Whenever I speak to people about SEO, the number one question that I get asked is, “What’s the most important factor to rank number one in Google?”

This is a difficult question to answer because it depends heavily on a whole bunch of variables related to your brand, current situation and the kinds of topics that you’re looking to gain visibility around within the search engines.

That said, there are a lot of interesting insights to be had from analyzing a large data set of top-performing webpages. In order for me to give a holistic overview of the factors that are influencing search engine rankings, I need data.

Luckily, data is what I have.

With the help of the amazing team at Accuranker and also Ahrefs, I’ve gathered a huge variety of data points on over 1 million different URLs that rank on page 1 of Google. I also had the help of the amazing, Dimitris Vlachos, who supported on the data collection and organization.

I’m now going to share the distilled findings from the research so that you can understand both the ways that Google is evaluating the webpages that it ranks, as well as highlight the tactics that top websites are using to dominate the search engine results page.

Major Findings from the Data
Backlinks matter. On average, the top 2 results on page 1 of Google equated to having 38% of all the backlinks from pages on page 1.
On average, the higher up page 1 the result is, the greater the number of linking domains that the webpage has. Webpages ranking #1 had an average of 168% more linking domains than those ranking #5.
Webpages on HTTPS had positive correlation with higher rankings, with 33% of all the sampled URL that ranked either #1, #2 or #3 using HTTPS.
Anchor text is still a huge ranking signal. Webpages ranking #1 had an average of 5.42% of their anchor text actually including their target keyword. The further up page 1 you look, the higher this percentage goes.
Top-ranking webpages tended to have shorter page titles, with the sweet spot nearing closer to 8 words in length.
Webpages with their target keyword in their URL tended to rank higher in Google than those that didn’t.
Including your target keyword within your page title positively correlated with higher search rankings. Of the sampled data, over 15% of all the page 1 rankings included the target keyword within its page title.
Across the results of page 1, the average ratio of backlinks to linking domains was 37:1. This means that on average, each website that linked to page 1 content was linking from 37 different pages on their website.
Top-ranking webpages in Google have shorter URLs, with position 1 URLs averaging 59 characters in length.