Every second, thousands of users conduct a Google search to find a new service, product, or solution to their query, something that your business is qualified to provide.
Will they end up finding your website? This is the most crucial question for most online businesses. If your website doesn’t rank on the first page of Google search results, then probably not. Reach out to your target audience by boosting your keyword rankings. Here are five effective tips that you can follow to boost your search results positioning.
With more than 85% of global traffic, Google dominates the search engine market. About 75% of internet users never check the search results beyond the first page. These facts show the importance of search engine optimisation (SEO).
In order to make sure your website ranks on the first page, you can’t just focus on what search engines are looking for. But you also need to consider the visitors’ experiences to your site. Take an overall view of the value your website is providing to users, then optimise your content to get desired results. If you aare planning to build apps for ios and android, you also need to consider the content optimisation factor in mind.
Let’s look at the top five ranking factors and discuss how you can efficiently use keywords to drive more search traffic.
1. Measure your rank
The first and foremost place to start is to measure your rankings. Without a thorough understanding of your baseline keyword performance, you will not be able to assess the success and what needs to be improved.
Exporting all the valuable keyword data into a file for future reference is advisable. If nothing, it will at least show you have much improvement you have made with time.
Export keyword landing page traffic from Google Analytics and data from Google Search Console.
Analysing this data will give you a thorough idea of:
- Your most valuable landing pages and keywords.
- Underperforming keywords or landing pages.
- The most effective opportunities for improvement.
Focus on improving keywords that have gained better ranking (Page 1 or top of Page 2 on Google). With the right strategy, it is easier to get these keywords ranked on the first page of Google.
2. Target the right set of keywords
It is crucial to understand the search intent and the challenges of ranking to ensure that your targeted keywords align with your business objectives and offer real value.
While terms have a specific meaning to users, they could take on an entirely different meaning in Google and vice versa. Knowing the intent, whether educational/intentional, navigational, or transactional, will help you understand which stage of the sales funnel users are at.
Do a thorough analysis of SERP and check what is currently ranking in the top search result for your core keyword targets, including:
- Google auto-complete suggestions
- Related searches
- Other advanced search features
Knowing what is required to rank for a specific keyword will help you learn what content development efforts will be required and develop a plan for creation. Semrush’s SEO content template is excellent for this kind of analysis.
Enter a keyword, and the tool will analyse what’s showing up in Google’s top results to provide recommendations for SEO-friendly content.
Cross-referencing your organic keyword research with paid advertising data can fill gaps and uncover new opportunities.
Don’t ignore long-tail queries because of their low search volume because this way, you could be missing out on potential targeted audiences.
3. Pay close attention to user experience signals
Brand equity and user experience are crucial for driving organic search visibility. While user experience may not be a direct responsibility of a digital marketer, it is vital that SEO and user experience work hand in hand—especially considering that Google’s algorithm pays attention to it.
To ensure online visitors interact with your website, you should consider checking Google’s Core Web Vitals report. It monitors the loading time of each webpage of your site and generates data to show which pages offer a good user experience and which need to be improved.
Another critical factor that you need to consider is the responsiveness of your website. Mobile web browsing has surpassed desktop, and it now accounts for over 54% of global traffic.
If your website is not responsive, you will have to suffer from a high bounce rate that negatively affects your website ranking. Below are some of the elements that can improve UX and SEO.
- Keyword research: Make sure that you target keywords that have the right search intent and are rightly aligned with the language your target audience use.
- Page tagging: Make sure your page tagging is engaging and invites more clicks.
- Content optimisation: This helps keep users on the page and leads them to another page or destination. This involves everything ranging from call-to-action, internal cross-linking, etc.
- Page speed: It provides users content quickly and seamlessly across various devices. Try compressing images, cleaning up your code, and speeding up the server.
4. Optimise for search engines and users
Many of us over-emphasise content optimisation for Google that we forget the end goal—reaching the target audience. Search engines and humans have distinct ways of reading and digesting content; there are certain common factors to consider to cater to both humans and robots.
- Be concise and clear.
- Provide information with complete accuracy.
- Cover-related subtopics.
- Avoid jargon.
Keep this in mind from the beginning of your content creation process. Header tags are also an essential part of this.
Accurate header tags improve the overall readability of your content and ensure that search engines can follow a specific hierarchy.
Images should also be considered as providing more images can make the web pages more appealing.
5. Clean up your site structure
Your website structure plays a crucial role in SEO. Set a robust foundation by rectifying all technical issues that may reduce your organic keyword visibility.
Site pages should be easy to find and navigate by search engines and users. Your keyword rankings can likely fall if your website is difficult to navigate and crawl.
On the other hand, your rankings will see positive results if your website is intuitive for both users and Google.
Ensure your site has a solid website structure, resolve content duplicacy issues, and fix broken links.
Conducting a thorough technical SEO audit is essential to address all priority technical issues adequately.
Final thoughts
The work of an SEO professional is ongoing. Because of constant updates on Google algorithm, it will continue to fluctuate your results on SERPs. This means you continuously have to work to keep your website up to date. Keep in mind that SEO is a marathon, not a sprint.
Have a realistic approach and don’t expect immediate results because SEO requires a lot of testing, so never be afraid to experiment.
You may not get the top spot immediately, but you will surely get there one day using best practices. Apart from the above, look for the best ways to optimise your website. This will further aid your SEO efforts.
LegUp SEO
Great resource about tips on improving keyword rankings. Thanks for sharing with us. Do you have any resource about local SEO?
10seos
Thanks for the best tips. Already spent so much time finding useful content. Finally get it here!