Many things have
changed in SEO since Google first came online in 1998.
The one thing that
hasn’t changed is this: Your organic traffic is directly related to your search
engine ranking positions.
If you have a prolific
number of keywords in the Google index and they appear at or near the top of
the search results, boundless traffic will follow.
Conversely, if you have
a great website, but no visibility in the SERPs, you are destined to have
little if any organic search traffic.
In this post, I’m going
to break down the steps needed to boost your Google SERPs. That said, I know
you are equally interested in knowing the following.
How Long Does It Take To Improve Google Rankings?
I’m going to go out on
a limb here and give you the definitive answer, “It depends.”
While I recognize this
is frustrating and seems like a copout, it’s the truth. SEO doesn’t happen in a
vacuum and every situation offers a unique set of variables.
Skill, budget, the
level of competition, and how your website stacks up can all play a role in how
quickly one can move the dial.
So, bearing that in mind,
let’s break it down in a more quantifiable sense and review what you can do to
make things happen sooner, rather than later.
During an episode of
AskGooglebot in June of 2021, John Mueller, a Google search rep, said it can
take “several hours to several weeks” for Google to index new or updated
content. He also warned that just because a page gets indexed, doesn’t mean
that it will rank for anything right away, if ever.
Due to the number of
factors in play, rapid changes in SERPs should not be expected.
Mueller has said in the
past that even if you make drastic changes to your website’s design and
functionality, it could still take a couple of months or even a year to have an
impact.
This, however, doesn’t
mean that you should just sit and wait after you upgrade your site. He
mentioned some specific ideas for speeding up indexing, which included:
- Preventing server overload by making your server and website faster.
- Prominently linking to new pages.
- Avoiding the use of unnecessary URLs, like category page filters.
- Taking advantage of user submission methods like uploading sitemap files, and utilizing the URL inspection tool.
Finally, Mueller
reiterated the best way to get ranked is to create high-quality content that
searchers will find useful. In his words, make your site “fantastic.”
How To Improve Your
Google Rankings
To reach the top 10
SERPs in less than a year takes lots of hard work, skill, and sometimes luck.
And this takes us back
to the topic of today’s discussion on how to improve your Google ranking.
So, if you want to
boost sales and conversions by taking your website to the first page of Google,
here are five steps you should take.
1. Start With A Sound
Foundation
Poor website structure
and information architecture can doom even the best SEO campaigns
If your website is
difficult for users to navigate and Google to crawl, your rankings are likely
to suffer. Pay attention to Core Web Vitals.
Perform A Technical SEO
Audit
The Google algorithm
incorporates thousands of signals, plus machine learning and AI to determine
search rankings.
That said, attending to
the basics, even today, will give you an advantage over many competitors. Here
are the need-to-know steps for conducting an SEO audit.
2. Deliver A Great Page
Experience
Google defines page
experience as “a set of signals that measure how users perceive the experience
of interacting with a web page beyond its pure information value, both on
mobile and desktop devices. “
Core Web Vitals
Whether it’s a mobile
or desktop site, you must continuously monitor the speed and keep improving it.
Specifically, Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
File Size
For file size, use your
favorite image editing program.
Before uploading, you
can further optimize the size of the file with apps like Optimizilla, Image
Recycle, and Kraken.io.
Lastly, always confirm
that the dimensions of the image fit into the reserved image space to retain a
clean, structured look of your live webpage.
Browser Caching
When a web browser
loads a page, it loads a number of resources. Browser caching stores these
resource files locally on the users’ computers.
That way, when a user
navigates to a new page, those resources need not be loaded again.
For most, the best way
to enable caching is by adding code to the web host/server .htaccess file.
For WordPress, there
are free plugins available to accomplish this, like WP SuperCache.
Script Handling
Before loading
countless JS and CSS files to enhance your site, make sure that you need those
extra augmentations as they end up slowing down your website.
You can also minify
your files by stripping comments, for instance, to keep things running fast.
And if it’s possible to
merge several scripts into a single file, go for it. That way, there will only
be one retrieving call to the server to load all the scripts.
Here are some tools
that can help you measure and monitor Core Web Vitals.
Mobile Friendly
With the evolution of
search and the mobile-first index, your website needs to pass the
Mobile-Friendly Test.
