The Only Three Ranking Factors That Actually Matter

Anyone who starts looking into how Google ranks websites will be immediately overwhelmed by information. There are hundreds of articles listing dozens, sometimes hundreds of ranking factors. Some claim there are over two hundred. The first instinct is to simplify, to cut through the noise and find the few things that actually matter.

Here is the good news: you can simplify. Google ranking essentially comes down to three things: content, links and page experience.

Here is the bad news: each of those three “things” is actually a family of factors, not a single metric. And each family is complex enough to keep an entire team of specialists busy. So yes, there are only three things that matter — but no, it is not easy.

We published this analysis as a series of four articles on our Italian site between late 2023 and early 2024. Here, we have condensed the essential insights into a single, practical guide.

The trick with “only three factors”

Before we start, a word of honesty. Saying there are “only three ranking factors” is technically true but somewhat misleading. It is like saying a car has only three essential systems: the engine, the chassis and the electronics. Technically correct, but each of those systems contains dozens of components, and a problem with any single component can stop the car from running.

The same applies here. Content, links and page experience are the three broad families. Within each family, there are multiple signals, metrics and considerations. But the framework is genuinely useful because it helps you prioritise. If your website has excellent content but terrible page speed, you know where to focus. If your content is thin but your site loads in under a second, the answer is equally clear.

Let us examine each family in turn.

Factor one: Content

This is the big one. If you have to pick a single area to invest your time and resources, content is where you should start. The reason is simple and Google’s own Gary Illyes has stated it plainly: without content, you literally cannot rank. If there are no words on the page, there is no ranking.

But having words on the page is merely the minimum requirement. The question is whether those words are any good. And “good” in Google’s eyes has become increasingly sophisticated over the years.

Understanding user intent

The ranking process begins with Google interpreting the user’s query. Before your content can rank for anything, Google needs to understand what the searcher is actually looking for and determine whether your page is a plausible answer.

This sounds straightforward, but it is remarkably complex. A search for “apple” could mean the fruit, the company or the record label. A search for “best running shoes” could mean “tell me what to buy” or “show me comparison data.” Google has invested billions in understanding these nuances, and your content needs to align with the intent behind the queries you are targeting.

Keywords still matter

Despite what you may have heard, keywords remain a foundational element of SEO. They are the bridge that connects the user’s query to your content. Google itself confirms that the words on your page help determine its relevance to a given search.

Pedro Dias, a former Google employee, has been quite direct about this: the original ranking factors like keywords are not obsolete. They are the cornerstone on which everything else is built. Getting the fundamentals right is still essential.

This does not mean stuffing your pages with keywords. It means understanding which terms your potential visitors actually use and ensuring your content speaks their language naturally.

E-E-A-T: the quality framework

In recent years, Google has placed increasing emphasis on what it calls E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. Originally introduced as E-A-T in 2014, the extra “E” for Experience was added in 2022, reflecting the growing importance of first-hand knowledge.

The message is clear: Google wants content created by people who actually know what they are talking about, ideally because they have direct experience with the subject. A restaurant review from someone who has eaten there is more valuable than one compiled from other reviews. A guide to starting a business in Malta is more credible when written by someone who has actually done it.

For website owners, this means that generic, impersonal content is becoming increasingly disadvantaged. The more your content demonstrates genuine expertise and real-world experience, the better it will perform.

Helpful Content and the algorithm updates

Google launched its Helpful Content system in 2022, and it has been updating it continuously since. The stated goal is to reward content where visitors feel they have had a satisfying experience and to demote content that fails to meet expectations.

In practice, Google’s guidance for Helpful Content boils down to three principles: stay focused on your core topic, demonstrate direct experience, and do not try to cover too many unrelated subjects on a single site.

The 2023 and 2024 updates to this system caused significant turbulence in the search results, with many websites that relied on formulaic, SEO-optimised content seeing dramatic drops in traffic.

The algorithm zoo

Beyond Helpful Content, several other Google systems directly affect how content is evaluated. RankBrain (2015) uses machine learning to understand the intent behind queries, including handling synonyms and typos. BERT (2018) improved Google’s understanding of how word combinations express meaning — it affected roughly 10% of all queries, which is enormous. MUM (2021) extended analysis to text, images and potentially video.

You do not need to understand the technical details of each system. What matters is the direction of travel: Google is getting progressively better at understanding what content actually says and means, rather than just counting keywords and measuring word length. Write for humans, demonstrate genuine knowledge, and you are moving in the right direction.

Factor two: Links

Links were one of Google’s original innovations. The insight that founded the company — described in the famous Stanford paper by Sergey Brin and Larry Page — was that links function similarly to academic citations. If a paper is cited by many other papers, especially by authoritative ones, it is probably valuable. The same logic applies to web pages.

The evolution of links as a ranking signal

In 2016, Andrey Lipattsev, a Senior Strategist at Google, publicly confirmed that the top three ranking signals were “content, links and RankBrain.” For years, this was treated as gospel.

