What is Google Ranking?
You can’t earn your google ranking with money alone, it takes time and a good strategy to improve your position on the search engine’s ranking. Ranking high in the Google search results will serve your business well if you have some background knowledge on what to do to make sure you have a fighting chance of coming off on top.
Here are 10 top tips to help you improve your ranking which are all free.
1. Improve Your Website’s User Experience
According to a study conducted by SEMrush, the top four Google ranking factors are website visits, time on site, pages per session, and bounce rate. These four factors directly relate to your website user experience, this means it is vital for you to make sure your site is easy and enjoyable to use and offers valuable information. By doing this, you’ll get more visitors who will stay longer on your site and visit more pages which will greatly improve your search ranking.
2. Write Great Content Optimised For SEO
Having high-quality content available to view on your website is one of the most effective ways of increasing your traffic and improving your search engine ranking. In fact, Google itself said in a blog post on page experience that “having great and relevant content on a page is more important for ranking than the page experience”. Make sure your content is keyword-rich, mobile-optimized, written to address the specific needs of your target audience, and includes valuable links to internal additional content.
3. Get More Backlinks
Backlinks are links from other websites to yours. These are some of the most heavily weighted Google ranking factors. Incoming links to your website from high-authority domains show your site’s dominance, bring in traffic, and improve your search engine ranking.
4. Improve Your Page Speed
Load time is one of the key measurements in Google ranking so it’s very important to make sure your site is as fast as possible which will improve your search engine ranking and provide a good user experience. For more information on how to improve your page speed, check out our article on the Top 10 WordPress Plugins To Improve Your Site Speed.
5. Fix Broken Links
Having quality links on your website is one of the most effective ways to boost traffic and establish authority on your site. Links that bring up a 404 error seriously hurt your user experience and your search ranking. You could use a tool like Dead Link Checker to fish out any broken links.
6. Optimise Your Images
Optimizing your images is crucial to boosting the speed of your site and making it easier for Google to identify the images on your web page. Make sure all your website images are compressed, have descriptive filenames, and include alt text.
7. Use Header Tags
Headers make your content more readable and easier to understand for both humans and search engines. There is a strong correlation between Google ranking and the use of header tags in the body of your content. Header tags are also a great way to show the structure of your content and emphasize your key points.
8. Optimise For Local Search
More and more people are using their phones to search “businesses near me”. To improve the chances of your business showing up in relevant local searches, make sure you claim your Google My Business listing, provide relevant content in Google Posts, get your business listed in local directories, and improve your online reputation with great online reviews.
9. Optimise For Voice Search
According to a study by Perficient, voice search is no longer growing but more than 60% of people surveyed still said voice search is their preferred method of asking questions on their smartphone. Make sure voice searchers find your business by incorporating likely voice search phrases into your website content.
10. Aim for Position “Zero”
When a user asks a question in Google Search, Google sometimes pulls content from a relevant website and displays it in a special featured snippet or answer box above the number one search result. Getting content featured into a featured snippet is a good way to boost traffic to your website and improve the credibility and visibility of your brand.