If you expect people to find you through Google searches, search engine optimization (SEO) should be high on your list of priorities. You won’t get sales leads for your business if no one finds you.
Over 3.5 billion searches are carried out on Google every day. So you need to follow Google’s guidelines to ensure that potential visitors can reach your content. One of the best ways to get more traffic is to improve your website’s SEO.
Before we investigate the details of improving the search results for your site, we’ll take a moment to check the ranking of your current page in the search results. Visit the tool to help you rank your site by keyword searches.
Your goal, of course, is to put your website at the top of this list. Higher rankings mean more organic traffic and should increase the overall ROI of your SEO strategy. Sounds like a dream right? However, if you are disappointed with the ranking check of a newly launched website, don’t panic. Follow these tips to improve your search engine optimization (SEO) and make sure your website ranks high in search results.
Well, finally you have developed the website for your business and launched it now. But now what would be the next step? After spending a good amount and investing time too, you want your website to be ranked in search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and get noticed by millions of people. But do you have any idea – how to do it?
You might have heard the term – SEO and we assume that for any business owners or entrepreneurs, what SEO means is, ‘keywords’. Well, SEO is not only about keywords, but it’s also much more than that.
In the era of the digital world, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) seems to be the topic that comes in every business owner’s mind. On the other hand, most of the consumers use search engines like Google just to find out their needs – brands, products, and services. But have you thought about what’s the actual procedure behind the stage to increase the search engine optimization results?
That’s why the term was born – Search Engine Optimization (SEO). And here, we have come up with the ultimate guide on how to increase and improve search engine optimization rankings for your website in 2020.
But retailers or business owners are running out of patience and they want their website to be ranked on the search engine in a very quick time. Let us clear your mind here, SEO is not a short-term course which could give your overnight results. It’s all about the long-term game and anyone promising with quick results should be greeted with a high level of skepticism.
Besides this, Google is frequently changing its algorithm to ensure that only good SEO practices are implemented by SEO experts daily. Proper techniques don’t mean to rank your website higher but that helps people find relevant information effortlessly. That’s called a white hat SEO technique.
So to the point, SEO is not here to serve you a page ranking but gets you potential visitors, followers and happy customers.
Table of Contents
10 Effective Ways to Improve your Website SEO Rankings
However, some factors might help you boost your website on the search engines. Here’s the time to get into the shoes of SEO with the several techniques and improve your website ranking on the SERP.
Here are several ways to improve your SEO.
1. Audit Your Website
(Source: webpixeltechnologies)
Just like when you are planning to purchase a car, you inquire about the company and the car itself about the capacity, advantages, and drawbacks. The same theory applies here. If you are planning to do SEO, first you need to monitor and audit your website. Thus, you will be able to identify your website’s weaknesses and strengths. That will become much easier for you to play to your strengths while creating strategic improvements to the weaker areas of your SEO.
An SEO website audit depends on several factors, such as:
- The structure of your website
- The information you are providing
- The existing content
- Duplicate Content.
- Title and Description lenght.
- Broken links and redirection.
- Anchor text overoptimization.
- Thin content removal.
- Missing image alternative text.
- Page speed optimization.
- Internal linking.
- Bad link removal and disvowing.
- Schema structure data.
- Sitemap html and xml.
- Robots.txt optimization.
The actual point of auditing your website is to identify areas that need to be fixed so that you can start to develop a strategic plan for improvement. Though the audit itself will not help you improve SEO; it’s the basic and first step in effectively boosting your SEO efforts.
So, since you are clear with the first and basic step, let us figure out the other techniques as well.
2. Produce Useful & High-Quality Content
So tell us, how often do you update your website with content? If you have not updated it for a long time, you’re probably out of the race of SEO right now.
To gain more traffic to your website and increase its popularity, you need to feed visitors with unique, proper and relevant content so that they will come back to your website frequently.
The amount of time visitors spend on your website also creates an impact on your SEO ranking. That’s called a ‘Dwell Time’. This lets you know the time users are spending on your website.
If the content of your website is fresh, exciting, interesting, informative and unique, the visitors will never leave your website, visit frequently and this will improve your dwell time.
Different types of content attract users, so don’t publish same types of content and use the different formate of the content:
- Example
- Point-illustration-explanation
- Thought Leadership
- Inverted Pyramid
- Interview
- List
- Link Post
- Book Review
- Product Review
- How to
- Case Study
- Media Post
According to research by QuickSprout, the content words between 2000 to 2500 seems to rank the highest in search engine results.
