Last Updated on May 18, 2026 by Paula

Researching keywords and using them strategically in your content is still an important part of SEO. But there are other factors working behind the scenes that have just as much influence on where you show up in search. And in 2026, “search” means more than Google’s results page. It now includes AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s own AI Overviews that answer questions directly without a single click.

Let’s look at the factors that affect your SEO rankings today.

Mobile Friendliness

Readers today don’t just visit websites on their desktops or laptops. Almost everyone has a smartphone or tablet that they also use to surf the internet.

You want to take advantage of that potential traffic by having a responsive website. This means that your content is coded to adjust to the screen size so that no matter how someone is viewing your website they can see it at its best.

Being mobile friendly is great for your visitors and it’s great for your SEO!

Google has been using mobile-first indexing for years now, which means your mobile version is what they evaluate for rankings. Not your desktop. If your site isn’t responsive, you’re already starting at a disadvantage. And with AI tools increasingly pulling from well-performing pages to answer questions, a broken mobile experience can hurt your visibility in more places than just traditional search.

Image Optimization

Site speed is another factor in how you rank in search engines. One thing that can really slow down your website is large image files. So be sure that you optimize each image you use.

For most images, you will want to resize them. That beautiful picture you took could be 4000 or more pixels wide. You won’t need an image that large on your website.

Each theme is different so you’ll want to experiment to find a good size for your website. For mine, if I need a full-size image 1500px wide is good. My images for my blog posts are 795px wide.

After you resize, you’ll want to run through an image optimizer which will further decrease the file size. I like TinyPNG. You can resize JPG and PNG files here.

This post at Lyrical Host has several great tips for optimizing images.

While you’re at it, name every image descriptively before you upload it (woman-writing-at-desk.jpg, not IMG_4823.jpg) and add alt text to every single one. Alt text helps search engines understand your content, makes your site more accessible, and increasingly helps AI tools interpret what your site is about.

SSL Certificates

An SSL certificate is a form of security for your website. It will create a secure connection between your visitor’s browser and your host’s server. This will protect any information your visitors submit like their email address when they sign up for your newsletter. Or if you’re selling products, it will protect their credit card information.

If you’re not sure if you have one, check to see if you have a padlock next to your URL when you visit your website in a Chrome browser. You should also have an “s” after http in your URL if your website is secure.

Most web hosts, like my host, Lyrical Host,* include SSL certificates at no extra cost. If yours doesn’t, or if yours hasn’t been set up, contact your host to what you need to do. It’s one of the fastest trust signals you can have in place, and Google has factored it into rankings for years.

Permalink Structure

Did you notice the URL for this blog post? It has the title in it. I’m sure you’ve seen URLs with numbers in them or dates. Using a permalink structure with the title is good for your visitor’s experience and for search engines because it lets both know what the post is about. With this permalink structure, you also have another place to use your keywords.

If you’re on WordPress, you can set your permalink structure under Settings > Permalinks. Choose “Post name” and you’re in good shape. One note: if your site is already live and you change your URL structure, you’ll need to set up redirects so your old links don’t break.

Site Speed

I mentioned above that site speed is important for your SEO when we talked about images. Site speed affects how people experience your site and how search engines rank it. Research has shown that if your website takes more than three seconds to load your chance of a bounce increases to 90%. That’s not good! You want people to stick around and enjoy your content.

So speeding up your website will be good for your visitors and it will help your SEO ranking because Google uses site speed as a consideration in the mobile-first indexing we mentioned above.

Broken Links

We all have broken links every now and then but it’s important to fix them as soon as possible. You don’t want your visitors clicking on broken links and ruining their experience on your website.

For a search engine crawling your site, it can interrupt the process of indexing your content entirely. If search engines can’t crawl your pages, those pages don’t show up in results.

Run a broken link check periodically, especially after you update or move content. Dead Link Checker is a free tool that makes this easy. Fix anything that’s broken promptly.

Internal Linking

Interlinking means linking posts on related topics to each other. This is helpful to your website visitors by showing them how to get to more related content on your website.

It’s also helpful to search engines as they crawl your website they’re able to see which posts are related to each other. Internal linking is how you tell the search engines which pages and posts are important.

Every time you write a new post, look for opportunities to link back to related content already on your site. And when you update older posts, link forward to newer ones.

Disclosing and Tagging Paid Links

It’s no secret that links help your search engine rankings. The more websites that link to you the better (well as long as they are quality backlinks and not spammy ones.)

What Google doesn’t like is for people to pay others to link to their website. If you link to anything through an affiliate relationship or paid partnership, that link needs to be marked as nofollow (or sponsored). This is both an FTC disclosure requirement and an SEO best practice. Google doesn’t want paid links passing ranking credit, and they have ways of detecting when they do.

Any link you create will be dofollow by default so you will need to add the nofollow to it. In WordPress, you can add this attribute directly in the link settings.

This post has a ton of great info on how to use nofollow links.

Submit Your Sitemap to Google

A sitemap is a file that lists all the important pages on your website and tells search engines where to find them. Submitting it to Google Search Console means you’re actively inviting Google to crawl your content instead of waiting for it to stumble across your pages on its own.

If you use Yoast SEO or Rank Math, your sitemap is generated automatically. You just need to submit the URL to Google Search Console. It takes just a few minutes and it’s worth doing, whether your site is brand new or has been around for years.

In this post, Mariah has a helpful section on how to create your XML sitemap and submit it to Google.

Did you notice that the majority of these factors that affect your SEO also affect the user’s experience on your website? Fast load times, working links, clear URLs, secure browsing, these aren’t just SEO boxes to check off. They’re the things that make your site feel trustworthy and easy to use.

That’s exactly what search engines are trying to reward. And it’s what AI tools look for too when deciding whose content is worth referencing.

When building your website and creating content for it, always keep the user experience in mind. If you do that, you’ll keep your visitors, search engines and AI happy!

Want more SEO tips? Check out 15 Tips to Improve SEO on Your Site