SEMRush ranking factors study 2017

After the SEMrush Ranking Factors Study 2017 was published a month ago, many brows were raised in disbelief — indeed, direct website visits are usually assumed to be the result of higher SERP positions, not vice versa. And yet site visits is exactly what our study named the most important Google ranking factor among those we analyzed. Moreover, the methodology we used was unique to the field of SEO studies — we traded correlation analysis for the Random Forest algorithm. As the ultimate goal of our study was to help SEOs prioritize tasks and do their jobs more effectively, we would like to reveal the details of our methodology and bust some popular misconceptions, so that you can safely rely on our takeaways.