Are you looking for ways to improve your website’s Search Engine Ranking to get the edge over your competitors to grow your business and obtain new leads? The following are five strategies you can use today to boost your presence in search results.
1. Ensure your website design is user-friendly
Your website itself is the most critical part of SEO. Your design may look good to your eyes, but if your site isn’t providing a great user experience (UX), it doesn’t matter if you have great your site looks. Google’s ultimate goal is to provide the best possible results for their users.
If users can’t find the information they need on your site, they will waste no time clicking back to the search results. This can contribute to a high bounce rate and low time spent on your site, which sends negative signals to search engines. Incorporating a simple site structure and clean navigation can help search crawlers discover and index pages on your site, which is crucial for your search engine ranking in the search results.
2. Publish relevant content with keywords in strategic places
It is impossible to improve web page ranking if the readable copy on your web page does not contain the words you wish to be found by. Many people erroneously think that just putting your important keywords in meta tags is enough. This is not true; search engines like Google hardly use the meta tags and look more to the page’s copy. Ensure that your essential keyword copy is in the first paragraph of text, in headlines (using headers such as H1, H2, H3) and in the active or clickable portions of link text on your page.
3. Have a link-worthy website
It is difficult to improve a website’s ranking without obtaining a good number of links to your pages from other websites. If you have very good and valuable content, other sites may link to you because you are a valuable resource. However, if you want to speed this process along you will have to actively request links from other websites, either by trading links or by getting your content (with a link back to your site) placed on other websites.
When it comes to links, you should keep in mind one important principle: it is not the quantity of links that is important, but the quality. One good link from an authority site such as the BBC or Wikipedia is worth more than dozens of links from other sites. To get these quality links, there is no short cut. You will have to earn it by having a site that provides a lot of useful information.
4. Improve your site’s load speed
With the Internet’s growth, users expect to access information quickly and hate to wait for slow-loading pages. In fact, users expect pages to load in three seconds or less. If your page takes longer than three seconds to load, people will bounce from your page. A high bounce-rate negatively impacts your ranking because Google will believe that your page isn’t user-friendly.
One of the ways to improve your site’s speed is to your image sizes. Large images can slow down your site because they take a long time to load. Aside from reducing image file sizes, you can clean up code, enable browser caching, and fix broken links to improve your site’s performance. These are just a few simple adjustments you can make to help your site load quicker.
5. Keep up with Search Engine Developments
Search engine positioning is dynamic as Google is continually changing its algorithm on how a website is ranked. It would help if you kept up with changes in the world of search engines.
If you do not have the expertise or the time to tackle these matters by yourself, you should take advantage of a digital agency that can improve your search engine ranking. While this means that optimizing your site might require a bit more professional help, it also means that you’ll be continuously improving the user experience your site provides. And when you consider the impact that user experience has on conversions, this can significantly impact your sales and revenue in the long run.