(Source: QuickSprout)
Although the SEO world is not ruled by word count, moreover, nobody will ever read your stuff if it’s not helpful and relevant. Actually, lengthy content does give you the opportunity to provide more value, inject more keywords and give more outbound links.
Another method that will boost your SEO ranking is – when visitors bookmark your content on Chrome, the browser helps to improve the SEO ranking of your website.
3. Optimize Your Page Speed
(Source: seoptimer)
Page speed or website speed is yet another important factor that the Google algorithm considers when ranking your website on its SERP.
The longer your page takes to load, the more frustrated the user becomes. This will force them to leave your website and choose your competitors.
As per the research, if your site speed is more than 3 seconds to load, there is almost 50% chance of losing customers or visitors. Even 80% of those visitors will never visit your website again. This is troublesome for your SEO ranking as it eventually kills the traffic.
Thus, to improve bounce rates and SERP ranking, you will have to focus on site speed. This way, users will keep coming back and Google algorithm will recognize your website’s traffic and adjust your search ranking accordingly.
Here are a few factors that should be considered to optimize your page speed.
Image File Size: It’s a common thing and everybody knows that larger image files take longer to load. It slows down your page speed. So, compress and optimize your image size before uploading it on the website.
Browser Caching: When a browser loads a webpage, it’s loading a number of resources. These types of resources are stored in the user’s computer with browser caching. So, it is not necessary to be loaded again – making pages load faster.
Script Handling: JSS and CSS files can reduce your site speed, so make sure that you actually need these extras to enhance your site before using them.
So, at the endnote, when you are improving your website speed, you are just not providing a better UX, but you are also increasing the conversion rates.
4. Improve Your Header Tags
Nobody likes to be bound into the wall of text. Obviously, good content attracts the visitor, but good formatting catches the visitor’s attention. It makes readers or users more willing to spend time to read your content and come back again, which will ultimately affect your SERP.
Formatting and Formula of the Header Tags
- The headline should be in the center.
- Use Bold and Large font in dark color with white background.
- Use Title Case.
5 Header Tags Formulas:
- [Large Number] Ways to [Achieve an Outcome], Live Example :
Top 5 Ways to Improve SEO Rankings - The Definitive Guide to [Achieve a Desired Outcome], Live Example: The Definitive Guide to Getting SEO Rank Faster
Proper use of header tags can help break up your content into various sections that look more appealing and amazing to read.
5. Include Inbound and Outbound Hyperlinks
Linking is another important factor to gain traffic and increase search engine optimization results. The best way to increase the readability of your content is to give a link to that content with the relevant content of your own site or third-party websites. The more informative content you write and share with others, the more likely other sites will link back to your content.
Linking to other trusted websites will not only increase the relevancy of your content and dwell time, but Google gets trust signals based on the user traffic and improves SEO ranking.
Apart from adding external links, you can also link your own site pages internally. So, whenever you find any relevant content or data regarding your content then include links. This will not only help you increase search engine optimization results but it also navigates readers to refer to other useful content regarding that topic.
Here is some sample data that you can use in each column of the Link Building Scorecard:
Here is some sample data that you can use in each column of the Link Building Scorecard:
Niche/Category:
Input any information that help you contextualize what kind of website you’re trying to get links from. For example:
- Nutrition
- Health
- Fitness
- Gaming
- Football
- SEO
- Content Marketing
- Fashion
Link Placement:
Where is your link going to be positioned, in case you succeed? Here are some examples:
- Footer
- Sidebar
- Resources page
- Article body
- Author Bio/signature
- Navigation
Relevancy:
On a scale of 1 to 5, how relevant is the topic of this website in relationship with your website topic.
DS/PS:
Domain Score and Page Score.
Traffic:
Using your preferred competitive intelligence tool, what is the estimated traffic this website gets per month?
No Follow/Do Follow Links:
Using your preferred competitive intelligence tool, determine the amount of No Follow and Do Follow links this website has.
Referring domains:
Using your preferred competitive intelligence tool, determine the amount of Referring Domains this website has.
6. Improve Your Homepage Loading Speed
Your page loading time is important for a reason. If your download speed is too slow, Google will detect it and it will affect your ranking. However, a slow website also affects how your website visitors interact with your pages. Hence, these negative attitudes will hurt your ranks as well.
A survey shows that 40% of visitors leave a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load a page. Even more shocking is that 80% of these visitors do not return to this site. This is terrible for your SEO rankings as it will ultimately kill your website traffic. On the other hand, if your page loads quickly, people will return.
