It’s not always easy to determine which digital marketing strategy works best for your website. You have SEO, paid ads, social media, and much more. Some website owners don’t know where to start with all there is to do.
If you’re in this situation, SEO is a great first choice. Reports show that 82% of marketers believe the effectiveness of SEO is on the rise. With so much to gain, SEO makes sense.
Besides, this digital marketing strategy can help websites rank highly on search engine results pages and, in turn, generate more organic traffic. Once the site has more traffic, you can improve your business’s chances of converting mere visitors to loyal customers.
On the other hand, SEO can help improve your site’s credibility. Having a high ranking on the search engine results pages may give users a signal that Google and other major search engines consider your site as credible or trustworthy. Lastly, with SEO techniques in place, your business can outrank your competition by ensuring your website appears on the first page of the search engine results.
SEO, indeed, plays a crucial part in the success of your business. However, you’ll need to put in the work if you want to get SEO results.
Luckily, some steps you can take will help you improve search engine ranking for your website. Keep reading to learn how to improve Google search ranking.
Target the Correct Keywords
It’s hard to rank a website if all you target are highly competitive keywords. Other websites have already put in a ton of work on optimizing to rank for those search terms. You’ll need to target less-competitive phrases to rank for more keywords quickly.
The good news is that you can target subtopics of more competitive topics to build your authority on a specific category. Use Google’s autocomplete feature and Q&A websites to learn about other topics people search for related to competitive search terms.
Your goal in doing this is to create topical authority. You’ll use internal linking to connect these topics and use each post to add page authority to your other pages with links.
Once you start seeing results from low-competition search terms, you can start trying to rank for higher terms. You can add internal links to more competitive terms and have an easier time ranking. This is possible because you built topical authority, and Google now knows your website is an excellent resource for questions related to high-competition keywords.
Create Thought Leadership Content
If you want to get the most out of your content strategy for SEO, consider creating thought leadership content (TLC) for your website. Generally, TLC refers to a content strategy that’s designed to position brands and businesses as an authority in the industry for providing valuable information about a certain product to the public. When you invest in this kind of content, your business may be able to provide value to your target customers, create a perception that your company is deeply involved in the product you’re offering.
Hence, if you think about adding TLC to your SEO content efforts, you should start gathering ideas by talking to the sales staff, reading reviews provided by the customers on social media platforms, conducting surveys to customers, analyzing the performance of your product, and looking at your competitor’s content.
However, to better understand how thought leadership content works, you may work with a content marketing agency and other professionals to guide you through the process and improve your search engine ranking in no time.
Improve Your User Experience
SEO used to only take content and backlinks into account when determining rankings on Google. Now that Google understands more about user experience, that’s starting to change. You currently have the Core Page Vitals ranking algorithm that plays a role in ranking your site on the search engine.
The first place to start this process is page speed. Now that much of the internet traffic today is from mobile devices, you can’t count on your visitors to have a fast internet connection. You still have people connecting on 3G and 4G, which aren’t as fast as broadband and fiber.
The most significant part of improving your page speed is optimizing your images. If you load your site with huge images, you will not have a fast-loading site. Run every image through an optimization program to reduce the file size as much as possible.
You can also lazy load images below the fold on your site. That will stop the images from loading until visitors start scrolling your site.
The next step is to make sure your website is mobile-friendly. Your website won’t look good on mobile devices if all you consider are desktop users. Use a responsive design to improve the digital experience for your visitors.
Improve Your Security
Google tasks security seriously these days. It doesn’t want websites riddled with viruses to be on the front page and cause problems for its visitors. It does everything it can to track down these sites to remove them from the search results.
While this may not be a problem if you run a static website, it’s an issue if you run a platform like WordPress. While WordPress is generally secure, there are occasions when the platform, themes, and plugins suffer from security issues. These issues can allow hackers access to your website.
Running security software will stop this from happening. Look for the security plugins for your website software and use them to scan your website for issues. Your software will check the core website files and replace them with the correct version to see if anything is wrong.
However, your website will still be open to hacks if you keep old versions of your files on your website. Make sure you regularly update your website software to get fixes for security issues.
Using a secure connection for your visitors is also essential, even if you don’t collect sensitive information. Luckily, LetsEncrypt offers free SSL certificates for every website on the internet.
Build Backlinks
There will come a point where great content won’t be enough to rank your website on Google. You may be able to build a lot of topical authority by writing the best content, but other websites are doing the same.
When you run into this situation, it’s time to build backlinks to your website.
A backlink is a vote for your site that increases your website’s authority. Almost every link will count for something, with the highest authority websites offering the most power with their links.
You can use a domain authority checker to see which websites are the best to get links with. There are several ways to do this, so look for more info on how to run the check.
Most websites will use the guest posting method for this. You offer a free blog post for a website’s readers and get a link in return.
Another great option for acquiring strong links is HARO. HARO is a website that connects journalists with experts. If you offer your insight to a journalist looking for soundbites, they’ll reward you with a link from a news source.
However, many websites turn to SEO companies to acquire links since it’s so much work. You can work with a dedicated SEO company or will a service that directly offers links.
Start to Improve Search Engine Ranking Today
SEO is a long process, so you can’t afford to wait if you want to improve search engine ranking. You need to start today and use every tip at your disposal to start increasing search engine results. Use the tips above to start getting more free search engine traffic.
Are you interested in learning more ways to improve your website’s traffic? Head back to the blog to see what the other digital marketing methods can offer.
