How to Improve Your Website’s Google Rankings

With a massive 95% of users not going beyond the first page of the Google search results to find what they are looking for, improving your ranking and getting on the first page has never been more important.

Here are some tips and solid advice to help improve your website’s Google Rankings:

Ensure Your Website is Mobile Friendly

With over 70% of all traffic being mobile and tablet traffic the importance of having a responsive, mobile-friendly website has never been more pertinent. Google has started moving towards indexing the mobile version of your website first since 2016. There is a definite trend in web design to design for mobile first and then translate the design for desktop, while in bygone years it was the other way around.

Use an SSL Certificate – HTTPS

Having a website that is secure and uses Https is an important ranking factor. There seems to be a strong correlation between websites rankings on the first page of Google and Https, with almost 50% of the sites on the first page employing SSL certificates.

 Make Sure Your Site is Fast Loading

With the majority of users browsing on mobile devices, fast loading pages and websites have become ever more important. Research shows that slow loading pages drastically increase the bounce rate and many users get irritated and will exit websites that take to long to load.

Ensuring that your website code is clean and optimised, that not to many scripts or large images have been used are all important for fast loading pages. This, along with using proper website and browser caching.

Focus on the Quality of Your Content

It can be said enough “Content is King”.  Try to write content that offers true value to website visitors. Write well-researched and insightful l content that positions you and your business as an expert in your field. Don’t keyword stuff for search engines as you will get penalized. Write content that flows and reads well for users and covers the topics in a fair amount of details by using different keyword variations. Be careful of using over technical or industry speak as this may deter users who don’t understand the concepts represented.

Optimse your Images and Code

Optimise your image for search engines and users. Images should be no bigger than 100kb per image and not have too many images should be used per page, so as not to impact negatively on the page load speed. Ensure that your images are name with appropriate keywords and have alt text with keywords to improve the relevance to search engines.

Build High Quality Backlinks to Your Website

Build quality backlinks from website with good domain authority and trust. This links with past some authority onto your website. When it comes to links, quality rather than quantity is definitely the way to go. Links should also be from websites that are well related and relevant to the topics of your website as these will carry more weight.

Avoid low quality or spammy links as these will have a negative effect on your website ranking.

Make a Marketing Budget available for PPC and Facebook Advertising

While it is very important to optimise ones website in order to gain exposure in the organic search results, it is also important to make some budget available for Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising as this budget is well spent and usually converts well and brings good targeted leads. Running a Facebook advertising campaign can also be very cost effective and yield good results, so make some budget available for such social media campaigns.

Employ An SEO Specialist

The world of Search Engine Optimization or SEO can be confusing and so it makes sense to employ an SEO specialist to guide and advise you on the best practices and help grow your website traffic. Contact us today to chat about SEO.