The Google algorithm recognizes the popularity of your website and adjusts your search position accordingly. This leads to optimizations for both page speed and response time. If you want to check the speed of your website, online services like Pingdom are available for free.
This way, you can test your site in different places around the world. If you find that your site is slow, you should check its theme and plug-ins. If your slow server is to blame, check out my list of the best web hosts and forward them to the new host!
7. Optimize for Voice Search
Now that 25% of adults in the US have smart speakers (a number that is set to reach 55% by 2024), it’s safe to say that voice search is something to consider in your SEO strategy.
Revenue from voice searches reached $ 1.8 billion last year (and is expected to reach $ 40 billion by 2024). 2% of smart speakers in the United States bought their own devices. There are huge differences between using voice and text search and therefore optimizing voice search, and user results. For example, a search engine might enter “horse part.” But voice search is usually longer – something like “What do horses eat?”
Long-tail keywords play a key role in voice searches, with long-tail usually referring to terms with at least three words. Write a long, detailed blog post that publishes these semantically related keywords accordingly. For example, write a detailed post on the keyword or plugin like WooCommerce pre order, you provide or you use in your site to give a thorough description and engage with your audience as well as for the site’s ranking. Also, try to produce content that is significantly better than what is currently set for your target keyword.
Do you remember how we said that about 40% of the voice search results come from highlighted snippets? Using structured data can increase the possibility that your information will be used to answer a competitor’s voice question.
8. Diversify Your Backlink Portfolio
Even if you follow all of the technical SEO tips for a page, there is no guarantee that Google will be the homepage. A lot of search engine optimization has to do with backlinks and whether or not you are creating links from high-authority websites.
Different links can come from two sources. Your backlink is an order or an unsubscribe, and the backlink carries more weight.
Wheels = On-page SEO
Engine = Off-page SEO
Gas = Backlinks and New Content
Oil = Link Diversity
A website that gets a backlink: For example, if you advertise your content and ask publishers to run a story, your source of the backlink is a website that links to your content.
A diverse portfolio of backlinks signals to Google that your website is an authoritative source and that you are naturally creating links using an outdated black hat or another spam tactic.
Do you need help finding the right backlinks? You can use the link analysis tool to identify your referral domains and entire links. They provide the ability to compare up to four competing URLs to understand your position.
9. Take Advantage of YouTube SEO
In most cases, YouTube videos often provide search results. YouTube is the most popular video site on the Internet. Two billion active users watch 1 billion hours of video every day.
Many SEO managers forget about YouTube when they think of search engines. Video marketing isn’t for everyone, and not necessarily for all industries, but now that most of us have powerful video cameras, now is the time to play with video marketing.
Like Google’s spiders, YouTube’s algorithm collects and uses information about your video. The file name, title, and description of the uploaded content will affect your ranking in YouTube search results.
A great thumbnail should tell viewers exactly what it is about. Don’t use a single YouTube screenshot for your video. Instead, create your thumbnail with an eye-catching image.
Breaking a topic or story down into a series of videos called a playlist allows users to stay on your channel longer and engage with most of the content.
10. Continually Learn From Your Analytics
By monitoring the performance of your website, you can better understand what’s right for your audience and what’s not. This way, you can create more content that is tailored to your liking and dislike. There are many metrics to improve that you can focus on. Below is a common metric error that you need to look out for.
If you look at how much time visitors spend on a page, you can get valuable insight into their reading habits. For example, if your users spend less time on the page than others, this can show you what content your audience likes.
A bounce rate shows how many visitors to a website leave a page without navigating to another page on the site. A high bounce rate is a sure sign that something needs to be improved on your site. In some cases, slow download speeds or even inaction can lead to high bounce rates.
Knowing what sources are driving traffic to your website can be very helpful. This metric shows where to focus your efforts for the best results. For example, if your website gets the most traffic from Instagram, it could be because of your audience or even your brand type.
Wrap Up
If you want your website to be ranked on the top page of the search engine, you will need to keep an eye on all the aspects of SEO. The role of SEO and its techniques will make you a leader of the search engine.
Having said earlier, search engine optimization takes time, attention and continuous effort to rank among the first few results on Google’s SERP. It’s the most important factor that your website needs to concentrate on right now and in the future as well.
Well, it’s never too late to start a new beginning and implement strategies we just shared here. Even, there are many other strategies as well to improve your SEO rankings.
Start with zero and eventually that will lead you to a hundred. Monitor the activities and results. Soon enough, you will make your way toward the top search results on Google.
Who knows, you might even occupy the first rank as well!
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