Improving your local search ranking is always a great way to place your business and website ahead of your competition.
However, for a business to rank consistently on search engines, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is crucial.
And a fun fact according to Platonik, only 12% of web users ever make it to page 2 of Google. So how can you ensure that you always rank higher on the first page?
Here are 6 factors to keep in mind for your business or blog to rank higher on Google.
1. Good URL for your Website.
A good URL or link enables Google bots to easily visit and understand your page content. A good URL is a simple URL that works.
As a rule of thumb, aim for a short and relevant URL – as shown in the photo example above for a blog post on my website. Every URL on your website should include the relevant keywords that describe exactly what the page is about.
Do not try to over-complicate the meta-tags in your URLs.
The keywords should be correctly spaced to aid the search engines in finding your content. Also note, you may want also use hyphens as they are more advantageous to SEO than underscores.
2. Quality Content.
If your web content does not help people or provide value for them, then it does not matter how good all your other aspects of SEO are.
A key component of ranking highly as a small business trust from your visitors.
Large websites do this too. But they have access to incredibly large budgets, which they can use to hire teams of copywriters, web designers and digital marketing experts. This means that they can dominate Page 1 results through sheer volume alone, and not necessarily quality.
Small and Micro businesses, however, do not have that luxury. So it is imperative that your content helps to answer a question or provide invaluable insight that people in your niche really need.
Here are some SEO tips you can add to quality content:
- Have a title that is not longer than 70 characters and clearly defines what your web page or blog post is all about.
- Write content containing maybe 1000 – 2000 words. This makes it more linkable and shareable.
- Use White space in your posts, so that your content is not clustered and easy to read.
3. Consistency.
Just like Floyd Mayweather always showed up consistently in the gym and won 50 straight fights, you also need to be consistent with your content output – in both quantity and quality.
Set a strategy – and decide realistically how often you can put out content without skipping.
Personally, I put out a new blog post every Wednesday because it is both realistic & achievable for me.
Consistency in tasks is a very desirable quality for success in anything. And not just because the Google bots are keeping tabs on how consistent you are.
Many times, you may not want to do the work you know you need to do. And this could also be due to reasons beyond your control. However, it is important that you show up at the very least.
Click HERE to read my blog post on what to consider when setting strategy goals.
4. Use External and Internal Links in Your Posts.
Did you know links help your website to be easily optimized?
This is because, without them, visitors won’t understand how to use your site, and search engines won’t know how to recommend it.
When writing your blog, try to add in more internal links and highly authoritative external links but avoid being spammy.
Also, remember to only add links related to the content that you are writing about so that your readers will trust your website. This will place your website in a good position to be ranked higher.
5. Webpage Loading Speed.
There are a lot of websites out there with great content. But they do not rank properly on search engines due to poor Technical SEO.
In order to find out how good or bad, your technical SEO is, simply type in your website link in either GT Metrix or Google’s Pagespeed Insights.
In the above illustration, you can see that the performance rating for this website is 100% on GT Metrix.
I have the same results on Pagespeed Insights. This means that my web pages load very quickly – and thereby improve user experience.
Understand that there are millions of websites out there with similar content. So the difference between a Page1 rank and a Page 2 rank can be due to a millisecond’s difference in loading time. I’m not even joking here.
And frankly speaking, my technical SEO had been terrible until very recently.
The best part about this is that Technical SEO can be done by an expert on Fiverr for as little as $10 to $30! Click HERE to see the expert who helped turn my website into a Technical SEO juggernaut.
6. Correct Use of Relevant Keywords.
Relevant keywords are extremely crucial in improving your search ranking.
This is because they represent what visitors type when they are searching on Google. Therefore, if you have the right keywords, visitors to your website will get the information they are looking for.
This is also why keyword tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner are very useful. If you have money to spend on more high-quality keyword search results, then Ahrefs and SemRush are the leading industry giants today.
Keyword research tools show you the search frequency per month, the competition for those keywords – as well as other suggestions!
The use of relevant keywords makes the Google algorithm understand that your content is trustworthy.
Conclusion.
Oh, there’s none.
All that is left is for you to give the above steps a try!
