Table of Contents
Are you looking to improve your site’s ranking? Is your site never at the top of a result page? Do you need help to bring in organic web traffic?
Well then, you are in a suitable space. Today, we will review ten tips to help you take that number one spot on the search engine.
Before we get ahead of ourselves, we must get some foundations right. One thing you should be asking yourself now is what factors will help my website rank.
You might have heard of SEO before, and that is the exact mechanism we will be using to improve your website’s ranking.
SEO simply stands for Search engine optimisation.
- Related article: “Can I Learn SEO in a Single Day?”
In this article, we will mainly discuss ‘Google’, as it is the most used search engine.
Let’s now look into ten aspects of your SEO you can tweak.
1. Quality Content Creation
It seems obvious at first, right? All creators must have some kind of value in their content, but over time, it’s becoming increasingly difficult.
With AI on the rise in copywriting, the term “AI copywriting” is becoming more popular by the day. For now, content made by AI is not of a quality that can be used to help your customers and audiences.
This leads to how Google’s algorithm treats your content. If you were to use AI primarily, we would see that the content would not solve the problem of people searching for your blog. This leads to our problem: Google only promotes content that solves its users’ problems.
How would I be able to optimise this then?
Copywriters exist all over the world, from cheap to high-end luxury writers. In the US alone, over 131,000 copywriters are employed. You have to look at this as a long-term investment. Even if the initial cost may disturb you, that piece of content will stay on the internet for decades. This is a representation of your business. If the content is sloppy, so would the impression you leave on that customer.
If your content provides value to your customers, it will massively help you rank. Value translates to solving a problem.
2. Keyword Optimisation
Now that you’ve got some quality content sorted, what’s next?
Put yourself in the shoes of your customer now. What would you search for to find a solution to your problem? What words would be used?
Start by brainstorming some inclusive words. For example, if you owned an e-commerce store selling “infrared saunas for two people,” the starting word would be “Sauna.” Now, we don’t want our biases to get involved. We are not the customers.
So, How do you find the right words?
Many tools online are now available online to aid you in your journey. All you do is enter the initial ideas of your brainstorm into the SEO keyword search tool, and it will come up with some relevant search terms your customers are very likely to use.
You may now have 1,000+ keywords you can use. It is advised to apply metrics like a minimum volume of 300. Can you match search intent? Traffic potential and more…
This very technical topic would require another article on its own.
At times, it’s best not to do the work yourself, as you may waste time and get things wrong. You could book a call with our team of SEO specialists.
3. Mobile Optimisation
We have the content and the correct search terms to include in our content, so what’s next?
The Format. Just because you may spend most of your time on the computer, your customer may need more time to do so. Not optimising your site for mobile users may lead to a lousy page experience.
According to Google, a sub-par page experience in a sea of millions of sites may affect your search performance. Remember, if you want Google to promote your content, you should at least attempt to follow their guidelines.
According to SEMRush, as shown in the image below, people see that, on average, mobile users spend much less time on a website. Having a lousy page experience will only decrease that. So the critical takeaway is always to consider your mobile customers – nearly +65% of website traffic is mobile traffic.
4. Page Speed Optimisation
Now that we have completed most of the hard work, we move into the small details that can help you get onto that ranking page.
Imagine you are now searching for a new bed on Google for yourself. You scroll past a couple of results and find one that attracts you, so you press it. 1. 2…3 seconds go by, and the loading sign is still going at it.
Be honest with yourself, and you will leave that site immediately.
As we discussed before, a bad page experience can decrease search ranking. So, how do we tackle this problem?
Compressing images is the easiest way to improve page load speed. Image compression is the process of drastically reducing the size of an image file while also preserving its quality.
Other methods to optimise this would be much more technical and require separate articles. If you are serious about this, then contact us, or you could at least apply the compressions to the media on your site.
5. Optimise Meta Tags
When you make a Google search, what do the results show you? Do they give you the whole block of text in one go? No. A small snippet of what to expect is showcased to the user. You could liken this to your offer to them.
When writing meta tags, think about the benefits you bring.
You should ask yourself the following questions:
- What value do I bring to the table?
- What problems do I solve?
- What results do I guarantee my readers?
- What makes me different?
The meta tags are your real estate space. After the title, your customers will look at the site’s description. If it’s all fluff and no value, they’ll scroll past. Be direct and have a message to send.
Additionally, meta tags help Google understand your site’s purpose and, therefore, make it appear in front of the right people.
6. Improve User Experience (UX)
You might say to yourself I’ve already got this to a tee. You may need to be corrected. 57% of internet users say that their page experiences in the past year have decreased in quality.
