Google determines relevance in search results by understanding the intent behind user queries, considering exact and related keyword matches, and analyzing user engagement with pages. It also takes into account factors like internal links, localization, personalization, and whether the content is up-to-date.

Think of relevance as the bedrock of your content. First and foremost, your content needs to align with the meaning of the query and the reason why someone could be searching for it. You can also use SEO techniques to improve the relevance of your content and get more traffic.

1. The intent behind the query. Google aims to understand what users want when they search. If your content is about the topic but not in a way that would fulfill the needs of the user, it’s simply less relevant to the user (source)
2. Exact keyword matches. Content containing the same words as the search query is considered relevant. However, Google doesn’t rely solely on exact matches (source).
3. Other relevant keywords and content. Beyond exact matches, Google looks for related words and media such as videos or pictures. If a page covers a topic comprehensively, it’s likely to include relevant terms (source).
4. Searchers’ behavioral data. If users engage with a page they found in the SERPs, it indicates relevance (source).
5. Links. External and internal links help Google understand the page’s context. Google also examines the page’s anchor text and the surrounding text (source).
6. Localization and personalization. Search results can vary based on the user’s location, search history, and preferences. This personalization helps in delivering more relevant results (source).
7. Freshness. Regularly updated content is more likely to be relevant, especially for topics that evolve over time. Google may prioritize newer content for certain queries (source).

That said, relevance is not the only principle or system that Google uses for ranking. In the video below, Paul Haahr, Distinguished Engineer at Google, explains two types of signals: those that take into account the user’s query and those that score the page itself, regardless of the query.

Relevance, in my opinion, would be in the query-dependent category.

Keyword relevance in local SEO and Google Ads is different

Google uses the idea of keyword relevance in ranking local results and choosing winners of Google Search Ads. If you ever step into the territory of search engine marketing, it’s good to know the difference.

• Local relevance refers to how well a local business profile matches what someone is searching for (source). This can include name of the business, business category and attributes. When people look for products or services in their vicinity, Google takes this into account and weights against other factors (prominence and distance).
• Ad relevance is how well the content of the ad and the landing page fit the intent behind the query (source). Google claims that you get a higher position for your ad than someone who’s willing to pay more for their ads, just because you’ve hit a higher ad relevance.

How to create content relevant to a search query in 7 steps

First, make sure you have a good target keyword that’s worth the time and effort put into search engine optimization. You can check that with our guide to keyword research.

Google tends to favor what it already ranks highly, which is why the top 10 search results often look very similar. To ensure your content is keyword-relevant, it’s often more effective to align with existing successful content rather than trying something entirely new and hoping that Google will recognize your effort.

And this is also my advice to you. Make your content relevant before you make it unique. Don’t skip any of these seven steps.

1. Make sure you’re aligning with search intent

Search intent is what the searcher expects to see in the SERPs when they type in a search query. It could be a list of the best products, a video, a Wikipedia-like page, or a simple, direct answer that doesn’t require clicking on anything.

Nobody types in queries like “give me the best places to buy the doona liki trike but if there’s something important I should know before buying, lmk”. They will just type “doona liki” because they’re used to writing simple queries and expecting Google to figure them out. Google expects content creators (you) to make that content so they can index it, rank it, and show it to their users.

The most reliable way to align with search intent is to look at what’s already ranking and identify the 3Cs of search intent:

• Content type. Typically one of the following: blog post, video, product page, category page, landing page.
• Content format. This applies mostly to informational content. For example, a how-to guide will be a different content format than a listicle or product review.
• Content angle. The specific focus or unique selling point that makes top-ranking posts and pages stand out.

For example, all the the posts below are blog posts in the listicle format. Some angles you can spot here are “that actually matter”, “important”, “key”.

Another great way to examine search intent is to check the amount of traffic generated by each type of page. To make this fast and easy, use Ahrefs’ Identify intents feature.

If you’re curious to learn more about search intent, head on to our guide.

2. Include your target keyword in relevant places

On any page, there are a few places that Google likes to look for signals of relevance.

