Google PageRank - Have We Discovered The Secret Sauce?

We learned in class that although Google's PageRank is a proprietary set of algorithms, digital marketers have tested various hypotheses to come up with a pretty solid understanding of what techniques work best in order to pop higher on a Google search, and get to the first page.

I stumbled across a relatively recent study by Brian Dean of Backlinko and Eric Van Buskirk of Clickstream that analyzed 1 million Google search results (content, backlinks, even site speed) to answer the question: which factors correlate with first page search engine rankings?

Obviously, this isn't the first time someone has done this (a firm named Moz has run their own search engine ranking factor studies for years, and the professor shared this with us). What makes this one different is that it analyzed A LOT more search results (1 million searches vs. fewer than 20 thousand).

The key conclusions for me were:

• Get backlinks from other sites considered "authorities"
• Publish long-form content
• Put at least one image on your content
• Stop wasting time on title / tag / keyword optimization
• Spend time / money on optimizing the speed of your site

I quote their most interesting findings:

1. Backlinks remain an extremely important Google ranking factor. We found the number of domains linking to a page correlated with rankings more than any other factor.
2. Our data also shows that a site’s overall link authority (as measured by Ahrefs Domain Rating) strongly correlates with higher rankings.
3. We discovered that content rated as “topically relevant” (via MarketMuse), significantly outperformed content that didn’t cover a topic in-depth. Therefore, publishing focused content that covers a single topic may help with rankings.
4. Based on SERP data from SEMRush, we found that longer content tends to rank higher in Google’s search results. The average Google first page result contains 1,890 words.
5. Content with at least one image significantly outperformed content without any images. However, we didn’t find that adding additional images influenced rankings.
6. We found a very small relationship between title tag keyword optimization and ranking. This correlation was significantly smaller than we expected, which may reflect Google’s move to Semantic Search.
7. Site speed matters. Based on data from Alexa, pages on fast-loading sites rank significantly higher than pages on slow-loading sites.