While website owners know that the higher their website ranks in search engine results, the more traffic it will get, not everyone understands how to improve their ranking. The process of doing this is called search engine optimisation, often abbreviated to SEO. Essentially, SEO involves making improvements to your website and pages that will help it perform better in search results. To help, here are some useful tips to help your website rank higher.
1. Analyse your keywords
It’s likely that you will have given consideration to the keywords you want your web pages to rank highly for and will have used those in your content. This, however, is only the start of what you should do. Once you have included them, it is important to monitor how well your site performs in searches where those keywords are used and to do so across the major search engines. If your site isn’t performing well, it may be a sign that you need to focus on different terms using long-tailed keywords, for example, or it might be because the keywords are not in the right places on your website.
2. Place keywords correctly
Keyword placement is important because search engines pay attention to where you put them. If you have a page about cars and you want it to rank highly for the term ‘cars’, search engines will expect you will use that word in specific places on the page. If it isn’t where they expect, they might not realise what the topic of the page is and not rank you for that term.
Ideally, you should use the term in titles, meta descriptions, subheadings and sporadically throughout the text. However, to place keywords more precisely, there are now tools available that can analyse each page of your website and show you the best place to put them.
3. Competitor comparison
Are you losing business to your competitors because their websites are outranking yours on Google? It is now common practice among online businesses to monitor their competitors and compare search engine performance. For example, you can compare how your site and your competitor’s site performs for the same keywords or see if your rivals are using alternative keywords that perform better than the ones you are focusing on.
Understanding what is helping your competitors rank well can help you make vital changes to improve your own website’s performance and there is a range of online tools you can use to help you find out.
4. How mobile-friendly is your website?
Smartphones have transformed how people search the internet and today we use them far more for searches than we do computers or tablets. Search engines understand that most of their users are searching by phone and in an attempt to improve the quality of the service they offer, they have updated their ranking algorithms to favour websites that perform better on mobile devices. If you want to rank higher, therefore, you have to optimise your website for mobile users.
The two main factors you need to be aware of are site speed and functionality. Mobile sites have to perform very quickly as the speed can be affected by the user’s connection (3G vs 5G, for example.) With functionality, you need to make sure that the mobile version of your site is easy to see and read and that interactive features, like buttons, are easy to use with a thumb or finger on a small screen. If unsure, test your site to see what aspects of mobile friendliness need improvement.
5. Get rid of errors that affect ranking
With over 200 different ranking criteria taken into account by search engines, sometimes it’s easy to overlook something that could be hindering your performance. For example, you could unknowingly be blocking some pages from being indexed or have issues with 404 error pages or broken internal links. Alternatively, your site might be missing a robots.txt file, have errors with its htaccess file or you may not have a sitemap in XML format that search engines use to discover your pages. Using an auditing tool can highlight these issues so that you can put them right.
6. Keep track of your on-page optimisation
A good on-page optimisation tool can pinpoint issues with page content and display that also affect ranking. Search engines, for example, like websites that keep adding new content and which update older pages to keep them relevant and factually accurate. On-page analysis will look at the number of web pages you have, tell you how fresh your content is and point out problems like duplicate content, user experience issues and whether pages have meta descriptions.
7. Use the best tools
As in all areas of business, companies are making use of the latest technologies to help them in the marketplace. This is also true of SEO, where there is a wide range of tools now available. Most, like Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool, only carry out testing on a specific area and don’t, therefore, give a comprehensive overview of all the SEO work needed. That said, those comprehensive tools are now available. marketgoo, for example, is an all-inclusive SEO platform that undertakes all the types of analysis mentioned above and much more. Indeed, it audits your site, lists and prioritises the SEO tasks that need carrying out, provides you with the tools you need and lets you monitor your progress towards optimising your website. It even produces regular SEO reports.
Conclusion
SEO is essential if you want to rank higher in search engine results and gain more visitors. However, with so many ranking criteria and regular changes to search engine algorithms, it is an ongoing job that can be a challenge. All-inclusive tools, like marketgoo, however, can streamline the process, auditing your site, highlighting the improvements needed and providing the tools to undertake them.
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