1. Page title.
2. URL.
3. Main header (H1).
4. Subheaders (some of your H2s, H3s, etc.).
5. Intro paragraph.

Here’s an example with highlighted page elements:

In other words, Google is looking for the most direct, straightforward type of relevance. Both a poem and a Wikpedia article can be about a topic like love. But the kind of relevance that you need to achieve in content is the latter type.

Keep in mind that in any text that you want to rank, however creative or unique you want it to be, Google will likely look at these places.

3. Include secondary keywords and frequently mentioned phrases

This step refers to words and phrases that naturally fit into the text. Once you identify them, it feels obvious. For example, if your primary keyword is ‘running shoes,’ related phrases could include ‘breathable material,’ ‘arch support,’ and ‘lightweight design.

You can manually look for commonalities among top-ranking pages or even brainstorm these words. But the quickest and most reliable way is to use an SEO tool that allows you to look specifically for those keywords.

Here’s how it looks in Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer:

1. Enter your target keyword.
2. Go to the Related terms report.
3. Choose Also rank for for secondary keywords and Also talk about for frequently mentioned phrases. You’ll likely get the best results in the Top 10 mode.

4. Align with the content structure of top-ranking pages

Content structure is about serving the most relevant need-to-know information first and goo-to-know information last.

The key to understanding what is need-to-know and what is good-to-know is to look for hints in the content that already ranks; these have already nailed keyword relevance.

For example, if you’re creating content about “beginner’s guide to investing” you’ll want to start with the most essential, need-to-know information, such as “What is investing?” and “Why should you start investing?”. Opening with key takeaways, as Nerdwallet does in the example below, wouldn’t be a bad idea, either.

The structure is also about the comprehensiveness of your content. In other words, it’s about covering the topic in full and how much focus you’ll give to each subtopic.

Again, you can look at pages manually or streamline the process with an SEO tool. In Ahrefs, you can find a tool called Content Grader that scores content based on the topics mentioned and how well they are explained.

If you’re working on a new piece of content, you can use Content Grader to aid your outlining process. You can also use it to optimize existing content; it will help close the content gap.

Finally, structure is also about what media you include on a page. Google claims to take into account the presence of images or videos that could support content’s relevance:

Just think: when you search for ‘dogs’, you likely don’t want a page with the word ‘dogs’ on it hundreds of times. With that in mind, algorithms assess if a page contains other relevant content beyond the keyword ‘dogs’ – such as pictures of dogs, videos or even a list of breeds.

Tip

Remember to add descriptive alt text to your images. It will help Google understand what the image is about and how it relates to the entire text. So this might help you rank in Google Image Search, too. 

Google has some helpful, easy to follow tips on how to write good alt text here.

5. Look for hints in the SERPs

Apart from what we’ve discussed so far, you may find additional clues on search engine results pages.

For example, meta descriptions are often overlooked in SEO because they’re not a direct ranking factor. However, since Google rewrites meta descriptions around 60% of the time, they can provide valuable insights into what Google and searchers find most important about a page.

I used the information from meta descriptions to rank #2 for the keyword “is seo worth it” and increase traffic to the post (#1 being Reddit…).

I noticed that Google favors a quick and direct response to the question (they even highlight the most direct answer—“yes”), so I added that to the intro.

Moreover, Google also rewrote my original meta description to put the new direct answer in front of the searcher.

You can find similar hints in these SERP features:

• Featured snippets.
• “People Also Ask” box.
• “Things to know” box.
• Images shown on top of the SERP.

6. Add relevant internal links

As you may already know, internal links are hyperlinks between pages on your site. Not only they help Google understand the linked page is about but also they aid the flow of link equity, helping interilnked pages rank higher.

Here’s a tip for adding internal links as you write. Use the “inurl” search operator to find other places on your site where you mention a particular word or phrase. To illustrate, here’s what I would type into Google’s search bar if I wanted to find mentions of the phrase “content marketing”:

inurl:ahrefs.com "content marketing"

As for adding internal links to your existing content, you can streamline the process with Internal link opportunities tool in Ahrefs’ Site Audit. It takes the top 10 keywords (by traffic) for each crawled page, then looks for mentions of those on your other crawled pages.

