SEO Ranking 2025: Top Factors to Keep in Mind to Shine in SERPs

In 2025, appearing high in search engine result pages (SERPs) means staying competitive. As you should know, sites that take a high search engine rank position tend to attract more clicks and traffic. Respectively, they have more chances for conversions and can facilitate faster business growth in the long run. And that’s where search engine optimization steps in.

Actively implementing the best optimization practices can help you increase SEO rankings and fuel your business for growth and success. Yet, defining which steps you need to take, in particular, can feel rather overwhelming, especially since ranking factors change rather frequently.

What Is SEO Ranking and How Is It Determined?

In a nutshell, an SEO ranking is a specific position your site takes in SERPs for a relevant query. The higher it is, the more visible your site is, and the more organic traffic can flow to it.

The difficulty here is that your SEO position is determined by many things. There are a few key factors that Google uses to determine your position in SERPs: quality, relevance, and meaning. Additionally, there are over 200 other things that also affect your positions both directly and indirectly.

Furthermore, Google's algorithms are updated regularly to introduce new trends. That’s why it’s pivotal to know about the top SEO ranking factors persisting at the moment to make your optimization strategy effective.

9 Factors to Consider to Improve Your SEO Ranking in 2025

As you now know, watching emerging trends and dominating factors is crucial if you want to hit higher search engine rankings. So, what major things determine your SERP positions in 2025? - Below is a detailed overview of each.

1. Quality Content That Brings Value

When determining your Google SEO ranking for a particular keyword, the very first thing algorithms consider is the quality and relevance of your content.

Google’s core goal is to bring users the most valuable results that perfectly match their intent. To do this, Google has implemented its E-E-A-T quality rater guidelines:

• Expertise
• Experience
• Authoritativeness
• Trustworthiness

This concept lies at the heart of Google’s search rater guidelines in 2025. It implies that the engine will prioritize quality content that demonstrates topical authority, depth, and freshness. In order to meet this factor, businesses need to research their audiences and competitors more deeply, analyze top Google searches to be aware of trends, and leverage insights gained from their research to produce intent-driven, unique, and high-value content that will actually answer users’ queries.

2. Quality Backlinks Above Bulk Backlinks

Along with the quality of content, backlinks have long been among the primary things determining your Google SEO ranking. In a nutshell, they act as votes of trust, showing search engines and users that your content is high quality and trustworthy. They also usually expand your traffic sources, bringing new audiences from donor sites right to your doorstep. And they remain important in 2025, too. However, now, the focus is on the quality of your links rather than quantity.

For a better understanding, a backlink is considered high-quality if it:

• Is received from a trustworthy and well-respected website.
• Is a dofollow backlink.
• Placed within the body text on a page.
• Is relevant to your topic and niche.
• Is linked with a relevant anchor text.

On the other hand, a backlink is commonly considered bad if it comes from a low-grade site and is irrelevant to your content. These can greatly harm your domain rating–a metric that measures the strengths of your backlink profile.

Although the domain rating metric itself isn’t a direct factor affecting your SEO ranking, the quality of your backlinks signals Google about the trustworthiness of your site and content. Hence, the more backlinks your website receives from good sources, the higher you can appear in results.

In order to use this in your ranking SEO strategy, you need to focus on quality link-building tactics and continuously monitor and improve your backlink health. All you need to do is find the best backlink checker tool for you and assess your backlink profile with its help to detect any spam links, errors, and areas for improvement.

3. User Experience

The third important thing impacting your SEO position is user experience (UX). These days, Google wants users not only to find content that matches their needs but also to receive a positive experience while consuming this content. It rewards such sites by taking them higher in SERPs.

Google outlines several primary page experience signals:

• Mobile-friendliness and design responsiveness.
• Adherence to Core Web Vitals (loading speed, page interactivity, and stability).
• Site security is ensured by an HTTPS protocol.
• A lack of intrusive interstitials, such as pop-ups.

These four things are what determines UX in the first place. So, if you want to rank high in SERPs, it’s crucial to assess your site based on these components and fix any errors that might be there.

4. Technical SEO

Speaking about user experience, it’s impossible to omit another direct point affecting SEO rankings–technical SEO. A lack of technical optimization can lead to a range of on-page errors that greatly hinder UX. These include slow loading times, broken links, duplicate content, etc. Detecting these mistakes early and fixing them is pivotal for creating better experiences for your visitors.

Additionally, a lack of technical optimization can affect your SEO rankings by creating crawling and indexing issues. For example, creating and submitting sitemaps or using robots.txt files can help you communicate to Google which pages should be crawled and indexed and which shouldn’t.

5. Keyword Optimization

Search engine algorithms use keywords to understand what your content is about and match it to the most relevant user queries. Respectively, keyword optimization has always been and still is one of the primary factors determining your positions in SERPs.

In order to meet this, businesses need to target relevant and popular keywords that naturally fit into their content and distribute them through their title tags, meta descriptions, URLs, body text, image alt text, and other on-site elements. It’s important to keep the number of keywords moderate and ensure they look natural so as not to hinder user experience. Also, it’s important to continuously monitor your target keyword ranking to assess and refine your strategy's effectiveness.

Additionally, in 2025, it becomes even more important to keep user intent in mind. If you want to get higher in SERPs, you must produce content that is the most relevant to your target query and that answers users’ questions best.

6. Local SEO

Local SEO is a part of optimization that aims to make you visible in local searches. This type of optimization is pivotal for every business with a physical location and who wants to drive offline visitors. Yet, it also matters for online brands looking to expand their reach, boost trust and credibility, and enhance their positions in SERPs.

In order to benefit from local optimization, you need to create a Google Business profile and fill it with up-to-date business information. Also, you should target long-tail, geo-specific keywords for higher keyword ranking. You can also use IP geolocation tools to gain valuable insights into your audience’s geographic profiles and use this data for hyper-localized marketing with local content that resonates.

7. Visual and Voiced Optimization

The next one on our list of SEO ranking factors is a rather new trend emerging due to the rise of visual and voice search. Voice searches rid users of the necessity to type their queries in search engines. This means the need for an entirely different optimization approach. And due to the popularity of such searches, ranking for them also impacts your overall discoverability in SERPs.

In order to tap into this new trend, businesses need to optimize their content for these trending search types. They need to embrace long-tail keywords, make their content more conversational, and implement FAQ pages and sections to be discovered by voice. To get visual results, you need to integrate quality images and infographics into your content and implement image SEO practices, such as adding descriptive alt texts using keywords.

8. AI Search

Another emerging trend to know about is the rise of AI-powered search. Since the introduction of Google’s new SERP feature–AI Overview, AI optimization has become a hot topic in the world of SEO. In order to get featured at the top of the page in AI-generated results overview, you need to adopt the following tactics:

• Target natural, long-tail queries and optimize your content for them.
• Make your content more conversational.
• Strive for maximum readability. It might be a good idea to use AI tools for writing to help improve your texts.
• Answer users' primary questions snappy and clearly.
• Implement structured data to help search engine algorithms understand your content better.

9. Social Signals

Finally, speaking about the most prominent SEO ranking factors of 2025, we should mention social signals. Social signals are basically engagement indicators that come from your social media, such as likes, comments, and shares. These signals don’t impact your ranking SEO directly. However, they affect it indirectly.

Social signals create greater visibility and engagement for your content on social media. From an SEO perspective, this can mean more potential traffic flowing to your site and the presence of social proof. Thus, staying active on social platforms and encouraging these signals will also be important for your rankings in 2025.