In the age of AI, ranking signals actually matter more than ever. Google is looking for fresh, relevant content that they can provide to the searcher that’s accurate and up to date. If you can provide the information better than anyone else, your results will be shown, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that people will click on your website.
For instance, if I can figure out how to apply for a mortgage without actually going to the website of a mortgage provider and looking up a Blog, I’m going to figure that out however, when the time comes that I actually need to speak to a mortgage advisor, I will need to go to an actual website. So while you might not be getting as many click-throughs, the people that are going to your side are actually looking for your business and your service.
Google still rewards certain ranking signals and we’re going to go over those in this blog post.
If you’re trying to figure out why one page ranks in another dozen it usually comes down to a few repeatable signals. These signals include tools, tactics, and different Trends, and they constantly change but core signals can stay consistent.
Quality content
You’ve heard it before and I’ll say it again, content is King. This has never really gone away. Quality content is still very important. People still want accurate relevant information that’s up to date and pertinent to whatever they’re searching for.
What does AI look for in quality content?
People are looking for answers within the first 5 to 10 seconds of reading. This includes specifics examples, numbers or definitions. It’s written by someone who sounds like they have done the work and are authoritative. This comes back to the EEAT method, which stands for expertise, experience, Authority, and trustworthiness. People want to know that wherever they’re reading the information, the author has all of those characteristics.
Tim Emineth – Owner of Personal SEO says, “They also want to know of any updated facts or results change. So if something changes, make sure you go back to posts and update them so they stay fresh and relevant.”
Authority score
Your Authority score still matters. And while you probably can’t be a 99 like Google, you can get above 10. This is a useful short-hand SEO tool for overall site Health. It reflects how likely a domain is to compete based on its link profile, visibility, and Trust. In order to do that, you want to focus on:
- Building topic clusters so your site becomes known for a subject not just a page.
- Improve the authority and experience signals with clear authorship, business information, credentials, and any citations.
- Reduce any thin pages that might drag down your overall quality footprint. This means any light content or pages with very little content, or maybe just an image, need to have some context on them.
Backlinks
Backlinks still matter. They act as third-party validation. Not all backlinks are helpful, and some can be quite toxic; however, you can’t control who links to you, so you’re naturally going to have some toxic backlinks that you can simply disavow or ignore. If Google looks at your site and all you have are five high-quality, top-tier backlinks, it may not look as natural as if you had a thousand backlinks, 5% being toxic, 30% being high quality, and the rest being just average. That looks a lot more natural.
What kind of links should you be going for?
You want links from relevant sites in your industry or region. This means that if you’re selling real estate, you don’t want your link on a casino website. You want links that are earned because they are useful and provide a resource, attribution, checklist or comparison. Look for links with partnerships or sponsorships and local citations when they are appropriate.
Internal linking
There’s a reason Amazon and Wikipedia are so good at this. Internal linking means linking to other pages within your own site. This is one of the highest Roi ranking signals because you can actually control it. This helps Google discover other pages, understand the relationship between Pages or topics and past Authority throughout your site.
You want to make sure that links are contextual inside the body not just in navigation. If you’re talking about quality content, you want to link to other pages on content and how to write. If you’re talking about backlinks, you want to link to other pages about backlinking. It’s really to add more reference and information and authority to the page and for the reader.
Technical SEO
This is really the foundation because when this is broken, all the other content and links we’ve talked about above can’t do their job properly. This means that crawability and indexation need to be appropriate, your site speed and core web vitals need to be on par, you want to correct any duplicate content or parameter spam, fix any broken internal links and external links, and correct any poor site architecture, and fix any structured data so that it matches the page content. This might mean schema markup and other code that helps Google identify what’s on the page.
Branding and Trust.
Consistent trust signals include your name, address, and phone number across your site, a strong Google Business Profile, a clear about page, contact page, and any other authorship Pages like policies, Real reviews, and reputation signals, and a clean domain history with no spammy undertones.
If you need help with any of these topics, that’s what we do. We’d be happy to offer a free audit to tell you a little bit more about your website and how you can correct any issues, fix them, and launch a better SEO campaign moving forward.
