Latest 2017 SEO Ranking factors from SEMRush also show that user experience/user engagement is playing more bigger role in the SEO ranking. Off-site marketing strategy like link building are still very critical, and Content is more “King” than ever. Due to the innovation of A.I. (Artificial Intelligent) technology and its application to Search Engines, the bots are getting smarter to understand the page contents even without primary keywords being presented.

  • Still see that direct website traffic is the most influential ranking factor. That is, when many users go to a website directly it is a good sign to Google that the domain has high authority and value.
  • User behavior signals such as time on site, pages per session and bounce rate also influence website rankings, since they indicate website quality and relevance for users.
  • Backlink factors are extremely important for rankings. Except for the factors related to anchor texts, all the backlink factors share 5th place in the importance chart — NEW!
  • All backlink factors impact one another. So your positions are unlikely to change if you boost the values for one factor but ignore others — NEW!
  • Branded keywords will always return more relevant but less popular websites on the first position — NEW!
  • 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 your competition.
  • 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 impressive — keyword usage is one of the most popular SEO techniques.