It will tell you where to link from, where to link to, and which word/phrase to link.

7. Aim for relevant backlinks

Relevant backlinks mean links from other sites that mention your target keyword or a similar phrase in the anchor text or surrounding text.

In a short video on how Google Search works (below), Google’s Matt Cutts explains that a document can become relevant to a query by having that query included in its backlinks. Paraphrasing his explanation, backlinks containing the target query can enhance the relevance of a webpage in search results.

You can use Ahrefs’ Web Explorer to find and vet pages that already use your target keyword as link anchors and try to win over those links. Just type “outlinkanchor:[your keyword]” in the search bar.

There is also a possibility that backlinks coming from pages or sites on the same topic (or closely related) can increase relevance — some SEOs believe so. Mentions of such a system come from Google’s Reasonable Surfer patent, research on topic-sensitive PageRank. Moreover, irrelevant links were supposedly the target of the Google Penguin update.

However, at this point Google erased the only official mention of this I could find.

In 2021 Google said this:

If other prominent websites on the subject link to the page, that’s a good sign that the information is of high quality.

But then, they erased a few words, giving a whole different meaning to that sentence:

For example, one of several factors we use to help determine this is understanding if other prominent websites link or refer to the content.

If you want to see if these kinds of links work for you, you can find them and vet them using either Ahrefs’ Web Explorer or Content Explorer.

You can aim for topically relevant backlinks but make sure you don’t over-optimize your link profile. If most of your backlinks include the same anchor, it may signal link manipulation to Google.

Final thoughts

The goal of achieving high keyword relevance is to improve your organic rankings. But it’s sometimes hard to draw the line between all the different systems that Google uses for ranking. Backlinks are a great example of that. They play a role in determining relevance but authority as well.

For this reason, content optimization tools can be useful in creating relevant content, but they don’t guarantee high rankings. A high content score doesn’t always mean your page will rank well (read our study), and sometimes you can rank high even with a low score.

So, it’s best to treat SEO as a holistic process. Do what you need to do to achieve high relevance, then check all the other boxes, such as technical SEO, EEAT, and link building.

Got questions or comments? Find me on LinkedIn.

Throughout every technological change, the one constant always seems to be people calling for the death of SEO and search engines.

While pundits have been quick to call for the death of SEO, SEO itself has been all too reluctant to die. This article will look at how SEO evolves and why that makes it even more important.

Sure we could just spout some random facts about how most online purchases begin with a search and how a majority of online sessions include search – but there is a much bigger case to be made.

To fully grasp the importance of SEO and search, we first need to go back and understand both user intent (why people search) and how search engines have changed.

SEO Isn’t Dead

The “SEO is dead” articles always seem to follow a change to search that makes information easier to access for consumers. We saw it with featured snippets, we saw it with instant answers, and we’re seeing it again with AI.

We’ve also seen the “death of SEO” articles pop up around new and emerging social media sites like Meta, TikTok, X, etc – but the fact remains that overall web searches on search engines have continued to increase every year for the last decade plus.

Search isn’t dying, and new social networks or technology like AI aren’t cutting into search – they’re just making people search more. Search is becoming ingrained in (if not defining) our everyday online behavior.

While often associated, SEO is more than just building links or tricking search engines with spammy tactics. That stuff can work – temporarily – but not long-term for a real business or a brand. Sustained SEO growth needs to focus on more than keywords and tricks.

From Keywords To Intent

There’s a great quote from Bill Gates back in 2009 where he said “the future of search is verbs.”

This quote really summarizes the heart of “why” people search. People are searching to accomplish a task or do something.

It’s important that we consider this search intent when evaluating SEO and search. Not all searchers want websites. In the early days of search, links to websites were the best thing we had.

Today, however, search engines and AI are getting better at answering common questions.

For a search like [how old is taylor swift] or [when is the NHL trade deadline?] users just want an answer – without having to click over to a website, accept the cookie consent notice, close the alert popup, decline to subscribe to the newsletter, stop the auto-play video ad, and scroll past three irrelevant paragraphs to get the answer.

If creating thin ad-rich pages to answer public domain questions was your idea of SEO, then yes SEO is dead – however, SEO is much more than that now.

