The modern online business world can sometimes be a very volatile environment. With a plethora of similar businesses all trying to attract similar audiences, things can get quite tricky.
Luckily, modern businesses can rely on numerous digital marketing strategies that will help them achieve their goals. However, simply creating or choosing a strategy won’t be enough either.
Instead, businesses need to find ways to tailor and improve their strategies to fit their specific needs.
One of the most popular marketing strategies is search engine optimization (SEO). With the majority of modern businesses operating in the online realm, they need to find ways to boost their exposure and rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). This can be achieved with SEO.
With that in mind, here are some easy ways you can improve the Google ranking of your website and attract more traffic.
Start off with a great website
Although this may seem obvious, you will first need to make sure you have a great website if you want your business to be successful online.
Simply having a website will no longer suffice in this day and age. Instead, you’ll need to make sure that your website is user-friendly, responsive and contains valuable content.
Professionals in website design from New York emphasize that, aside from a great design, your website needs to offer clean typography and compelling visuals.
Improve user experience
According to SEMrush, the top four most important ranking factors include website visits, time spent on the website, the number of pages visited per session and bounce rate.
All of these four factors are closely related to the experience users have when visiting your website. So, the aim here is to create a website that will attract new visitors.
On top of that, your website needs to encourage your visitors to stay, explore your website further and – hopefully – convert. User experience is extremely important for any online business, so you need to make sure you offer your visitors the best experience possible.
Create quality content
Filling your website with high-quality content will help you attract a greater audience and improve your website traffic.
If you offer your visitors a reason to stay on your website – such as engaging, informative and relevant content – you will also increase the time your visitors spend on your website and lower your bounce rate.
Google itself stated that high-quality content is sometimes even more important than user experience, which is another thing to keep in mind.
Optimize your content for SEO
Aside from making sure your content is of high quality, you also need to make sure that it’s well optimized for SEO. You can achieve this by:
- Determining your primary and secondary keywords and including them in your content
- Making your main keyword a part of your page’s URL
- Adding your primary keyword in title tags and H1s
- Ensuring that your content is easily readable and understandable
- Using effective anchor text in your internal links
- Breaking up the text by including at least one image or video
All these will not only help you cater to some of the most important SEO rules, but will also make your content more enjoyable and engaging.
Photo by Callum Shaw on Unsplash
Make your content easy to read
Once you’ve created quality content and made efforts to optimize it for SEO, you should also make it easy to digest.
By using different headings, bullet points and other similar structures in your content, you will instantly make it easier to read. On top of that, different headings enable you to emphasize your key points, which both your readers and search engines will find to be quite useful.
So, instead of presenting your content as a solid block of text, make sure you give it more structure and make it easier to read and follow.
Secure backlinks
Backlinks play a huge role when it comes to improving your Google ranking.
Backlinks, or the links that trace from other websites back to yours, are another important factor that will affect your ranking. By securing backlinks – particularly from high-authority domains — you will boost your relevance and authority, showing Google that you are who you claim to be.
This is not only important for your Google ranking, but it will also establish your business as an industry expert, which will resonate well with your audience. In turn, it will result in greater trust, more traffic and higher authority.
Improve page speed
Another way you can improve your Google ranking is by paying more attention to your website loading speed.
Since Google uses loading speed as one of its ranking factors, you need to make sure that yours is up to par. Generally speaking, your website needs to load in 4 seconds or less to be positively viewed by Google.
On top of that, users will – in most cases – abandon a website that takes too long to load, which is another thing you need to keep in mind.
So, by improving your website loading speed, you will not only play by Google’s rules, but you’ll also make your website more appealing to your audience.
Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash
Get rid of broken links
Arguably, there’s nothing more frustrating than a website that’s full of broken links.
If you want to establish your business as an industry leader, having broken links on your website won’t help you achieve that goal.
Luckily, there are plenty of useful tools that will enable you to analyze the links on your website and quickly identify the ones that need to be fixed or even removed.
Make sure you run regular checks to ensure that all of the links featured on your website perform as they are intended to.
Optimize your visuals
As mentioned earlier, adding various visuals to your content will help you keep it fresh and entertaining.
Not only that, but well-placed visuals can boost the authority of your content and even offer greater value to your audience. However, if you simply add visuals – such as photos and videos – to your website without optimizing them properly, you may end up doing more harm than good.
Although Google does like to see a variety of content on a website, you also need to make sure that all that content doesn’t hinder the overall performance of your website in any way.
Any elements you decide to add to your website will affect its performance to a certain extent. Heavy Visuals can seriously slow down your website loading speed, for instance, which is something you wish to avoid.
Consider optimizing for local search
Online users commonly search for businesses “near me” when looking them up via search engines.
That’s why you should also optimize your content for local searches. That way, aside from catering to a wider audience, you’ll also be working on attracting the one in your vicinity.
Optimizing your content for local searches will also help you rank better on Google, especially if you list your business on Google My Business as well.
Keep voice search in mind
As we generally move closer to greater inclusivity, you should also pay attention to voice searches.
Keep in mind that more and more users rely on these types of searches when looking for things online. So, make sure you add likely voice search phrases to your website content as well. This will improve your chances of appearing in voice search results.
However, make sure you don’t rely on single keywords only — optimize your content for full sentences that reflect the natural conversational style.
Don’t forget about mobile
Since the number of people using mobile devices to access the internet is constantly on the rise, your website should cater to these people.
Additionally, websites that are optimized for mobile are generally more appealing to Google. So, if you are trying to improve your Google ranking, make sure you pay attention to the mobile users as well.
That way, you will boost your ranking on Google and gain access to an audience that was previously unaware of your business. This will improve your reach, boost your exposure, drive more traffic to your website and – potentially – result in greater revenue.
The examples listed above are some of the best ways to ensure that you improve your website’s Google ranking.
Of course, since every business is unique, you will need to identify the things that work best for your business in particular.
But it’s safe to say that as long as you stay up to date with all the changing trends and make sure you tweak and update your website regularly, you’ll significantly improve your chances of ranking higher on Google.
Christopher is a digital marketing specialist and a freelance blogger. He is focused on new web tech trends and digital voice distribution across different channels. In his free time Christopher plays drums and Magic: the Gathering.
