We’d all love for our websites to rank as efficiently as possible with minimal effort; but unfortunately it just isn’t that simple. Our guide below should give some insight into what’s involved in getting your website ranking well.
Review your current standing
This is a big deal. Instead of blindly going full steam ahead with changes / amendments to your search strategy, we suggest that you review your current site in its present standing. That way, you’ll get a greater understanding of what’s required and will give you a greater chance of success ongoing. Check your current rankings and try to understand the bigger picture in terms of how you are ranking compared to your competitors. Tools such as SEOptimer can help provide a good level of insight from a broad SEO perspective.
Understand how Search Engines work
Understanding the fundamental purpose of search engines and how they index and rank websites is also key in ensuring you obtain and sustain successful search results ongoing. Information to help with this is readily available for free! For example, the Google SEO guide contains lots of helpful and insightful information – https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184?hl=en. Doing this, you’ll get a greater understanding of best practices moving forward.
Develop a keyword strategy
Think about the key terms you would want your website to be found for. Make a list, use an Excel sheet to list these out and then prioritise them in order of preference. Utilise long-tail keywords and gradually narrow down to more generic search terms that are more difficult to rank for. Some keywords are of course, more more difficult to rank than others. Tools like WordTracker can help with this.
Content
One of the most important elements, if not THE most is content. Content plays a huge role in how your website ranks. Using your list of keywords, try and develop and broaden your content to include these terms. You’ll want to make sure that your content is user friendly, easy to read and relevant to your business. Avoid black-hat strategies such as keyword stuffing. The Yoast SEO tool is very good for helping to score and evaluate content based on what you have added to your pages / posts / products.
Utilise your Blog
A blog is a great way to tell a story, to get a news post out to your audience and much more. Using your blog frequently allows you to implement your keywords within the content and is a great way to build your online presence and get found online.
Performance / Speed
The speed of your website can have a huge bearing on user experience and conversions. On top of this, speed is now a crucial ranking factor when it comes to Google. Here’s a great article explaining this in detail. https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/07/search-ads-speed. Use tools like Pingdom, GTMetrix and Pagespeed Insights to audit your site speed and find out what’s slowing it down.
Mobile / User Experience
Since the majority of users will visit your site on a mobile device, we can’t stress just how important it is to have a fluid, responsive and user friendly mobile layout in place. Without this, your organic positioning and traffic may be hugely negatively affected. Ensure that your content is easy to find, easy to read and not blocked by annoying pop-ups etc. Mobile optimisation is absolutely essential and should never be overlooked.
Link Building
Once you are happy with your website in terms of performance, mobile responsiveness and content, performing your link building strategy will supplement these greatly. We recently wrote a post on link building which you can find here.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is the place to measure your website’s performance / errors / reports and more. Here you can submit your sitemap, check for any pages with mobile errors and see your performance on Google for a particular period. On top of this, keep an eye out for any algorithm updates and changes to understand whether or not you are being penalised in any way – https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change
Google Analytics
Without measuring your performance and metrics, it’s going to be difficult to improve. Google Analytics provides a huge amount of data for doing so. Even if you are to just looking to measure organic performance ongoing after following the above recommendations then this is your go-to tool. Google run free online classes for beginners to familiarise yourself with Analytics and can be really beneficial! https://analytics.google.com/analytics/academy/
Conclusion
To conclude, spending time and effort on the points above will no doubt help to increase your search rankings and results. Take your time and make sure you are doing things the right way rather than looking for a fast fix.
At 2Cubed Web Design & Development, we can assist you with any of the needs above, helping you to build your online presence. We offer a number of services to help you grow your online presence. Check out our list of services here – https://2cubed.ie/services/
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