User experience is not only about how fancy your website is. It’s not about the number of animations—although I can’t lie, that can be quite cool sometimes.
We sometimes need to recognise that Google is an algorithm; therefore, it is objective. When Google crawls your site for information, it will analyse its structure.
Does your website have a clear and defined structure? Or is it all over the place? A lack of a defined structure can lead to users becoming confused about how to navigate your site.
What else do you think influences user experience?
Many people in well-developed countries can read, but not everyone does. Your site may not be accessible to illiterate or colour-blind people. You could solve many of these accessibility issues.
The key takeaway here is that only some are like you. You must cater for their needs and not yours.
With the development of AI, many tools, like text-to-audio software, can help increase the accessibility of your site.
7. Internal Linking
In the last point, we discussed the importance of user experience and what element of that is needed to navigate a site.
For example, this article has a couple of internal links set up to help you navigate to relevant content with a click of a button. In the first section of this article, I introduced the topic of SEO to you. Some of you may be seasoned experts, while others may be new to the field, so to help the new customers, I included a link to another article on SEO.
Now, this does not only help your users navigate the site with ease and relevance. There is no point or relevance for me to include a link to an article on social media marketing now. It is simply irrelevant in the current context.
So remember, when creating internal links to other parts of your websites, keep them relevant and useful to your users’ problems.
Internal data not only helps your users but also helps Google crawlers index your site and discover its content. Distributing links across your site could be pretty simple: isolate an article or piece of content and pick out 3-5 words that can be related to another article you have written before. Now, all you do is insert a link for that word, and there you have it: an internal link.
8. Backlink Building
This is one of the most critical factors you should consider when deploying your content. A backlink simply includes a link to your site in its content. There are three ways you could gain these.
- Earn them
- Buy them
- Grow them
Buying backlinks could put you in the bad books of Google, so it should be avoided. On the other hand, growing them would take a very long time as many people would need to view your content before someone links it to their website or social media profile.
So that leaves us with earning them. To simplify this strategy, I can break it down into three steps, but we must understand backlinks at a much higher surface level before we get into that. Backlinks are the skill of building relationships with similar authors.
Firstly, we would create a list of prospects who might link our content on their sites. This could take some time, but you could get a Virtual assistant to do this for you for a cheap price.
Next,t you would need to vet them. Are they suitable? Does their brand align with ours? Can this be a long-term relationship?
The last stage, where most people need to improve, is outreach. Now you need to send your message. But you can’t take something from someone without giving. So, provide value and then directly or indirectly ask for a link. You could exchange links if that comes up.
After completing these three steps, you must maintain these relationships. Remember that this relationship is purely business, so it’s give-and-take.
Checkout our linkbuilding services here.
9. Regular Content Updates
We see that many businesses have an inconsistent flow of content publishing. One week, you could post 2 articles and then go for a whole month without posting. Consistency is key in this game.
Although you may not understand why regularly posting content is important, trust me, it is. Let me explain myself.
Firstly, a consistent blog allows your audience to follow you weekly and keep in touch with your brand. Having a regular upload to please your audience doesn’t directly increase your SEO – the keyword here is “directly”.
Article by article, your website starts to earn more backlinks on your site with the higher domain authority you have. You can make use of the ahrefs domain authority tool for free. Compare your jurisdiction to your competitors.
Now, a trend can be spotted if you research it long enough. More backlinks translate to higher domain authority. Google understands that websites with higher authority on a topic are more likely to solve a user’s problem.
The Key Takeaway here is to be consistent with your content. Over time, this will pay off if you have a website with some high authority within your niche.
10. Stay Updated with SEO Trends
Times change. Google’s algorithm may be updated tomorrow or the week after. I am not a person who can see the future, but with technology growing, tactics will evolve and change.
Of course, the principles I taught you here are the basics, and most will not be affected by time if nothing major occurs with Google’s algorithms.
In reality, if you want to keep up with all the trends within the marketing world to boost your sales, it could take you a long time. From reading news on SEO daily to listening to podcasts, it will eventually get tiring.
It could be challenging to do it yourself. Hiring someone can take a long time; if they leave, you will need more time to hire another. This leaves you with the option of handing it off to professionals who dedicate themselves to the field.
I recommend you check out our content marketing services to see how we can optimise your SEO.
The key takeaway is that the industry is dynamic; nothing stays forever, so keeping up with the trends will always be in your favour. Let that be by partnering with us or by going at it as a sole soldier.
Conclusion
In this article, we reviewed ten tips for bringing your site to life. The tips varied in difficulty, but if done right, they can boost organic traffic.
I strongly recommend implementing the steps chronologically, as each step seamlessly fits in with the next. But as discussed in the last step, you should always adapt and increase.
Have a great day!
