8 Ways to Improve Your Website's SEO Ranking
In the world of SEO, improving website SEO ranking and visibility is paramount to the success of your business no matter your industry or niche. With a large majority of consumers using search engines such as Google and Bing to find products, services and information online, elevating your SEO ranking not only helps drives organic traffic to your website, but also enhances brand authority amongst your competitors.
68% of online experiences begin with a search engine. (BrightEdge)
1. Optimise On-Page Elements
Optimising the on page elements of your site can help to drastically improve the ranking of your site across search engines. Creating keyword focused and compelling meta descriptions, title tags, and headers infused with relevant keywords throughout your page content will help to improve your site’s relevance in search results by providing a range of useful content surrounding your chosen keywords or phrases.
You can also ensure that your page layouts and designs provide a seamless and easy to navigate experience for your users, which also hold favour in Google’s algorithm and can help to improve your sites authority and ranking. A good tool to help you identify relevant search terms relating to your business and its services/products is SEMrush.com. This tool provides intuitive insights into keywords and phrases searches across the web worldwide.
2. High-Quality Content
Produce engaging, informative and useful content that caters to your audience’s needs and preferences in relation to their search terms. Aim to produce a range of high quality, original content on a consistent basis to ensure you captivate both readers and search engine algorithms at the same time.
Utilising a wide range of different content such as blog posts, white papers, research reports and eBooks can help to diversify your content offering which in turns makes your website more appealing to a range of different audiences and users. This helps to cement your website as an authoritative and reliable source of content, helping to rank higher than other sites in the same category.
3. Mobile-Friendly Design
With mobile usage surging across all types of demographic, ensuring your website is responsive across various devices is crucial for SEO success and a higher ranking. In the last quarter of 2023, mobile devices generated 58.67 percent of global website traffic (statista.com), which illustrates the prominence that mobile device usage holds over the market.
Google also prioritises mobile-friendly websites in its search results and often talks about the importance of mobile device responsiveness and usability, which influences user experience and, consequently, SEO performance. With this in mind it’s important to build your website for mobile first and then cater to desktop and larger screens after you have optimised your mobile views.
4. Site Speed Optimisation
Minimising your site loading times is a great way to enhance your website usability and experience and thus improve your SEO ranking. You can achieve this by optimising different elements across your site such as:
- Converting images into a ‘webp’ format and reducing the file size of your images.
- Leveraging browser caching to reduce loading times.
- Employing efficient coding practices.
Research found across the industry indicates that 53% of mobile users abandon sites that take over three seconds to load, which is a big deal when it comes to generating revenue and engagement across your site. Google and other search engines favour fast loading sites and actively use this as a key consideration in their search results algorithms.
5. Backlink Building
SEO and the factors which are taking into consideration when choosing which websites to display over others, backlinks is often a great way to improve your SEO ranking. A backlink is a link from another website which directs to your website, whether that be through citing your website or utilising a piece of your content.
Creating a large network of high quality backlinks from reputable websites within your industry is crucial to the success of your SEO efforts. Backlinks serve as a sign of confidence in your content’s authority within your industry and sector, contributing to heightened search engine visibility and higher ranked results.
6. Regular Content Updates
Maintaining a consistent stream of content and regular updates is key to improving your overall SEO ranking. Keep your website content relevant by consistently updating existing content across your site and publishing fresh material on a regular basis too. Search engines often favour websites that demonstrate ongoing activity, optimisations and changes to measure relevancy to users’ search terms.
7. Optimise for Local SEO
Local searches cover a wide range of search terms relevant to local areas and geographical locations. If possible, optimise your website for local search by including location-specific keywords and search terms which will help in increasing your organic search rankings.
Other tools can be used like creating a Google My Business listings which allows consumers to view your business profile, services, reviews and location on maps across the Google platform. Local SEO optimisation enhances visibility for users seeking nearby products or services in your businesses local area. For more information on how to improve local SEO, why not check out our blog ‘Local SEO Tactics: A Guide to Dominating Local Search’
8. Monitor and Analyse Performance
Using analytical tools to track, monitor and then improve website SEO performance is crucial to being able to adapt and change your content accordingly. Businesses should track keyword rankings across their industry in relation to their page rank, and identify areas for improvement throughout their content. You can utilise tools such as Google Search Console to track and measure your SEO performance which will allow you to have greater visibility over metrics such as page rank, searches you rank for, and other popular metrics which provide insight into your performance.
Thoughts...
Investing in these different types of SEO strategy can drastically improve website SEO, findability and ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs).
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