Digital Marketing

5 Ways to Improve your SEO Ranking

Author
Chloe Toogood
Published
16th November 2022
Length
5 minute read

You may have heard the term SEO a lot when looking at the web design industry, but what actually is it, and how can you utilise it to improve your rankings on Google?

SEO is an incredibly important tool if you want to stay ahead of your competitors, and stand out from other brands doing the same or similar things to you.
We’re going to give you five handy tips to try and help with your SEO ranking!

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and its goal is to improve the positioning of websites through organic search results. The result of this is more visitors are driven to the website, allowing for a higher rate of conversions, customers, and profit. SEO is important as it allows for companies to appear on the first SERP (Search Engine results Page) without the need for paid ads, which are making up an increasingly higher number of results. There are a number of ways you can utilise SEO for your benefit, but they should be monitored consistently to make sure that you are getting the most of your strategy.

How can you improve your SEO ranking?

Here are some of the best ways to improve your SEO ranking to help you get to the top of the SERP:

 

Business Profile on Google

A Google business profile is a great first step in trying to improve SEO. Setting up a profile allows you to set a location for your business, as well as helping it show up on Google Maps and the search results. You are able to add opening hours, a link to your website and phone number, and also pictures to help people searching have a better look at what your business is about.

Having a Google business profile is great for those with businesses that are solely online, and for those with physical stores, and can attract more visitors to your site as it makes your business look authentic and more trustworthy.

Another great aspect about the business profile is that customers can leave reviews, and is a good way for business owners to interact with customers, while other consumers can see if the site is worth visiting or not.

Long blog content

You may have gone onto a site before, noticed there was a blog, and wondered why it was there. While it does seem a bit random and pointless, the reason for it being there is usually purely for SEO purposes.

Having a well written blog can help with the positioning of your website in response to consumers searching for answers to their questions.

In addition, they can use a variety of SEO strategies to make them more likely to appear higher on the SERP, therefore increasing the number of visitors to your page. Blog content should be at least 1000 words for Google to recognise it, and should be well set out and easy to read for those who do end up reading the content. Generally, blog posts take the form of articles, a little like this one, but they can also include videos and infographics to make a change from longer written content.

Key words

A hugely important part of your SEO strategy should be using key words that are going to be most likely to be searched by consumers, and that are relevant to their search overall. As an example, a customer who wants to find a ‘best coffee shops’ could type in just that, and have Google bring up a ton of results that aren’t relevant, or close to them.

What you want to do, is highlight the specific key words so that your results get to the top of their search, so instead of just using the phrase ‘best coffee shops’ ‘it could be ‘best coffee shops in Newcastle’.

One thing about keyword searching is that you have to make sure you have thoroughly researched your intended target market, so that you know precisely what it is they are searching for. This will give you the best opportunity to stand out and come out on top.

 

 

Optimise your website

This is one that may not be obvious, but the way in which your site is optimised can greatly affect the positioning of your search results. Google doesn’t like webpages that take an age to load, and neither do consumers, which then affects the traffic to your site, and your conversion rate.

A study showed that for each additional second that a page took to load, the website lost 10% of its users, which is an amount that no one can afford to lose. There are a number of ways you can optimise your site:

  • Compressing images and videos
  • Get rid of code that is unnecessary
  • Use easily readable content layouts
  • Get rid of any plugins that you don’t need (check with your dev first!)

The more accessible and responsive your website is, the more people will stay and convert, which is obviously going to benefit you in the long run.

Make use of links

By making use of links is a great way to enhance your SEO strategy, and one of the best ways to do this is through backlinking. A backlink is where a website links to yours and is favoured by Google as it doesn’t see that all links are equal.

If you don’t want to make the most out of backlinking, then you can use internal links as an alternative. It is important to monitor any backlinks regularly as dead links can actually hinder your SEO score, and reduce the positive user experience on your site.

Internal links are formed when you link a page to your own website and not an external source. These kinds of links can help the SEO of specific pages, especially when there are multiple links looping back to the same page.

 

What’s the takeaway?

Everyone with a website should be making use of SEO, and if you already are, then it’s a good idea to monitor it regularly to make sure that you are doing everything you can to get to the top of the SERP. There are many ways you can do this, and the points mentioned above are some of the best ways to help you get there.

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