No business can survive without a noticeable online presence in this digital age. But, on the other hand, it is of no use to own a website if it is not visible on the top positions of major search engines. Therefore, experts advise you to follow the basic rules of search engine optimisation to help improve and maintain the keyword rankings on Google SERPs.
Everyone is curious about improving their visibility and reach online. But unfortunately, many fall into the trap of shortcuts. We need to understand that SEO is a long term game, and anyone promising you quick results should be treated doubtfully.
Here we will try to understand the top five areas that you should focus on to improve your results and ranking on search engine pages (especially Google) and draw organic traffic to your website.
How to Improve Your Google Rankings?
It takes a lot of hard work, dedication, expertise, determination, and blessings to achieve the top 10 SERPs within a year. Therefore, the topic we are about to discuss in the post is quite relevant in relation to improving your Google ranking. To take your website to the first pages of Google in order to increase your leads, conversions and sale, follow some of the steps we will talk about here.
1. Build a Strong Foundation
If your website has a poor structure and information architecture, then even the best SEO activities will not work for the website. Poor navigation and interlinking of a website do not allow Google to crawl your website, impacting your rankings. Few things you can follow to improve your keyword rankings are:
Perform a Technical SEO Audit
You need to follow the rules set by Google to fix all the technical issues related to your website. For example, improving your website architecture, simplifying the navigation, removing extra clicks while browsing between pages, improving URL structures, fixing broken links, and many more similar technical issues need to be rectified to make your website ready for search engine challenges.
Fix Duplicate Content
Duplicated content is not considered suitable for a website and can badly impact your website’s keyword rankings. Duplicate content issues are technical issues and are often found in multiple versions of the same page.
For example, http://www.website.com, https://www.website.com, http://website.com, and https://website.com would be considered four different pages, holding identical content by Google.
You can use proper redirect rules in your .htaccess file to resolve this issue.
2. Optimise for Mobile to Improve Your Google Ranking
With Google giving significance to the mobile-first index for rankings, you will need to consider a mobile-friendly test for your website.
Crawling, indexing and ranking systems have usually used the desktop version to index and rank page content; with the increasing growth in mobile devices, now Google has made mobile-first indexing one of the significant factors for indexing and ranking the mobile version of the pages.
Moreover, make sure you improve the task and performance on mobiles to avoid a mobile ranking breakdown. First, your mobile should be able to multitask without any difficulty or breakdown. Ensure your users can accomplish their tasks on your mobile websites effortlessly.
Also, make sure there is no speed issue while browsing. Loading time is a significant factor on mobile devices. Users can scroll endlessly to access your services or products on offer. Check the load time of your images as Google see page speed as a mobile search ranking factor. Lesser the time better the chances of your ranking.
3. Optimise for Speed
The speed factor is very crucial for both mobile and desktop. Therefore, it should be continuously monitored, and improvements should be made as and when needed. Use the Google PageSpeed tool to measure your website speed performance.
A few factors to optimise your website speed to improve your Google ranking:
- Before loading, use the image compression and optimiser tool to optimise your image before loading. There are several online tools available that you can use.
- Also, check the image’s dimensions to fit appropriately on the reserved space to give your page a clean and structured appearance of your website.
- Ensure you enable browser caching by adding code to the web host/server .htaccess file to avoid loading resource files on users’ computers repeatedly.
- Handle scripts responsibly. Before loading numerous JS and CSS files to improve the appearance of your website, make sure they are actually doing a favour to your website as they slow down your website. You can also minimise your files to improve the performance. You can merge several scripts into a single file; if possible, you can opt for this.
4. Improve Your Website Links
Whether internal or external, website links greatly influence how your website will rank on search engine results pages.
Few actions that you can take to improve your links:
- Most of the time, website owners do not take broken links seriously. This can be disastrous for any website’s performance as it badly impacts an ideal user experience. So make sure you fix your broken links. Use tools like W3C Link Checker to run a crawl on your site. It will help you identify the 404 errors and fix them immediately.
- Exact match anchor text is not advisable for external linking strategy but can be used when selecting internal anchor text as it still plays a significant role. However, avoid spamming and use it only if relevant.
- Wherever you mention your website name, try to create links for them. Do it moderately, as overdoing might not be the right thing to do. You can set a Google Alert to get notifications of mentions of your site. It will also help in keeping track of your brand mentions.
5. Work on On-Page Optimisation
You can use the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Starter Guide to understand the rules to promote and rank your content on Google searches.
Optimisation Best Practices for On-Page SEO:
- Adding structured data throughout your site will help Google understand what each page is about on your website.
- Google prefers the Schema format. Schema types include recipes, businesses, products, authors, and more.
- Create unique, natural, relevant, brief and descriptive titles against a series of keywords.
- Every page should carry a unique title.
- Write interesting Meta Descriptions. They play a vital role in CTR.
Wrap Up
If you are serious about your online presence and want to make optimum use of search engine optimisation (SEO) and digital marketing, then follow all the above tips sincerely. However, if you find it complicated to manage, you can hire professional SEO experts or SEO consultants to handle your work. Since they are specialised in their field, they can quickly provide you with expert services.
