Did you know that as little as 25% of people turn to the second page of Google results?[1] What if your business’s website was on that second page, you would be missing out on a shocking 75% of potential customers.
That is why your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) ranking is so important. Where you rank will determine your visibility and credibility, both things that can positively and negatively affect your website’s traffic.
Here we look at some of the easy things you can do to help improve your SEO ranking so that you can give your business the best chance at being seen.
Quality and relevant content
Having quality and relevant content on your website is one of the best and undeniable ways to improve your SEO ranking. To ensure this, you must build your content around your business’s relevant keywords.
Search engines prioritize the user’s experience, so having good quality content that adds value to a search user will be the content that is seen first.
To make sure you have great-quality content try to understand your readers and what they will what to know and read about. An effective way of figuring this out is by thinking about their search intent. Checking the SERP (search engine results pages) show what is relevant and valuable information to your audience.
Regularly updating your content is another way of improving your SEO because it shows the search engine that your content is up-to-date, relevant and worth showing to a user. This is a practice that matters to the Google algorithm.
Have quality backlinks
Gaining quality backlinks to your website is another strong method of improving your SEO ranking.
Backlinks are simply links from one page to another website. Search engines see them like a seal of approval. They tell search engines that this website is worth showing the user because other people liked the content.
It is important to note that not all backlinks are as effective in improving your ranking.
High-quality backlinks that come from a relevant and reputable domain, one that is earned and not paid, are valuable in increasing your SEO ranking. One of the easiest ways to create quality backlinks is through social media. Try to post shareable content that links to your website, this way you can create valuable backlinks not only from your posts but from the people who share them.
On the flip side, low-quality backlinks can actually harm your SEO ranking and the way the search engine views your site. Low-quality backlinks come from non-trusted websites such as spam sites or paid link schemes.
Thankfully, there are many sites out there that allow you to check and remove low-quality backlinks so that your SEO ranking won’t be hurt.
Start blogging
Blogging is an effective tool for increasing your SEO ranking.
As mentioned above, having up-to-date and relevant content on your website is a great way to improve your SEO ranking and blogging is the perfect way to do just that.
Blogging allows you to keep your content fresh without having to regularly change your homepage or the evergreen information on your website.
Blogging also lets you easily target long-tail keywords in your content. Long tail keywords are more specific and longer than normal keywords. They are more effective for smaller businesses as they have less competition and better conversion rates.
Lastly, blogging is a simple way of adding internal links to your website. Internal links bring you from one page of your website to another. They help boost SEO because they give Google a good understanding of the structure and layout of your website. Blogging will give you multiple opportunities to internally link your blog content to pages on your website.
Putting interesting blogs on your website will also give people more reasons to backlink to your site.
Make sure your website has a fast-loading speed
Another factor that determines your SEO ranking is how fast or slow your website and its pages load.
The optimal loading time of your website should be 3 seconds or less. Search engines will rank faster loading websites higher, so it is crucial your loading speed is fast.
If your website has a slow loading speed, try to make sure that you have optimized your photos and videos correctly. Another common reason why your website has a slow loading speed is because of too many ads or HTTP requests.
Google’s PageSpeed Insights is a useful tool that allows you to test the speed of your website and gives you suggestions on how it can be improved.
Conclusion
The bottom line is improving your SEO can be straightforward when you know the steps to follow. Putting out relevant content, gaining quality backlinks, blogging and having good loading speed will help you boost your SEO ranking and in return will improve your business’s visibility, credibility and most importantly website traffic.
[1] https://blog.hubspot.com/insiders/inbound-marketing-stats#:~