Nobody (apart from maybe Google themselves) has a crystal ball that can say for sure what these ranking factors for 2023 will be. But we can<\/em> still evaluate available data, look at current trends, and use official advice published by Google as a guide.<\/p>\n An important thing to know: Google uses around 200 ranking signals to determine where it will rank sites. But publishing content that\u2019s optimized for all 200 of these signals? Impossible. Fortunately not all of these signals are equally important, and you can optimize your content around the factors that hold the most influence.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s dive into the 10 factors that most SEO experts agree are the most important ranking signals for content marketers to focus on.<\/p>\n Quick Takeaways:<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n <\/strong> PS – I put together these 10 tips for optimizing your content marketing. Watch Now!<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n 2022 saw the launch of Google’s widely-anticipated Helpful Content update<\/a>. Which turned out to be exactly what it sounds like. Thin, promotional, keyword-stuffed content lost rankings in this update. And not surprisingly, longer-form, educational, thought leadership content<\/a> climbed in rankings.<\/p>\n Across more than 30 clients, we saw gains in 90% of our monthly reporting following the August 25th rollout. Our own website saw a roughly 20% gain in search traffic in the weeks following the update from an average of 2,500 google search visitors per week to an average of 3,000. And that number is still rising. Why? Because all we do is helpful content!<\/p>\n And the Helpful Content update just continued the recent trend from Google in focusing less on technical factors and more on user experience.<\/p>\n Last year, they confirmed that the AI-powered algorithm RankBrain is the third-most important factor<\/a> in deciding where a particular web page ends up in the search results. RankBrain analyzes user activity with search listings in an attempt to quantify their relevance and quality. For example, if a user clicks on a page that provides useful information and stays on the page for several minutes, this is likely to result in a higher ranking than a thin page that\u2019s not useful or has a high bounce rate.<\/p>\n Keywords are still important \u2014 you need to make sure you\u2019re including relevant keywords in your content in order to appear in the top search results for that particular keyword. However, Google\u2019s algorithms are now a lot more sophisticated at judging whether your content is really covering a topic<\/a> in a relevant way or just stuffing in a few keywords.<\/p>\n The really valuable thing about RankBrain is that it eliminates keyword-stuffed content from SERP top results. Instead, it ranks the content that provides the most relevant, high-quality, high-value content for that particular query. As a result, there really is no tried and true way to optimize for RankBrian itself. This video explains this in more detail:<\/p>\n\n
High-Value, Relevant Content<\/h2>\n
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