Right now someone is searching on Google for products or services that your business offers. Will they end up on your website? That depends on where your website ranks for that particular keyword and/or search intent.
With Google dominating over 90% of the search engine market share and with 75% of the visitors never going beyond the first page of the search result, you should always aim to rank on the first page for your niche and/or keyword.
Now imagine this, 34.36% of all clicks go to the number one result. Now that you are convinced, let’s look at what are the steps you can take to improve your Google ranking.
1. Measure Your Current Ranking
Before you start any race, you should know your starting point. In the world of SEO, your starting point will not only help you evaluate where you are in terms of your ranking, but will also help you strategize on which keywords to focus on to earn some quick gains.
So, the first task is to export keyword data from Google Search Console and your page traffic from Google Analytics.
This data should give you some insights on the keywords that you are ranking for and the opportunity keywords that you could rank for with little tweak and adjustment. The opportunity keywords are usually the keywords for which you are either on the bottom of the first page or top of the page two; i.e. keywords for which you are ranking in the position between 5 to 15.
2. Search Intent
Although, the data from the step one will give the list of opportunity keywords that you can work with to get some quick gains, it is equally important to understand the search intent in combination with the keywords.
Understand the key phrases that the user is typing to search for the products and services your business offers.
Once you know the search intent of the user in combination with the keywords and your page ranking for that keyword, you can draw up a plan to produce effective content that can help improve your ranking for those keywords and key phrases.
3. Improve Website Structure
The importance of the website structure is not discussed as much as it should and can sometimes be overlooked.
You should always want a site structure that is easy to navigate both by the users and Google crawlers to easily find all the pages on your website.
Most websites should not need to go beyond level 3 depth and majority of the small sites can get away with level 2 depth.
In case, if you are wondering what depth is, it is the number of pages you have to go deep into to find the links of the page. So the primary menu on the website header is accessible from home page. If you have links to blogs or articles on your archieve page, they are at depth 2 level. And if certain internal pages are linked in these articles that are not accessible from any othe pages or from the home page, then these links are depth 3 level (e.g. Home >> Archieve Page >> Blog Page >> Links to other internal pages).
4. Optimize for humans and bots
When working on website’s SEO, a lot of people are so focused on pleasing Google’s bot and/or crawlers that they forget that the end user is not a robot, but a human. So always keep the website, content, pages, layout, structure nice and simple for humans and if you do so in most cases bots will love it too.
We must remember that Google Search is in the business of providing the best result based on user’s intent + keywords/phrases. Over the years, Google has spent billions of dollars to improve the crawler’s capability to interepret and index the web pages based on it’s content produced for humans.
5. Product Relevant Content
If you want your target audience to come to your website and engage with the services you offer, you need to make it compelling for them to do so. And one of the ways you can engage users is by producing relevant content that the user engages with.
Producing relevant content also includes content type, improving the current content, style of content, headlines, infographics, videos, length of the content, the message, call to action, etc.
6. Link to your content
Now that you have done all the hard word of researching and producing the relevant content, it is time to get some links to this content. This could be internal and/or external links. Actually, if possible, it should be both internal and external links.
You not only want to promote the content on the other pages of the website via linking to them but you always want external websites to link to your content. A few ways to get external website admins to link to your content are:
- Ghost Posting – Posting on other websites to provide VALUE and in doing so, linking to your website’s relevant page to help the audience get value out of it.
- Research websites that have similar content on the topic but are not competing with your business and get in touch with the admin to ask them to link to your content to offer value to their audience.
- There are numerous other ways such as answering people’s question on Google or other forums, going on podcast and sharing your content, etc.
Here, I will link to an article by Semrush on 11 Strategies to get backlinks.
While we are at this topic of link building, here is a the example of an internal link to one of our other popular article on how to increase your email marketing list.
7. Google Business Profile, Google Places, Google Maps
As you can see from the image above that Google Places, Google Maps and/or Google Business Profile listings show right at the top of the search result page. Can you afford not to be on the top of this list?
If you are a relevant local business that provide services in your geographical location, you want to get on this Google list today. Here is the link for you to get your business on this list: https://www.google.com/business/
Conclusion
Getting on top of the Google’s search result page for your keyword is a marathon, not a sprint. As long as you do it right and consistently, you will eventually get there.
If you want our team to help you improve your SEO and Google ranking, please get in touch with us at info@a1websites.com.au.
