So you have started your business and developed a website to give you an online presence, but now you find out like many businesses typically do that just creating a website does not automatically guarantee you visitors? Not to fret, you are in the same boat as a lot of other small business owners; trying to get your website seen is often a tasking venture.
In this post, I will be sharing 7 actionable ways that you can deploy today to get your website to rank better on Google and other search engines. Let’s dive in.
Consider Optimising Your Website For Local SearchOne trend that has been growing steadily over the years is that people are now searching with terms such as “restaurants near me” or “dry cleaners near me”. When this happens, Google and other search engines typically use their locations to serve them results of local businesses that are close to their location. Taking advantage of this trend is integral for improving your website and indeed your business success.
To take advantage of this strategy, you have to optimise your website for local search. How do you go about that? It is super simple. Simply sign up for Google My Business here and Google will automatically add you to its database of businesses to be shown when prospective customers are searching for businesses like yours. However, keep in mind that you have to add your website information when prompted so that Google can serve it as a result when necessary.
Consider Adding A BlogAnother strategic way to improve your website ranking on Google and other search engines is by adding a blog. Adding a blog to your website will help you provide helpful content, attracting new and existing clients at the same time. Blogs also typically help you demonstrate authority in the subject matter you focus on, signalling to search engines that you are authority thereby improving your domain authority and consequently search rankings.
Write Helpful, Optimised ContentAdding a blog to your website is important, but writing helpful, optimised content is even more important. Writing helpful content is the first step towards getting your website to rank better on Google and other search engines, but to improve your ranking even more, you should optimise your web content to be picked up easily by search engines and humans.
There are a number of strategies to employ in order to optimise your content for search engines, but as a rule of thumb, I do the following to help optimise my content for web:
- Insert heading tags containing the keyword
- Add a meta description with the keyword
- Insert image alt tags with the focus keyword
- Add metatags with the focus areas
- Make sure that the header contains the keyword
There are a lot of things one can do to optimise content, but if you are new to web content, you can follow the checklist above for starters and improve as you go on.
Optimise Your Website For Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)One thing that Google and other search engines take into cognisance when ranking pages is the load time of the websites.
This means that Google will typically rank websites and pages that are fast higher than websites and pages that load slowly on the search engine results pages. One of the easiest ways to solve for this problem is by optimising your website to load faster.
One of the simplest ways to make sure that your website loads fast is by opting to serve Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to mobile visitors rather than the full website version. What this means is that if you are using the WordPress content management system, you can consider installing the AMP plugin and instruct your website to serve AMP pages to visitors on mobile.
Consequently, your visitors on mobile will receive an accelerated version of the website that scales down on text images to make sure that your website loads faster.
Have A Link-Building StrategyNow to the technical aspect; having a link building strategy will help you improve your domain authority and consequently your ranking. I’d explain.
Imagine that you write a book, and twelve other top authors reference your book while writing theirs. Now, imagine that your friend writes a book and no other author references their book. Which author do you think will be considered more valuable? You of course! That’s how Google and other search engines think of websites. If you write a post and top websites like CNN, Fox, Forbes and the like reference or link to that article, Google will naturally think that article is class. Now if another website writes another article that is not referenced by top websites and blogs, what will Google think? They will think that such a website is not a top website of course!
So, if you want your website to be ranked above other websites around, you have to create a link building or a “referencing” strategy where Google will think that your website is better than other websites in the same category. Creating top-notch content is the first step towards building a great link building strategy.
Check For And Replace Broken LinksOne thing that most people don’t know is that Google prioritises user experience. True, we have emphasised it in this post, but it is important that we mention it again; Google cares how users experience your website.
It, therefore, follows that Google will penalise you if they find that there are links on your website that are no longer working. So, it is important that you check for links that are not working on your website, then look to replace them before Google penalises.
It also bears saying that you can help websites find broken links on their platform, then write them offering to help them replace those links with your own links. This will help you build valuable links long-term.
Optimise Your ImagesLastly, you want to make sure that your images load properly and timely for Google to rank you properly. To help you circumvent this issue, you can get image caching tools to help you serve fast versions of images on your blog or website as the case may be.
