“I love a high SEO ranking but I hate the work involved!”
As a website owner, if you have discovered that most of your website’s traffic is coming from search engines particularly Google search, then you must love a high SEO ranking.
This means you rely heavily on people to find your business through search engines thereby making search engine optimisation a priority on your to-do list in the new year.
Let’s backtrack a little and analyse what really happens on the internet. Research has
shown that about 93% of experiences on the internet start with a search engine be it Google, Safari, etc. After the search, the top results on Google (and other search engines) have a 33% chance of getting clicked.
75% of internet users won’t click on the second page of the search results. What does this analysis mean to your business? It means if you are not ranked on the first page of the search engine, you just missed one-third of your potential clients. Did you just exclaim?
I’m sure you are asking yourself the important question, “why are other websites ranking higher than my website on Google search?”. The answer is simple. They are making a “conscious effort” to improve their SEO. Wanna join the party? How do you do that?
The key is to disabuse your mind off the notion that there is too much work involved in optimising your website to be highly ranked by search engines or the idea that you aren’t concerned with your site’s SEO ranking. (I’ve heard people say it is the job of their website designer or content creator!) It is your responsibility!
Remove the statement, I LOVE a high SEO ranking but I HATE the work involved from your vocabulary and replace it with I LOVE a high SEO ranking and I LOVE the work involved! Now, once we’ve got that established, how do you improve your SEO ranking? Here are 5 tips to help you improve your SEO ranking.
Increase Your Page Loading Speed
A slow load speed affects the way visitors engage with pages on your website. Research shows that 40% of visitors abandon websites with page loading speed longer than 30 seconds. A more adverse effect is that 80% of those visitors won’t return to that website.
These negative interactions will hurt your SEO ranking because it ultimately kills traffic to your site. On the other hand, if your page loads fast (faster than 3 seconds), people will visit and stay longer on your website. Your site’s popularity will increase which Google’s algorithm will recognise and rank your site higher on Google search.
Periodically testing the speed of your website is a must. Online services such as Pingdom allow you to test the speed of your website from any part of the world for free. If you find that your site’s loading speed is slow, you might want to check your website themes, plugins and server.
Produce High-Quality Content
Content is the life of your website. To drive more traffic and give visitors a reason to keep coming back to your website, your content needs to be high quality, recent and relevant. How often do you update your website content? When last did you change the images on your website? One important factor that impacts your SEO ranking is the “dwell-time”.
Dwelltime refers to how much time visitors spend on your site per visit. Websites that have high quality, informative content typically have longer dwelltimes while the reverse is the case for websites with low-quality content. Make updating your website content a priority to improve your SEO ranking this year.
Make Your Site Mobile Friendly
Repeat after me, I will make my site mobile friendly! Again! It is needless to say that the use of mobile devices is on the rise. It is a well-known fact that it has taken over PCs and tablets. Over 60% of Google searches come from mobile devices and the Google algorithm has been programmed to recognise this and rank sites accordingly.
If your site is not compatible with mobile devices, it will hinder the user experience, reducing website traffic and adversely affecting your ranking. This sums up the fact that your website needs to be mobile-friendly. There is absolutely no way around this!
Do More with Your Blogs
Blogging has always been one of the known ways to drive traffic and increase SEO ranking. I’m sure you are also thinking “my website has a blog”. However, when last did you post on your blog? Do you read your blog posts from the view of a potential client or visitor? Are they guaranteed to engage the attention of a visitor?
There is more to blogging than just writing articles. How engaging are those articles? This is especially true for businesses in a boring niche. For example, businesses in the real estate industry, how will your blog look like Big question, right? A good headline is “how to deal with problematic neighbours” I love cats but my flatmate is allergic! My next-door neighbour loves his music loud.
Make your blog posts entertaining, high quality, and relevant. Use videos, pictures and infographics in your posts to increase dwelltime. Use interesting and eye-catching headlines.
Finally, encourage social sharing on your blog. One of the best ways to do this is to include social sharing icons on your posts and also share links to your posts on your social media pages. This increases site traffic and thereby Search Engine Optimisation ranking.
Use a Clear and Neat Layout for Your Page
When coming up with a layout for your website, you need not to be in a hurry. You shouldn’t also leave it to your website designer to determine your website layout. Take your time.
Check out other websites, especially those with high SEO ranking, and take note of their page layout. Your page layout needs to be well organised, neat, clear and not jam-packed. Take note of things like font style, font size, background images, and colour. A clean format and design will improve your SEO ranking.
If your website is cluttered with too many pictures, texts, colours, and advertisements, it can appear untrustworthy to search engines and visitors. Make sure your text is formatted in an easy to read way especially with bullet points and checklists for easy scanning through content by visitors (most people might not be patient enough to read the whole post).
Use coloured texts, bold fonts, and italics infrequently. Take all these into consideration and you can be sure that your site traffic will get a boost and your SEO rank will experience a change.
The above are 5 important tips to improve your SEO ranking. However, there are even more tips available to increase your SEO ranking. Some are;
- Have a Google Business Account
- Write a great meta description
- Generate links and referrals from other respectable sites
- Include outbound links in your posts, etc.
Search Engine Optimisation isn’t a myth or a farce. It is something your website needs to concentrate on right now and even in the future. SEO isn’t going to get outdated.
However, if you are just starting to focus on SEO, start gradually so as not to get overwhelmed by doing it all at once. You might decide to start with your page loading speed, work on that, monitor the results and keep progressing. As you keep on doing the above and more, you will keep making your way towards the top search results on Google.
Don’t forget, You LOVE a high SEO ranking and You LOVE the work involved!