According to Google “…
our crawling, indexing, and ranking systems have typically used the desktop
version of a page’s content… Mobile-first indexing means that we’ll use the
mobile version of the page for indexing and ranking…”
To avoid mobile ranking
problems, you should double down on search intent and performance.
HTTPS
Check if your site’s
connection is secure. If the page isn’t served over HTTPS, learn how to make it
secure.
No Intrusive
Interstitials
Intrusive interstitials
are page elements that obscure content from the view of users, typically for
the purpose of promotion.
3. Optimize Your Pages
For Google
It goes without saying
that you must write great content that will keep readers engaged so that they
can read to the last paragraph.
To quickly win them
over your target audience, start with a quick summary intro that tells the
readers what they expect to find in that post.
Now, to make your
content friendly for Google, some of the best strategies you can implement are:
Tell Google What Your
Pages Are About
Do this by adding
structured data throughout your site. That way, Google can easily understand
what your content is about.
Schema.org is the
format preferred by Google. Schema types include recipes, businesses, products,
authors, and more.
Keep Your Titles Short
Apart from turning off
your readers as it will be impossible for them to get the full info at a
glance, extra-long titles will also hurt your keywords’ SEO impact.
To properly fit the
SERP length, keep your titles between 135 and 159 characters. SEO plugins can
help you identify titles with excessive characters.
Craft Unique Titles
& Meta Descriptions
Even though titles and
meta descriptions don’t have a direct impact on your website’s ranking, they
are quite significant in portraying your content’s value from the SERP.
Thus, if done right,
they can boost your click-through rate and subsequently increase your traffic.
So, make sure that you
write unique titles with a simple and attractive description that also contains
a target keyword.
Additionally, you
should also know that if you don’t write your own unique and vivid meta
descriptions with target keywords for your pages, Google will auto-generate
them.
Obviously, the
auto-generated ones won’t be as effective for your site as the ones you have
properly crafted. Still, you should also be careful not to stuff your titles
and descriptions with keywords.
Be Specific In Your
Internal Anchor Text
Get straight to the
point if you want your content to rank for a specific keyword.
Many websites out there
unknowingly use vague and elusive anchor texts to link to other pages within
their site.
This is a huge mistake
because it will not be a clear enough anchor to your visitors and even the
search engines.
4. Optimize For Search
Intent
The evolution of modern
search has its roots in Hummingbird, later supplemented by Rankbrain and then
BERT.
The end game for Google
is to better understand the context of a search to serve up results that match
the intent of a given query. In fact, Google’s continued success depends on it.
Four common types of
search (a.k.a. user) intent are:
·
Navigational – a search for a particular
website.
·
Informational – a search for knowledge.
·
Commercial – a search for data (like
reviews) to make an informed purchase decision.
·
Transactional – a search to make a
purchase (where to buy).
How To Optimize For
Search Intent
Check the SERPs for the
keyword phrase that you are interested in ranking for. If the top results don’t
align with your page, you aren’t going to rank. In other words, if Google has
decided the intent of a search is informational and your page is transactional,
that page will not rank well.
In cases where a page
does not match the top results/search intent, you have two choices:
·
Edit your page to match the intent.
·
Create a new page to match the intent.
5. Optimize Internal
Links
The links on your
website must be placed strategically, and you must ensure that all the links
are working properly as well. Here are a few tricks to polish your link game.
Link Architecture
The page depth of your
site shouldn’t be more than three clicks; an efficiency hack that sometimes
people forget.
A proper internal
linking strategy will mean that your best pages appear on the first level.
An effective way of
doing this is creating a home page section that links directly to your
‘Best-Selling Products’ or ‘Top Categories’.
Fix Broken Links &
Duplicates
Some website owners
have a habit of ignoring broken links because they don’t realize the impact of
the poor user experience they create.
By running a crawl on
your site with tools like Sitebulb, you can easily spot the 404 errors and fix
them in a jiffy!
Reclaim Your Site
Mentions
Reclaim the mentions of
your site by setting a Google Alert that will help you keep track of your brand
mentions across the internet.
And in case any of the
mentions come without being linked back to your site, contact the webmaster and
request them to link back!
Takeaway
SEO can seem
overwhelming. It’s easy to get caught up in the paralysis of analysis and do
nothing.
That said, it’s
important to remember that even in 2022, simply paying attention to the basics,
as outlined above, will position you for online success.
Resource: searchenginejournal.com
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