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Study Finds All Search Ranking Factors Feed Off One Another

Direct website traffic is the most influential ranking factor among 17 influences, according to the findings from a study released Monday. When those searching online type in a URL to go directly to a website, it's a good sign to Google that the domain has high authority and value.

Using a machine-learning algorithm, SEMRush analyzed 600,000 keywords based on 17 factors from clients in U.S., Spain, France, Italy, Germany and other countries in which it supports to determine rankings in top 10.

The second edition of the SEMrush Ranking Factors study puts a stronger focus on numerous backlinks factors such as number of referring domains, number of backlinks, number of referring IPs, number of follow links, number of variants of anchors and presence of target keyword in anchors.

User behavior signals such as time on site, pages per session and bounce rate influence website rankings, since they indicate website quality and relevance for users. 

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Backlink factors are extremely important for rankings. Except for the factors related to anchor texts, all the backlink factors share fourth place in the ranking of importance. The more popular the keyword for which the domain ranks, the more backlinks lead to the domain.

The study also found that all backlink factors impact one another, so a position will unlikely change if the search specialist boosts the values for one factor but ignore others. 

Branded keywords will always return more relevant content, but less popular websites on the first position.

The study also looked at security and new policies as Google continues to promote the idea of more web security. The majority of domains in the high-volume group have an HTTPS version. But, in the low-volume keyword groups the adoption rate is not so high. So implementing HTTPS would be a strong advantage against competition for low-volume keywords.

The on-page SEO factors such as the presence of keywords in title, meta description and body of the text proved to be significantly less influential than other factors; however, the adoption rate is high, with keyword use being one of the most popular SEO techniques.

The top 10 of the 17 ranking factors in order of importance include direct website visits, time on site, pages per session, bounce rate, total referring domains, total backlinks, total referring IPs, total follow backlinks, content length, and website security.

Interestingly, the findings show that long content tends to rank higher for keywords with higher volume. In fact, the pages that rank for highly popular keywords have on average 1.5 times more content than the pages in the low-volume segment.

 

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