The rough ranking hierarchy
From SEO leaks, studies, and practitioner observation, the ranking signal weight hierarchy looks roughly like: relevance (40%), link authority (30%), content quality and depth (20%), user experience signals like page speed and mobile-friendliness (10%). These are not fixed percentages, and they vary by query type and domain authority, but they reflect where effort returns the most value.
Relevance dominates: a poorly linked page about your exact topic outranks a highly linked page about something tangential. Link authority is the tiebreaker: when two pages are equally relevant, the one with more backlink authority wins. Content quality (comprehensiveness, structure, accuracy) lifts all boats for relevant, authoritative sites.
Diminishing returns above baseline
Core Web Vitals (page speed, layout stability, interactivity) are now meaningful ranking factors, but only if you're below Google's baseline (roughly 2.5-second load time, 100ms input delay). Optimizing a 4-second page to 2 seconds improves ranking. Optimizing a 1-second page to 0.8 seconds does almost nothing. This is why enterprise sites competing on the same keywords invest in relevance and links first, then speed as a differentiator only when other sites have already solved the basics.