SEO Is Marketing

When many say search and SEO are dying, those factoid searches are the SEO they’re talking about – but there’s an entire section of search that’s thriving: The verbs!

This shift makes SEO even more important because search is no longer about the word the user typed and is all about doing actual marketing.

SEOs can help understand user intents and personas.

A good SEO professional can help you understand not only what users are searching for but “why” they’re searching – and then help marketers build something that meets the users needs.

Just as search engines have evolved, so, too, has SEO.

The days of keyword density and meta tags are gone. Search engines don’t really work like that anymore.

They’ve moved on to a semantic model that uses vectors to try to understand meaning – and marketers would do well to make the same moves by understanding their user’s intent.

Evolution Of The Consumer Journey

We typically think of the consumer journey as a funnel – but that funnel in every business school textbook doesn’t really exist. Today’s consumer journey is more like one of those crazy straws you got in a cereal box as a kid with lots of bends and loops and turns it in.

Consumers are searching more than ever across multiple devices, platforms, networks, apps, and websites. This spread-out user behavior makes having an experienced SEO pro even more important.

It’s not just about getting the right words on the page anymore, and understanding user intent isn’t enough – we also have to understand where our users are acting on each of those intents.

Technical Still Matters, Too

Despite many platforms and frameworks claiming to be SEO-friendly, technical SEO issues and opportunities still remain abundant.

Most of today’s most popular website frameworks aren’t very SEO-friendly out of the box and still require customization and tweaking to really drive results.

There still isn’t a one size fits all solution and I’m not sure there ever will be.

A good SEO will help you ensure that there aren’t confusing duplicate versions of pages, that the pages you want to be seen are all easily understood by search engines, and that your re-design or re-platform won’t hurt your existing traffic.

So Why Is Search Still Important?

Search is important because users are important.

Sure, users are going to different platforms or using apps/AI – but those things are still technically a search and we still need to make sure that they’re surfacing our brands/products.

It doesn’t matter if the user is typing into a web form, talking to a device, asking an AI, using their camera, or even talking into a smart pin – they’re still trying to “do” something – and as long as users have tasks to accomplish, SEO pros will be there to influence them.

More resources:

Featured Image: Accogliente Design/Shutterstock

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is a Google Core Web Vitals metric that measures a user experience event.

CLS became a ranking factor in 2021 and that means it’s important to understand what it is and how to optimize for it.

What Is Cumulative Layout Shift?

CLS is the unexpected shifting of webpage elements on a page while a user is scrolling or interacting on the page

The kinds of elements that tend to cause shift are fonts, images, videos, contact forms, buttons, and other kinds of content.

Minimizing CLS is important because pages that shift around can cause a poor user experience.

A poor CLS score (below > 0.1 ) is indicative of coding issues that can be solved.

What Causes CLS Issues?

There are four reasons why Cumulative Layout Shift happens:

• Images without dimensions.
• Ads, embeds, and iframes without dimensions.
• Dynamically injected content.
• Web Fonts causing FOIT/FOUT.
• CSS or JavaScript animations.

Images and videos must have the height and width dimensions declared in the HTML. For responsive images, make sure that the different image sizes for the different viewports use the same aspect ratio.

Let’s dive into each of these factors to understand how they contribute to CLS.

Images Without Dimensions

Browsers cannot determine the image’s dimensions until they download them. As a result, upon encountering anHTML tag, the browser can’t allocate space for the image. The example video below illustrates that.

Once the image is downloaded, the browser needs to recalculate the layout and allocate space for the image to fit, which causes other elements on the page to shift.

By providing width and height attributes in the tag, you inform the browser of the image’s aspect ratio. This allows the browser to allocate the correct amount of space in the layout before the image is fully downloaded and prevents any unexpected layout shifts.

Ads Can Cause CLS

If you load AdSense ads in the content or leaderboard on top of the articles without proper styling and settings, the layout may shift.

This one is a little tricky to deal with because ad sizes can be different. For example, it may be a 970×250 or 970×90 ad, and if you allocate 970×90 space, it may load a 970×250 ad and cause a shift.

