Every day, individuals utilize the internet to investigate products, peruse reviews, and discover local businesses. Guaranteeing the visibility of your business in organic search results can significantly enhance your chances of attracting more customers.
The primary source of traffic to websites is organic search results, making it crucial to achieve a high ranking. Google has introduced the helpful content update, emphasizing a people-first approach. This update recognizes and rewards content that is informative, catering to visitors’ needs and primarily addressing their questions.
Stay within the bounds of your expertise; your website should provide answers to users’ queries and furnish them with pertinent information.
Here are several strategies to boost your business ranking on search engine results pages, ensuring that potential and current customers can easily locate your site.
👉Refresh content often
The more frequently you refresh the content on your website, the more regularly search engines will index the site. This increased indexing frequency facilitates the faster discovery of new content, contributing to its higher ranking.
Methods to consistently update content involve incorporating:
- Product or service news.
- Customer testimonials and success stories.
- Videos about products.
- Company news.
These additions contribute to keeping your content up-to-date and engaging for your audience.
Regularly assess your current web content every six months. When introducing new content, ensure to eliminate outdated or irrelevant items to maintain the freshness and accuracy of your website.
👉Make link building a priority
Effectively utilizing internal and external links is another strategy to enhance search rankings.
Internal linking prompts users to click on highlighted anchor text within the page, encouraging them to explore other content on your website. Search engines follow these links during site navigation to discover new pages. Opt for meaningful keywords as anchor text to provide readers with a clear idea of the linked page’s content.
External links lead to pages outside your web domain and should direct to authoritative sites like government institutions, higher education establishments, and reputable news or industry publications.
Regularly address broken links, as they can negatively impact your search engine results. If monitoring all your links is challenging, services like Dead Link Checker can assess your entire site or specific pages for broken links.
👉Produce high-quality content
As part of Google’s helpful content update, the emphasis is on creating human-oriented content rather than information tailored solely for search engine rankings. Google has provided key questions to ensure content prioritizes people, including:
- Does your website have a clear focus?
- Will viewers find satisfaction in the content?
- Will readers acquire knowledge from your site?
- Does your content reflect firsthand expertise in your product or service?
- Have you identified a target audience?
- Is content crafted to genuinely help people rather than merely boost search engine rankings?
When adding content to your site, prioritize relevance to your business rather than chasing trending topics with high search volumes. Aim for informative, helpful, and pertinent content to enhance the overall user experience, encouraging visitors to return. To maintain content quality, understand your target audience and tailor your information based on industry, business, and customer needs. Additionally, avoid duplicate content, as it can negatively impact your search rankings.
✍Optimize on-page SEO elements
There are additional elements that can help with SEO.
Videos and images
Enhancing your content with videos and images not only provides more information for readers but also contributes to improving your search engine ranking. To optimize SEO with images:
- Create a descriptive and optimized filename, such as website_design.jpg, instead of generic names like image_1.jpg.
- Include an alt tag in the HTML that provides a concise description of the image, like “man creating webpage.”
- Compress image size to enhance website loading speed.
- Add captions below images for an improved user experience.
For optimizing SEO with videos:
- Include a transcript on the video landing page to enhance accessibility and indexing.
- Design an engaging video thumbnail to provide a preview and attract viewers.
- Add a descriptive title and detailed description to enhance the user experience and highlight relevant keywords, making your video more prominent.
Meta descriptions
While meta tags themselves are not visible on your webpage, they play a crucial role in informing search engines about the content of your page. Although not always displayed, search engines may showcase your meta tags on the results page. It’s essential to craft a concise and explicit description within your meta tags, incorporating primary keywords that accurately represent the webpage’s subject matter. This aids search engines in understanding and presenting relevant information to users in search results.
Contact information
To enhance the trustworthiness of your website, a vital aspect of search engine ranking, ensure that your business contact information is prominently displayed and easily accessible. Additionally, incorporate a clear call to action that guides visitors on the next steps you want them to take. This transparency and ease of communication contribute to a positive user experience and can positively influence search engine rankings.
Headers
Using headers is beneficial for the styling and search engine ranking of your pages. Heading tags carry significant weight in search engine rankings as they facilitate easy content skimming for users. The primary heading, identified as an H1 tag, is the initial element visible to site visitors, making it crucial for establishing the page’s main theme. Subsection headers are also valuable for search engine ranking as they contribute to the overall organization and structure of the page.
⏲Improve page loading time
A sluggish website loading time negatively impacts search engine rankings, leading to a lower position. Additionally, slow-loading websites tend to drive away visitors, with around 50% of online shoppers abandoning a site that takes longer than six seconds to load.
Factors influencing page load times encompass:
- Page size, particularly due to large images and custom fonts.
- Issues related to content management system plug-ins.
- Insufficient bandwidth, affecting the data transfer speed.
Ensure your site is mobile-friendly
Approximately 60% of internet traffic originates from mobile devices, as reported by Statcounter. Consequently, websites need to be mobile-friendly to secure higher rankings in search engines.
To assess your website’s mobile-friendliness, utilize Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. This tool informs you whether your website meets the criteria or requires enhancements. Page load speed significantly influences a site’s mobile-friendliness, with considerations for page layout, font size, and navigation also playing pivotal roles.
To optimize a website for mobile use:
- Avoid Flash images and animations, as they are not supported by mobile devices.
- Space out links to prevent overwhelming blocks of blue text.
- Limit images and optimize their size to enhance page loading speed.
- Steer clear of presenting a dense “wall” of text.
- Utilize a large font that remains readable on smaller screens.
- Design larger buttons and position them towards the bottom of the screen for thumb-friendly scrolling.
- Prioritize simple and user-friendly designs.
Test your website often from a mobile device to ensure content is easy to read and navigate.
🎨Research keywords and use them appropriately
Keywords represent the terms or phrases that users input into a search engine when seeking a website or business. To enhance the discoverability of your site, it is essential to incorporate relevant keyword phrases on your website, aligning with your services, business, and location. Integrate these words into your content, page titles, title tags, and image names for optimal visibility.
Keyword research tools
The following are some examples of free keyword research tools to help you plan your content:
- Moz Keyword Explorer,
- Semrush,
- Keyword Surfer
- Google Keyword Planner
Ensure you steer clear of industry jargon that customers may not employ when conducting searches in your field.
Avoid keyword stuffing
Google penalizes sites when they overuse keywords, a tactic known as keyword stuffing. Your text should read naturally and use language that your everyday customer would use.
🧿Use local SEO
A local SEO approach aids businesses in featuring prominently in local outcomes, encompassing Google map results, local business listings, and organic search findings.
To refine your local outcomes and secure visibility when local users explore terms associated with your business:
- Establish a dedicated location page on your website.
- Infuse local keywords into your content, like “Houston web developer.”
- Claim and regularly update your Google Business Profile.
- Ensure consistency in your online directory details, including name, address, and phone number.
- Respond promptly to reviews, be they negative or positive.
