How to Find Your SEO Ranking: A Step-by-Step Guide to Tracking Performance

Here are five essential SEO ranking factors to boost your web traffic in 2025. There is a lot of debate on whether social media signals impact Google’s search rankings. As search algorithms continue to evolve, it is also essential to stay informed about the latest ranking factors and best practices. Optimized content is another Google ranking factor that involves creating your website’s content to meet audiences’ needs and align with search engine criteria.

• Backlinks are one of the most powerful ranking signals and continue to be a top-ranking factor in 2025.
• These best practices include compressing images (which improves page experience) and adding image alt text (which helps search engines and users understand the visual).
• Back when search engines lacked a lot of the sophistication they have today, the term “10 blue links” was coined to describe the flat structure of the SERP.
• Your external backlinks are recommendations to your users and have to be of very high quality.

These instructions are executed via Robots Meta Tags in the of your HTML pages (most commonly used) or via the X-Robots-Tag in the HTTP header. Some individuals believe that if they place a search box on their site, search engines will be able to find everything that their visitors search for. Most people think about making sure Google can find their important pages, but it’s easy to forget that there are likely pages you don’t want Googlebot to find. These might include things like old URLs that have thin content, duplicate URLs (such as sort-and-filter parameters for e-commerce), special promo code pages, staging or test pages, and so on.

Create High-Quality, Linkable Content

These correlations can therefore offer conclusions as to which pages displayed in the top search results listings have features that are similar. Enter any domain, and we’ll show you top competitive SEO metrics like Domain Authority, top pages, ranking keywords, and more. Enter any domain, and we’ll show you top competitive SEO metrics, such as Domain Authority, top pages, ranking keywords, and more. Many of these searches include a city name, or the phrase “near me.” These users are looking for businesses near their geographical location. When users conduct searches using “near me” or “in (location)”, this triggers the Google Business Profile listings. Local SEO is a little different because it also requires using Google Business Profile.

Bing Webmaster Guidelines

It’s better to NoIndex these pages and gate them behind a login form rather than place them in your robots.txt file. As part of your on-page SEO process, you should check your site’s responsiveness using a tool like Google Lighthouse. Accessible in Chrome DevTools, as a Node module or from the command line, it runs a series of audits against a page and then generates a report. In other words, responsiveness is necessary for any website that values its search ranking.

Considering that Google’s index is now mobile-first, you definitely want to make sure that your site is easy to use on mobile devices. Either way, here are a few ways you can improve your site’s loading speed. Your first SEO Anomaly step is to benchmark your site’s current loading speed.

User experience (UX) signals encompass a range of factors that indicate how users interact with and perceive a website. They play a crucial role in SEO as they provide search engines with insights into the quality and relevance of a site’s content. It isn’t enough to “have a blog” if you aren’t using it to converse with customers. How your business is seen on social media has become one of the fastest-growing ranking factors since 2015. They should be; if they aren’t, you need an SEO service provider to whip your social into shape.

They don’t want to mess around with rankings based on a factor that has no real relevance. This applies to any social media agency working with small businesses. This helps build trust and authority, both of which boost your ranking. See what Google has to say and what you need to know for your SEO strategy.

Remember, you want to be the last click so users don’t have to go back to Google. When users get the answer from you (even when it’s a link) you become more of an authority. In other words, make sure when people search for your keyword—and they eventually find you—you are the last result they need to click. You provide such good information, they have no need to go back and click any other result. You may not be the first result they click (although that helps too) but you’ll definitely be the last. Instead of ranking for a single Holy Grail keyword, a better goal is to rank for multiple keywords focused around a single idea.