In contrast, if you allocate a 970×250 ad and it loads a 970×90 banner, there will be a lot of white space around it, making the page look bad.

It is a trade-off, either you should load ads with the same size and benefit from increased inventory and higher CPMs or load multiple-sized ads at the expense of user experience or CLS metric.

Dynamically Injected Content

This is content that is injected into the webpage.

For example, posts on X (formerly Twitter), which load in the content of an article, may have arbitrary height depending on the post content length, causing the layout to shift.

Of course, those usually are below the fold and don’t count on the initial page load, but if the user scrolls fast enough to reach the point where the X post is placed and it hasn’t yet loaded, then it will cause a layout shift and contribute into your CLS metric.

One way to mitigate this shift is to give the average min-height CSS property to the tweet parent div tag because it is impossible to know the height of the tweet post before it loads so we can pre-allocate space.

Another way to fix this is to apply a CSS rule to the parent div tag containing the tweet to fix the height.

#tweet-div {
max-height: 300px;
overflow: auto;
}

However, it will cause a scrollbar to appear, and users will have to scroll to view the tweet, which may not be best for user experience.

If none of the suggested methods works, you could take a screenshot of the tweet and link to it.

Web-Based Fonts

Downloaded web fonts can cause what’s known as Flash of invisible text (FOIT).

A way to prevent that is to use preload fonts

and using font-display: swap; css property on @font-face at-rule.

@font-face {
   font-family: Inter;
   font-style: normal;
   font-weight: 200 900;
   font-display: swap;
   src: url('https://www.example.com/fonts/inter.woff2') format('woff2');
}

With these rules, you are loading web fonts as quickly as possible and telling the browser to use the system font until it loads the web fonts. As soon as the browser finishes loading the fonts, it swaps the system fonts with the loaded web fonts.

However, you may still have an effect called Flash of Unstyled Text (FOUT), which is impossible to avoid when using non-system fonts because it takes some time until web fonts load, and system fonts will be displayed during that time.

In the video below, you can see how the title font is changed by causing a shift.

The visibility of FOUT depends on the user’s connection speed if the recommended font loading mechanism is implemented.

If the user’s connection is sufficiently fast, the web fonts may load quickly enough and eliminate the noticeable FOUT effect.

Therefore, using system fonts whenever possible is a great approach, but it may not always be possible due to brand style guidelines or specific design requirements.

CSS Or JavaScript Animations

When animating HTML elements’ height via CSS or JS, for example, it expands an element vertically and shrinks by pushing down content, causing a layout shift.

To prevent that, use CSS transforms by allocating space for the element being animated. You can see the difference between CSS animation, which causes a shift on the left, and the same animation, which uses CSS transformation.

CSS animation example causing CLS

How Cumulative Layout Shift Is Calculated

This is a product of two metrics/events called “Impact Fraction” and “Distance Fraction.”

CLS = ( Impact Fraction)×( Distance Fraction)

Impact Fraction

Impact fraction measures how much space an unstable element takes up in the viewport.

A viewport is what you see on the mobile screen.

When an element downloads and then shifts, the total space that the element occupies, from the location that it occupied in the viewport when it’s first rendered to the final location when the page is rendered.

The example that Google uses is an element that occupies 50% of the viewport and then drops down by another 25%.

When added together, the 75% value is called the Impact Fraction, and it’s expressed as a score of 0.75.

Distance Fraction

The second measurement is called the Distance Fraction. The distance fraction is the amount of space the page element has moved from the original to the final position.

In the above example, the page element moved 25%.

So now the Cumulative Layout Score is calculated by multiplying the Impact Fraction by the Distance Fraction:

0.75 x 0.25 = 0.1875

The calculation involves some more math and other considerations. What’s important to take away from this is that the score is one way to measure an important user experience factor.

Here is an example video visually illustrating what impact and distance factors are:

Understand Cumulative Layout Shift

Understanding Cumulative Layout Shift is important, but it’s not necessary to know how to do the calculations yourself.

However, understanding what it means and how it works is key, as this has become part of the Core Web Vitals ranking factor.

More resources: 

Featured image credit: BestForBest/Shutterstock