Then, in 2023, Gary Illyes contradicted this at PubCon, stating that links are not a “top 3” ranking signal and have not been for some time. He added that it is “absolutely possible to rank without links.”

These contradictory statements from Google representatives are not unusual. It is worth remembering that Google has strong motivations to downplay the importance of links, primarily because link building has been the most aggressively spammed ranking factor since the early days of SEO.

The reality, based on what we observe in our daily work, is somewhere in between. Yes, it is technically possible to rank without external links in some niches. But in most competitive scenarios, links still make a meaningful difference. What has changed is the nature of that difference.

Quality over quantity

The old approach to link building — accumulate as many links as possible, from any source available — died with Google’s Penguin update in 2012. Penguin specifically targeted low-quality link schemes and effectively wiped out an entire industry of link sellers and link farms.

Today, Google focuses on the quality of individual links rather than their quantity. John Mueller has stated that while the sheer number of links may have mattered in the early days of PageRank, Google now uses more sophisticated metrics to evaluate links.

What does a quality link look like? In simple terms: a link from a relevant, authoritative website in your industry, placed within genuine content, where linking to your page makes natural sense. One such link is worth more than a hundred links from random directories or comment sections.

Internal links: the overlooked opportunity

When people talk about links as a ranking factor, they usually mean backlinks — links from other websites pointing to yours. But internal links — the links between pages on your own site — are equally important and far easier to control.

Internal linking helps Google crawl and index all the pages on your site. It also helps establish topical relationships between your content, connecting related pages into what SEO professionals call topic clusters or content silos.

A well-planned internal linking structure is one of the most effective things you can do for your SEO, and it costs nothing beyond the time to implement it. Yet it is consistently one of the most neglected aspects of most websites we audit.

Factor three: Page experience

Page experience is the most technical of the three families, and paradoxically the one that is easiest to measure objectively. We are not talking about subjective qualities like beauty or readability. We are talking about things a machine can measure precisely: how fast your page loads, whether it displays correctly on all devices, and how stable the visual layout is during loading.

What Google measures

Google’s page experience signals include four main areas:

Page speed — how quickly your page loads and becomes interactive. This is measured through Core Web Vitals, a set of specific metrics that Google introduced and has been refining since 2020. The three current Core Web Vitals are Largest Contentful Paint (how quickly the main content loads), Interaction to Next Paint (how responsive the page is to user input), and Cumulative Layout Shift (how stable the layout is as elements load).

HTTPS — whether your site uses a secure connection. This has been a ranking signal since 2014 and is now essentially table stakes. If your site is still on HTTP, fix this immediately. It is the easiest win in all of SEO.

Mobile compatibility — whether your pages display and function correctly on mobile devices. With mobile traffic exceeding desktop traffic on most websites, this is no longer optional.

No intrusive interstitials — whether your pages are free from aggressive pop-ups or overlays that obstruct the content, particularly on mobile. Google specifically penalises pages where the content is difficult to access because of intrusive advertising or sign-up forms.

The tiebreaker

An important nuance about page experience: it appears to function primarily as a tiebreaker. John Mueller has suggested that when the content quality of competing pages in a SERP is very similar, page experience helps Google determine which pages offer a more reasonable user experience and which do not.

This means that page experience alone is unlikely to propel a mediocre page to the top of the results. But when you are competing against pages with similar content quality — which is increasingly common — the technical performance of your page can make the difference between position three and position thirteen.

The only scenario where you can afford to ignore page experience is when you are ranking for extremely niche keywords with virtually no competition. But pages ranking for such keywords will also have virtually no traffic, so the point is rather academic.

How the three factors work together

The practical value of this framework lies in understanding how the three families interact. They are not independent switches that you can flip one at a time. They work as a system.

Content is the foundation. Without good content, no amount of link building or technical optimisation will produce sustainable results. You need content that matches user intent, demonstrates genuine expertise and provides real value.

Links are the amplifier. Good content that nobody links to will struggle to compete against good content that the rest of the web references and recommends. Links remain one of the primary ways Google discovers and evaluates pages.

Page experience is the differentiator. When your content is strong and your link profile is healthy, page experience determines whether you are in the top three or the bottom of page one.

For most small and medium-sized businesses, the priority order is clear: invest first in content quality, then in building a sensible internal linking structure and earning external links naturally, and finally in the technical performance of your site.

What we have learned

We have been working in SEO since 2012, and if there is one thing we can say with confidence, it is that Google’s guidance is always partly true and partly self-serving. When they tell you content is the most important factor, they are right — but they also want you to produce more content for them to index. When they downplay the importance of links, they have a point — but they also want to discourage the link spam that makes their job harder.

The most reliable approach is to watch what actually works in practice, not just what Google says should work. And in our experience, the three-factor framework holds up remarkably well. Content, links, page experience — in that order of priority.

There is no magic formula. There is no shortcut. There is just consistent, intelligent work on all three fronts. If that sounds like a lot of effort, it is. But it is also the reason why good SEO delivers results that last, while tricks and shortcuts inevitably stop working.

Get in touch →