What Really Matters for Google Rankings in 2024

Introduction

The times when dubious SEO tactics such as keyword stuffing or link farming brought a given website to the first search results page are long gone. In 2024, Google’s sophisticated search algorithm has become excellent at distinguishing quality from non-quality, meaning that attempts to manipulate it are becoming mostly futile. Simply put, the most critical oath for Google in 2024 is a relentless pursuit of quality, relevance, and trustworthiness.

The Factors

Consistent Publication of High-Quality, Engaging Content

In 2024, the value of well-written content is the No. 1 factor for ranking on Google. The search engine giant has confirmed that it takes newly posted material ‘to the test’ to check if it meets the desired searchers’ intent. If the user behaviour shows that the test was passed and the material meets the users’ needs, it gets promoted. The general recommendation of Google is that you publish a high-quality article or post at least twice a week.

Keywords in Meta Title Tags

It is not news to experienced SEO experts that selecting keywords is a difficult intellectual work, doing proper keyword targeting can take 20-30 minutes for each page. Another element that once again confirms the relevance of these skills is the placement and amount of concentration of keywords within the title tag.

Backlinks

While not as overpowering now, backlinks still remain a big factor in Google’s ranking decisions. However, content quality should always be your first consideration - it both draws links on its own and is the most important ranking factor in its own right.

Niche Expertise

At least in 2024, Google has fallen in love with websites that can be perceived as niche experts. This is an array of 10 or more authoritative pages that are closely tied to a “hub” keyword, obviously found on all of them. You will find that these authoritative pages attract traffic every time Google displays search results for that hub keyword.

User Engagement

One of the greatest recent changes to the ranking algorithm is the incorporation of user engagement in 2016. To measure that, Google uses some highly sophisticated tech borrowed from its business detecting click fraud. It has made user engagement a part of its ranking criteria in a big way.

Freshness

While content recency always had a minor effect, it only concerned articles where timeliness was a crucial factor. This was the case until sometime in Q2 2023. Our data reveals that even the most transactional keywords were ranked higher if the content they were tied to had a newer publication date. This effect does not carry on to the most researched-upon keywords.

Trustworthiness

As you might have noticed in the last two years, Google has an increased focus on examining content to ensure the user does not receive misinformation or, disinformation. To optimize for this, make sure your content does not contain any even possibly provably false claims and includes citations from reputable sources.

Internal Links

Google cares about internal links more than any other factor on this list. These are often included in a conversation about hubs. The more pages concentrate the presence of a certain keyword in their title tags, and the more there are internal links linking them, the higher the site ranks for that keyword.

Page Speed

Google has always put user experience first and site speed is one of the most important factors. Your pages should load as fast as possible as every additional second of load time reduces your ranking ability.

Site Security / SSL Certificate

As the Internet has become more ingrained in our lives, Google has taken measures to ensure our safety. Sites that do not have a properly set-up SSL certificate that should determine their URL structure , that is, without an “https” protocol, are ranked down as “not secure” and should under no circumstances be allowed to be clicked at.

Schema Markup / Structured Data

Schema markup is a code that helps Google show more visual search results, such as snippets or star ratings. Google loves pages that use Schema markup because their search results become more useful to searchers, and they stand out.