Search Ranking Factors Infographic 2015: Understand how the deck is stacked

The deck: How strong is your hand?

Each suit represents a core ranking factor category: content, user experience, technical, backlinks, (social is presented as a bonus suit). Each card value corresponds to a specific ranking factor, word count for example. We have also given each ranking factor an overall importance rating.

This legend explains how to read the cards

At a glance you can see the trends to 2014, correlations, and the overall importance of a ranking factor

Correlation infographic with bar charts

We didn’t want to disappoint the die-hard fans of the bar chart correlation infographic. If you like you can also download this version of the infographic, complete with all ranking factors from the 2015 study.

The 36 factors are the same as in the deck of cards. They are ordered by decreasing correlation: the factor with the highest correlation value is at the top, the factor with the lowest, possibly even negative correlation, is found at the bottom.

A note on interpretation: A high correlation means that the differences of the analyzed top-30 URLs with respect to the ranking factor are great. This is not to be assimilated or confused with overall importance. A ranking factor with a lower correlation can be more important overall for good rankings. Additionally, the correlation trend to 2014 are also represented: Has it decreased, increased, or has it remained the same?

And to make the interpretation of the factor easier, we have given each factor an overall importance score ranging from -1 to 2. This is Searchmetrics’ evaluation on how much impact this factor could have on search rankings.