep their clients happy, rogue digital marketers buy followers or bring auto-like, auto click, and auto comment. 

Because it is not a click and comment by any human but a machine-based engagement to bluff Google. 

It not only burns the brand’s budget but also ends up permanently banned from Google. Because in reality, he is not receiving any real traffic on his website.

With the help of Auto bots, if you are auto-linking and auto-sending Google queries, then Google will trigger penalties.

Dead SEO Methods and Tricks in 2023

91. Publishing Thin Content

After the Panda algorithm update if your content is not 100% original and comprehensive then do not expect any good results from Google. Search engines stopped rewarding thin content.

92. Republishing the Same Content with Different Title and URL

Now Google uses much sophisticated AI bots to read and detect your pages. So never try to use cheap tactics by republishing the same content on the same or different website just by changing the titles and slug of the pages. It will never work.

93. Buying Exact Match Domain

It is one of the most practiced things in the SEO world, but now it has almost ZERO significance. Even in an interview, Google’s John Mueller said that you must focus on creating a brand name rather than buying an exact match domain. 

94. Flat Website Architecture

Be very careful while creating website architecture mainly web page layout, pillar pages, category and subcategory pages, fonts, color, and index and no index pages. It helps Google to understand the overall content and its linking with the other pages. If you are ignoring them, then be ready for huge losses in terms of ranking, traffic, and overall brand visibility.

95. Creating Keyword Cannibalized Content Pages

Keyword cannibalization or content cannibalization is another outdated SEO practice in 2023. So, if you are still doing this, stop it! Otherwise, Google will devalue your pages without any hesitation. You will see a huge fall in ranking, traffic, click-through rate, conversion rate. and domain authority.

96. Keyword Stuffing

In 2023, if you think using aggressively stuffing keywords in the content can bring quick ranking and traffic, then it is not more than a delusion. Now, Google takes it as suspicious activity and they flag your content as unnatural.

97. Over using Exact Match Anchor Text

After the introduction of Penguin, Google has been better at identifying over-optimized content and prefers more natural-sounding anchor text over the exact match. Using exact match relevant anchor text is obviously a great practice of on-page SEO techniques but overusing can be lethal. Google can be offensive.

98. Buying or Creating Bulk Links from Directories or Other Irrelevant Forums

on April 24, 2012, Google introduced  The Penguin algorithm update to tackle wrong backlink practices by bloggers and other website owners. 

When Penguin was rolled out, billions of backlinks that were linked with millions of websites became MASSIVE WORTHLESS. 

In fact, link-building practices like social bookmarking, blog commenting, and web directory submission almost become IRRELEVANT. 

So, if you are practicing bulk link building from these sites or forums, stop doing it in 2023. It is an outdated SEO technique that can only waste your time, money, and other resources. Not only this, many websites were permanently blocked by Google for doing such fraud practice. 

99. Link Exchange

This strategy works as “follow for follow” and very popular among bloggers till 2016. But now, if you build links through exchange in huge numbers then Google bots will flag it as RED and may demote your site’s ranking and dilute site’s authority.

100. Slow Page Load Speed and Bad User Experience

Over 40% of the top 500 fortune companies’ sites failed the mobile test. So, leave a random website, even top fortune companies are not currently mobile-friendly. 

To tackle such a problem, on 15 June 2021, Google rolled out one of the biggest algorithm updates known as Google Core Web Vital Update. Google CWV task is to determine page experience score mainly on three factors i.e., largest contentful paint (LCP), first input delay(FID), and cumulative layout shift (CLS). 

Conclusion on Google’S 100 Ranking Factors, and Complete SEO Checklist

Do you want to share this infographic on your upcoming or existing blog?

Email me at [email protected], and I will give you the setup.

You can quickly analyze by going through the latest updated Google ranking factors and SEO checklist.

Now, I have shared all my SEO expertise, knowledge, experience, and research with you all to help your online business, blogging, and content marketing. I also warned you about the practices you should avoid on your site (Google spam or black hat SEO technique).

Now, it’s your turn. Let me know by leaving a comment about what you liked the most in the complete Google ranking factors and SEO checklist?  

And if you have any questions or queries, do let us know. We will help you out at the soonest! I reply to almost every comment.

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