All brands know what a giant bonus, it is to have a website with a great Google rank. However, getting to this point is not a walk in the park. It will take some strategizing from the website’s side as well. A good position is granted by Google only for websites that are worthy of holding that position. Here are some hacks you could try to achieve this goal.
Improving user navigation and experience
A lot of factors go into this, like how many visitors your website has, how much time these users spend on it, whether or not there are conversions, the bounce rate, etc. This more or less decides that kind of experience your customers will have on your website and this matters a lot to search engines. Google especially, takes into account websites that provide the best user experience and ranks sites accordingly.
Your site has to be engaging and entertaining as well. In other words, there needs to be some value in addition to the whole experience. That’s the only way you will be able to get people to stick around and explore your site better.
Optimization and content originality
The content displayed on your site needs to be optimized for SEO because Google has the kind of algorithm that uses machine learning (among other technology) to come up with its rankings. If your site has content that is of high quality, then that will reflect on how much traffic your site can generate and that thus, improves your site’s search ranking. Optimizing for SEO is polishing your content to ensure it is error-free, has rich keywords, has content relevant to your target population, is mobile-friendly and has links to back up information or support what you have to offer.
These are some of the basic things you need to look into to have an edge over your competition. Additionally, technical issues could also entail that your content is duplicated where your users find your content page to be similar to others. This is a bad sign because both Google and your users will not appreciate the duplication of content. Maintaining originality and adding fresh content could help solve this issue.
Become mobile-friendly
As most users today choose to spend time on their smartphones, it does not come as a surprise that they opt to look for what they want on search engines on their phones themselves. Google is pretty specific about wanting websites to be able to work seamlessly from the mobile screen as well. This will affect your site ranking.
So, ensuring performance and tasks through this medium works well is a huge plus-point. Upon landing on your brand’s website, users must be able to do everything they could have used their desktops. Simplicity is key here, the simpler your navigation, the easier it is to optimize it for mobile.
Get backlinks to back you up
Backlinks are basically links that you have on your website that redirect users to other sites that support your site’s claims or adds more value to their experience. This could either be a way towards showing users a video or similar, comparable products or reviews. This is a factor that adds weightage to your Google rank considerations.
Being supported by sites that have quality content and have got good ranks is a great way to add credibility to your site. It gives your domain more authority and will increase traffic and search ranking.
Need for speed
This is definitely a factor which Google considers to rank websites. So, ensuring your site loads fast will be a good thing to do. There is no downside to this because it just ensures that your users will have a great experience without having to wait and lose interest. Like earlier mentioned, Google wants a pleasant user experience for its search engine users.
So, regardless of whether your site is being accessed desktop or mobile, the speed has to be constantly monitored and there is always room for improvement. If there are way too many images in your site, it might affect load time.
An option would be to reduce the dimensions of those images, compress them and remove what is not necessary. You could enable browser caching as well, so that each time a user visits your page, there are already stored resources that will ensure that load time is a minimal as possible.
No room for broken links
Broken links are the worst for both users and your Google rankings. So, ensure your links are of great quality, so that there are no technical glitches. Fix what is broken and increase traffic instantly. Google too, will be pleased.
Putting your content out there in the best way possible
Now, how this is done to structure your site well. Well, enough for Google to recognize easily what the pages in it are about. You can make this a fruitful effort by creating titles that are unique and describe exactly what your site’s pages are all about. Making your descriptions tempting and innovative will ensure more traffic. Better you do it or Google will generate one for you.
Local search – an additional feather in the cap
Though this is not going to be your primary concern if you are just starting out, it does not hide the fact that people use their phones to find all things that are near them. So, the ‘near me’ option improves your user experience and is likely to affect your Google ranking.
When your site becomes part of the local searches, your brand gets listed in the local directories. This increases the chance of user engagement and interaction via reviews as well as adding to your online credibility as a useful and relevant website.
Aim for a good position
Google as a search engine does its best by pulling up content that is most relevant to the user’s query or search. All the websites that come in the search results are either exactly or come close to what the user is looking for. So, your aim as a brand should also be to be a part of these suggestions. A high rank can bring you closer to this.
Category: Google ranking
Keywords: optimization, ranking, SEO
Tags: rank, content, search engine
