For a business, location is everything, and one of the most important locations is where your website appears in search results. Increased visibility for your company or brand is a result of higher rankings in Google search results (for the appropriate keyword phrases). By increasing your visibility, you increase the amount of traffic you can send to your website. However, this information is also available to your competitors. If you’re struggling to outrank them in Google, it’s possible that your SEO tactics need to be adjusted.
You must increase your website’s visibility if you want to influence customers to buy your products or services. More often than not, your target customer will not find you if you’re not on the first page of a key search result. Consider this: when was the last time you went beyond the first page of results on Google?
As a result, if your competitors outrank you on Google, your website’s target audience will be less likely to visit it. The good news is that you can outrank your rivals by boosting your rankings.
Rank on Google: How Long Does It Take?
It’s fascinating to see what Ahrefs found out about the time it takes to rank on Google.
The following are a few key takeaways:
- The average age of a top-ten ranking page was over two years. Furthermore, the first-page pages had an average age of nearly 3 years.
- Only 22% of the top 10 most popular pages were less than a year old.
- For at least one keyword, only about 6% of the pages examined over the course of one year appeared in the top 10 results.
- Zooming in on the top 6 percent of pages reveals that most of them rose to the top 10 in the space of two to six months after they first appeared.
How to Rank Higher in Google?
Getting to the top 10 SERPs in under a year requires a lot of effort, skill, and even a little luck. In other words, it brings us full circle to the subject at hand: how to improve your Google ranking.
Here are the five steps you should take to get your website on the first page of Google in order to increase sales and conversions.
1. Begin With A Stable Base
Even the best SEO campaigns can be ruined by a shoddy website structure and information architecture.
Users and Google will penalize your rankings if your website is difficult to navigate and crawl.
On a mobile platform, put “usability first.”. That’s the way to get where you want to go.
- Audit Your Technical Seo.
To determine search rankings, Google uses an algorithm that takes into account hundreds (if not thousands) of signals, as well as machine learning.
This means that you’ll have an advantage over many of your rivals if you focus on the SEO basics.
- Resolve Content Duplication.
Problems with duplicate content are frequently caused by technical difficulties. Multiple versions of the same page are the most common occurrence.
For example, there are four different pages with the same content on
all of which would be considered the same by Google.
You can fix this by modifying your.htaccess file’s redirect rules.
2. Improve Performance On Smartphones And Tablets
Your website must pass Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test if it wants to be included in its new mobile-first index.
A mobile ranking meltdown can be avoided by increasing the amount of time spent on mobile tasks and performance.
- Tasks
Take a look at what your site’s visitors want to do after they arrive at it. They must be able to carry out these fundamental tasks with ease and without stumbling even when multitasking.
What are your site’s visitors’ first three to five goals? It’s important to make sure that they can be completed easily on your mobile site.
- Performance
How long does it take for your customers to find what they want on your website?
Do your website’s images slow down the loading process?
Page speed will be used by Google as a ranking factor for mobile searches starting in July, according to Google.
In mobile devices, loading time is a major factor, especially because most connections on mobile devices are slower than those on PCs.
3. Ensure That Everything Is Running As Quickly As Possible
You have to keep an eye on the speed, regardless of whether you’re on a mobile device or a desktop.
Benchmark your website’s speed with Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.
Here’s how to improve the speed of your website’s pages:
- The Size Of The Image File
Edit the image with your preferred photo editing program of choice.
Use an image compression and optimizer tool to further improve your image before uploading.
In the end, to keep your live webpage looking tidy and organized, make sure the image’s dimensions fit within the image space allotted.
- Caching On The Web Browser
When a web page is loaded into a web browser, several resources are also loaded. These resource files are cached on the user’s computer by the browser. By doing this, resources don’t have to be reloaded each time a user navigates to a different page on the site.
Adding code to the web host/server.htaccess file is the best way to enable browser caching for most sites.
To do this in WordPress, use one of the many plugins that are readily available.
- Handling Of Scripts
JS and CSS files can slow down your website, so before you load them, be sure you need them. Otherwise, you’ll end up with a bloated site.
To keep things running quickly, you can also minify your files by, for example, removing comments.
Do your best to combine multiple scripts into a single one if possible. Only one call to the server will be necessary to load all the scripts this way.
4. Focus On Link Building
Link popularity continues to be influenced by both internal and external factors.
Make your link game more polished by following these suggestions:
- Restore Access To Blocked Websites.
Broken links are frequently overlooked by website owners. As a result, the user may have a less than satisfactory experience.
You can easily find and fix 404 errors by crawling your site with tools like W3C Link Checker.
- Matching Text In The Anchor
When used as an external linking strategy, exact match anchor text can be poisonous, but it still has a significant impact when deciding on internal anchor text.
Try to avoid being annoying, but if something is useful, don’t hesitate to use it.
Convert the mentions of your website into links
Set up a Google Alert to be notified when your website is mentioned online.
You’ll be able to keep track of where your brand is being mentioned online with the help of this tool.
If the mentions aren’t linked, get in touch with the website’s owner and ask them to fix it.
5. Optimisation Of The Web Page
Google aims to assist you in this situation. If you’re interested in promoting your online content via Google search, check out their SEO Starter Guide.
When it comes to website architecture, following this guide’s basic instructions will put you miles ahead of your competition.
- Tell Google About Your Niche
Add structured data to your site to help with this. That way, Google will have no problem figuring out what the content on each page is about.
Google prefers the Schema markup format.
It’s possible to create schema types for everything from meals to companies to books.
- Make Titles That Are Original, Short, and Descriptive
Use descriptive and natural language in your title rather than just a list of keywords.
Each page must have its own title.
- Make Your Descriptions Catchy.
Despite the fact that meta descriptions don’t affect your website’s ranking, they have a significant impact on click-through rates. As a result, you may see an increase in traffic to your site.
As a result, make certain that all descriptions are both distinctive and enticing. The description will be generated for you if you don’t provide one or if Google disapproves of it.
Conclusion
Anyone serious about digital marketing must take a long view as Google continues to close the door on spammy techniques and schemes.