Five things that decide whether your site ranks, and four that do not

Search engines render your page. Most sites forget that.

A crawler no longer reads your HTML and leaves. It renders the page the way a browser does, waits for the JavaScript, and indexes what it can see at the end. That single fact explains most of the ranking problems we are asked to diagnose: the content is there, it just arrives after the crawler has moved on.

If your product descriptions are fetched by JavaScript after load, there is a real chance they are not in the index at all. The fix is not more content: it is server-side rendering, so the words are in the HTML the first time anyone asks for it.

Check it in thirty seconds: open your page, view source, and use Ctrl+F to search for a sentence you can see on screen. If it is not in the source, a search engine may not have it either.

The five that still decide it

Ranking has consolidated around a small set of things that are hard to fake, which is exactly why they still work.

• Server-rendered content: the words exist in the HTML, not only after hydration.
• Core Web Vitals, especially Interaction to Next Paint. A page that feels slow to a person measures slow to Google.
• One clear intent per URL. Two pages competing for the same query means both lose.
• Internal links with descriptive text. This is the cheapest ranking work there is, and almost nobody does it.
• Correct hreflang on multilingual sites. Get it wrong and your eight languages compete with each other instead of covering eight markets.

The four you can stop worrying about

Keyword density stopped being a thing before most current marketers started working. There is no target percentage; writing to hit one makes the page worse.

Meta keywords have been ignored for over fifteen years. Exact-match domains carry no weight on their own. And submitting your site to directories does nothing except create links you will later want removed.

If a proposal you are reading mentions any of these four as a deliverable, that is a useful signal about the rest of the proposal.

How to check your own site this afternoon

Run PageSpeed Insights on your three most important pages: not the home page, the pages that actually answer a buying question. Look at the field data if you have it; lab scores are a simulation, field data is what your visitors experienced.

Then open Search Console and sort your pages by impressions with a low click rate. Those are queries where you already rank and the title does not convince anyone to click. Rewriting a title is an afternoon of work and it is the highest-return SEO change most sites can make.