We all want higher rankings in Google to get more traffic and more customers, but how can we achieve this?
These 3 quick SEO changes can give your website rankings a boost!
1. Add Relevant Content to Your Website
In order to rank for keywords that consumers are using to find the products or services that your business sells, you’ll need to write high quality content addressing possible questions browsers have about that keyword and related to keywords.
A quick Google search using the keyword you would like to rank for, returns what other web-pages have “good content” and right at the bottom of the search results they tell you “search terms related to your search..”.
With this information write a great piece of content, longer than your competitors in the search results, with all the answers a browser needs.
If you have existing web-pages that are short (less 500 words), consider adding content to them to answer more questions.
When writing, ensure that you use Header 2 & 3 to logically layout the topics within your article to make it easy for browsers to skim to the section they’re most interested in and include images to make the page visually appealing.
The more content your website contains on a broad topic, the more relevancy your website owns toward a certain topic and the increased likelihood they’ll send you traffic.
For example, my website contains many articles on website design and Google SEO such as this one on 5 easy ways to quickly improve your search engine rankings. If I was to suddenly write an article on plumbing, this wouldn’t make much sense and I’d struggle to rank for this page which is outside of my natural topic.
2. Build Links to Your Website
If other websites aren’t talking about you, are you really deserving of a high ranking in google? If you’re an authority on a certain topic, it’s most likely that other websites are talking about you and hyperlinking or “linking” to your website.
Links to your website act as a kind of vote. The more votes you have from high quality websites or website relevant to the topics related to your businesses products and services, the better!
This can be tough for smaller businesses who don’t attract PR via established authority/reputation, but you can easily start building some links from your social media account profiles and top Australian online directories ( eg true local and yellow pages ) to get you ahead of your local competition.
With link building, you need to think a little bit about the different types of exposure you can get. Are you a member of an industry association? Can you get a listing on their website with a description of your business and a link to your website? Make sure you claim opportunities like this to extend your online footprint.
3. Fix Errors Preventing Google From Crawling
Google is constantly crawling the web to determine which websites it should rank. Therefore, you want to make your website as easy to crawl as possible!
But errors on your website can be making it hard for Google and human users to crawl.
You can check crawl errors within Google Search Console (formerly google webmaster tools).
Common errors to fix:
Broken Links
If you’re linking to other pages, but the link is broken and users get a “404 page not found” this is a poor experience. Scan your sites with tools like Broken Kink Checker to find broken links on your website and fix these links.
Robots.txt
This is a file that tells bots like Google, which pages NOT to crawl. If you happen to have setting on within this file, it can mean that you’re telling google not to index certain pages or in some cases the entire website!
Therefore, if you want to quickly increase your rankings in google, you need to:
- write good content;
- build links; and
- fix errors preventing crawl.
Easy!