If you want to generate leads for your business, you need to be easy to find! It takes a lot of dedication, persistence and time to improve your ranking on search engines. The way to do it is through Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Your goals should be to appear on the first page of Google search results. This is because very few people go to the second page of results. You might not be ready to hire a marketing agency to help you yet, but there are some things you can do yourself to help improve your chances of ranking better in search results.
Understand how you’re currently ranking:
Before making any improvements you need to know where you currently stand. A good starting point is Google Analytics. Google Analytics metrics help you to understand the amount of website traffic you get and can give you useful information on the people that are using your website. You can see how visitors find you, the device they are using, what pages of your site are most popular, and so much more. Once you have a starting point of what an average month looks like for your website, you can get to work on making improvements.
Make sure your website is mobile friendly:
Over half of all website traffic comes from mobile devices. As well as that, in 2020, Google moved to “mobile first indexing”, meaning that Google looks at the mobile version of a website to determine how it’ll be ranked. You can check if your site is friendly using Google’s mobile-friendly test. If your website isn’t mobile friendly, you’ll need an upgrade to make sure it is. Speak to your web developer to see how they can help. Most reputable web developers won’t charge you extra to build a website that is mobile friendly as it is now the norm.
Improve loading speed:
Loading speed has a direct impact on your ranking. Pages at the top of search results tend to load a lot faster than those further down the results. Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights to see how fast your website loads. If it is slow, then try compressing the images on your website. Big images are one of the main culprits for slowing down websites. Another thing to try is switching to a better host. It might cost a bit more every month, but it is definitely worth doing if it improves your site speed.
Use keywords:
Keywords play an important part in your site ranking. They show what your website content is about to search engines. Research to find out what keywords people use when they search for your services/products and include some within your content. Keep it sounding as natural as possible though because if you put too many in, then you can get penalised for keyword stuffing. Long-tail keywords are a great option. They are 3-4 word phrases that are more specific so you should be able to target more specific searches and your website will be appearing to people with a genuine interest in your business.
Utilise link building:
When other websites link to your web content, it can make your site seem more trustworthy and popular. This is called backlinking, and you’ve probably done it yourself when linking to third-party sources within your content. High-quality backlinks can improve your search ranking, but you don’t have a lot of control over who does and who doesn’t link to your website. This is where internal linking comes in. Internal linking is where you link to other pages on your own website. If you link to your existing content, site visitors can click through and read your other pages. Google will also crawl these pages so make sure your links aren’t broken. Also, when linking try to link to text with keywords, rather than just ‘click here’ as it isn’t useful for SEO.
Write quality content:
Having good quality content on your website is a great way to boost your ranking. This is because if you are writing amazing content that your audience actually wants to read, you are more likely to get people on your website. Writing SEO friendly blogs that are also interesting to read is the best way to ensure that your content is good for both readers and search engines, thus increasing your ranking.
Implementing some of these should get you started on improving your website ranking. It isn’t a quick fix process but it is definitely worth it.