It is safe to say that one of the secrets of having a growing business is to improve your Google rankings. To achieve this, there are a couple of well-defined and studied actions that are proven to boost your visitors number.
We know that everyone wants to improve their site’s visibility on the web, and we feel obligated to mention this is a process and you should not expect overnight results. This post will help you with guidelines for properly managing it in a healthy and organic way. After implementing these strategies, you will reap the fruits of your hard work, like collecting that sweet bonus from the online book of ra after a good run. Without further ado, let’s start our list!
Improve Your Page Loading Speed
We all know how frustrating a slow loading page is and, let’s be honest, most of the time, we give up and close that page to go look for another source. Google takes loading speed into consideration and, if it’s too slow, this will damage your Google ranking as well.
Research shows that a whopping 40% of visitors will take their business elsewhere if your page is taking more than 3 seconds to load, and the vast majority of them, 80% to be more specific, won’t return to your website!
It is known that a Google algorithm is going to recognize your website’s popularity, so diminishing the number of visitors will lower your search ranking. Make sure you optimize your page speed and the server response time to avoid losing all that traffic.
Optimize For Mobile
To underline the importance of mobile optimization, we would like to begin with the fact that, according to recent studies, over 60% of Google searches are generated from a mobile device. This definitely proves that having a mobile-friendly website is crucial for your business.
Let’s face it. There is no way around this. Your website has to be mobile-friendly! Otherwise, you take a great risk of offering a poor experience for visitors and eventually end up with your google ranking being lowered.
Regarding this area, you can focus your energy on mobile tasks and on performance while any Google ranking tool you’re using will be able to provide valuable info on how to increase your mobile score.
- Tasks
Always have in mind what users want from your site once they have accessed it. Simply put, they have to be able to perform those tasks in a smooth manner. Try to find out the three to five objectives that most of your site users have and make sure they can be achieved effortlessly by them.
- Performance
Nobody likes to find themselves on an endlessly scrolling adventure just to access the desired information or services.
Loading speed, which we covered earlier, is also a crucial factor for mobile users in improving your Google ranking factor starting with July of this year, according to Google.
Produce High Quality Content
Now that we covered the importance of page loading speed and mobile-friendliness, let’s continue our quest of how to improve Google search rankings: the quality of the content that you are providing to your visitors. Being one of the greatest Google SEO tools, maintaining high-quality content can be achieved from a couple of things like:
- Having an updated website so that visitors are given a reason to keep coming back to your platform. Always provide recent and relevant information in order to increase its popularity.
- This goes hand-in-hand with the above mentioned point. We are talking about the so-called dwell time, basically how much time visitors are spending on your website per visit.
If you can secure exciting, fresh or newsworthy pieces of information, you will keep visitors on your site longer; therefore, you will improve your dwell time.
A desirable win would be for a user to bookmark your page, as this is also being taken into consideration for your SEO ranking. You can only achieve this by having relevant and high-quality content. It’s important to know that you shouldn’t expect to see a huge increase overnight when you check Google ranking after posting good content. This process takes some time until the new content gets indexed and so on.
Work on your Links
Both external and internal links have a really big influence on bringing you to the top of Google search results. Let’s mention some of the most important tips for you to step up your link game:
- Fix Broken Links
A considerable amount of website owners have the bad habit of ignoring broken links, therefore creating a not so ideal experience for the user. Improve Google ranking by simply running a crawl on your website, using tools like the Google SEO checker W3C Link Checker that can easily find and fix those nasty 404 errors. If the suggested tool does not provide good results for you, any Google website test will show you all the broken links and things that need to be optimized.
- Turn Site Mentions Into Links
If you didn’t know this, you can set a Google Alert to get notifications about who mentioned your website from brands all around the web. If that mention happens to be unlinked, it would be recommended that you contact the webmaster and request they transform that into a link.
- Exact Match Anchor Text
Abusing an exact match anchor text, it is possible to become poisonous as a linking strategy that’s external, but this doesn’t deny the fact that it plays an important role when you select the internal anchor text. Avoid being spammy, although if it’s relevant, you should use it.
Optimize For Voice Search
Surely you are familiar with the existence of virtual assistants like Alexa, Cortana, Siri and Google Assistant. An increasing number of people are starting to change their way of searching for information on the internet, and that is via voice searches. To hit you with some figures, we can tell you that today 20% of the mobile searches are done by voice, and this percentage will go higher most definitely.
We can all agree this is a more comfortable and faster way of searching from a mobile user perspective, and we believe you should get on this train into the future of online searching.
Let’s go through some of the tips regarding voice search to improve your Google ranking:
Focus On Longer Keywords
Given the fact that a voice search is a bit more conversational than the other Google search tools, it would be beneficial for you to implement longer keywords that would naturally fit the way a person actually talks. For example, rather than “Pizza store NY” you might want to include a full sentence, such as “Where can I find a pizza store near me?” Use your common sense in regards to this.
Upgrade your FAQ’s
If you find it hard to incorporate those long keywords in a natural way, the FAQ section comes to your rescue and lets you do that in a seamless manner. As a bonus, if you use a clear and authoritative answer to frequently asked questions, it has the chance of being listed in Google Answers, which is truly a big source of organic traffic.
Encourage Sharing On Social Media
It is by now common knowledge that a strong presence on social media is a must when talking about improving a business and the Google page rank of its website. Maybe what is not so well-known is that you can boost your SEO ranking if people are sharing links to your page on social media.
A really good way of doing this is to make sure social sharing icons are being included on all your content and, of course, share links on the social media pages that you own.
“How do I encourage social sharing?” It’s our pleasure to list a couple of tips & tricks to help you, such as:
- Your headline should be “super-shareable”, appealing;
- Always use images. It’s easier for everyone to get the basic idea from a suggestive picture and convince them to click;
- Get the timing of the post right;
- Use positive remarks. It was proven that negative remarks are correlated with fewer followers;
- Make it easy to share. The placement of sharing buttons is critical.
Get More Backlinks
Backlinks are one of the most weighted factors for Google ranking. Incoming links from high-authority domains are proof that your page is to be taken seriously and provides a great amount of trust.
It is closely related to your search ranking improvement.
Keep in mind that Google doesn’t count the backlinks that come from the same domain, so make sure that you have a wider reach on a diverse pallet of domains.
Don’t hold back on hiring good SEO specialists that can help you improve your backlink game. You can even consider being a participant in podcasts, as they are recent and relevant in today’s day and age, and one mention from a podcast can generate a great amount of backlinks to your website.
Conclusion
Creating a successful website does not come by chance or a happy accident. It is the result of constant management, updating, and following social trends. The ultimate goal is to give people what they search for in an easy, fast, comfortable way. You will no longer have to keep checking the Google position checker every day with fear that your website went down.
We would love it if you can share your experiences in the adventure of growing a healthy website. Did you apply any particular strategy to improve your Google ranking? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments and maybe help another enthusiast get his game on.
BIO
Thomas Glare shares his experience in digital marketing. He is well-aware of how to apply marketing analytics in all areas of activity. His biggest achievement is the use of big data and marketing analytics for the new casino sites market.