Google Maps SEO: 12 Strategies to Get Found Locally

The landscape of SEO is changing constantly with the change in technology and the way people choose to interact with the content available online. Thus, it becomes a tedious task for all our SEO enthusiasts, learners, and professionals to keep up with the changes and try to bag that top spot in the search engine’s SERP. Mobile-first indexing refers to Google’s practice of indexing and ranking a web page’s mobile version rather than its desktop version in its search results. This approach stems from the increasing prevalence of mobile internet users over desktop users. Click-Through Rate measures the percentage of users who click on a link to your site in search engine results pages (SERPs) out of the total users who viewed the link.

seo ranking factors

What Will the Top Ranking Factors Be for Local SEO in 2025?

A mobile-friendly website with fast loading times provides a better user experience and is favored by search engines. Use responsive design, compress images, and minimize code to improve site speed and usability on mobile devices. Schema markup, also known as structured data, is a powerful SEO tool that helps search engines understand the content of your website more effectively. By adding schema markup to your website’s HTML, you provide search engines with explicit clues about what your data means. Page speed remains one of the most important ranking factors in 2025. Websites that load quickly provide a better user experience, and faster sites tend to rank higher on search engine result pages (SERPs).

seo ranking factors

Mobile Optimization is Non-Negotiable

  • If that isn’t the case for your services, it’s not a local SEO opportunity.
  • During this period you should implement the above-mentioned tips in order to guarantee a high ranking.
  • It also gives you full control to respond to reviews, post updates, and optimize your listing — key factors in improving your Google Maps ranking.

We hope this post helps you understand the most important SEO ranking factors.. Mushahid is a Digital Marketer who ensures that businesses can effectively reach their target audience and achieve their marketing goals. Content usability focuses on making information easy to read and navigate. Well-structured text, fast loading pages, and mobile-friendly designs improve user experience and keep visitors engaged. These rankings are decided by complex algorithms that evaluate various factors to present the most relevant and high-quality results to users. SEO ranking refers to where a webpage appears in the organic (unpaid) search results for a specific query on search engines like Google.

seo ranking factors

You can employ several tools, including Google PageSpeed Insights to test page speed. It shows them which pages are related to one another and helps crawlers discover new pages. They can also pass on link juice to underperforming pages, helping them rank higher in SERPs.

seo ranking factors

5 Relevance of Links

seo ranking factors

In the early 2000s, heading elements (H1, H2, H3) were actual ranking factors. It was mandatory to add your keywords in the headings if you wanted to rank. It’s vital to remember that SEO isn’t only about improving rankings – it’s a wider strategy that focuses on attracting the right sort of customer to your business. And with more and more decisions being made right there in the SERP, there are even more levers you can pull that impact users before they hit your site. Once the full data is available, we’ll update this article to include more of the local SEO ranking factors that matter most for each group. Focusing on the factors in the table above should help provide a useful starting point for the tasks needed to optimize for local searches.

seo ranking factors

Effective off-page strategies help establish your site’s reputation and perceived value among SEO Anomaly users and search engines. Sites that engage users for long periods of time or visit multiple pages are ranked higher. Therefore both content quality and internal links play a big part in the pages per visit metric. I’ll explain what each of those user engagement ranking factors mean below and whether each of them can help you, or hurt you. A lot of marketers are still focused on backlinks but there is no point in building backlinks if you don’t have quality content serving your core customers. They’ll lower your ranking for it, too, because above all else, Google needs to keep its users satisfied.

A well-organized website structure and navigation help search engines understand your content while providing a better user experience. When users submit a search query, search engines employ sophisticated algorithms to identify the most relevant pages from their indexed database. With the implementation of mobile-first indexing by Google, the mobile version of your website is now the benchmark for indexing and ranking. This means that your site’s mobile performance directly influences its visibility in search results, making mobile optimization an essential component of your SEO strategy .

This development, along with the pursuit of the optimum result, has culminated in the constant evolution of ranking factors. The endless feedback loop of permanent-iterative update cycles is designed purely to generate search results that offer constant improvements to the individual searcher. The structure and complexity of ranking factors, added to the strong influence of user signals, is designed to produce the most relevant content for the user. When high quality sites link to yours, this tells search engines that your site is also trustworthy and reputable.