by admin - 11 Jun 2021

However innovative your product may be, as effective your branding techniques maybe unless you rank on SERPs, your business and your products remain unknown to the world. These days every business has its online presence, however, one that ranks on the top of SERP gets the maximum lucrative results. It is because the maximum of the traffic gets driven by the top organic results and the featured snippets. When you rank higher, you get more traffic, brand awareness and higher chances of conversions. Here we share a few tips using which your website can rank higher on SERP.

 
 
Why is it necessary to rank higher on SERP?

When people search for a query on Google or an alternate search engine, they find their answers on the first page of the SERP among the top three results. More than three fourth of the searchers never goes beyond the first page of results. And it is said that nearly 35% of traffic and clicks get driven by featured snippets which is the 0th position on search results. However, 46% of traffic goes to the search results on the first page. It indicates how beneficial it could be if your website can rank on featured snippets or at least on the first page of SERP.

 
 
TIPS FOR BOOSTING SEARCH RANKINGS
 

1. 1. Populate Your Website with High-Quality Content

   Whenever you search any query on Google, you get your answer immediately within the first or second result. So imagine how efficiently Google ranks the websites such that the user’s intent is clearly understood, providing accurate results. You must also try to comprehend the user’s intent and create high-quality, detailed content. Populate every page on your website with at least 300-400 words and avoid duplicate content on different pages. Also, avoid copying content from other sites as Google does not encourage duplicate content. Your content should engage the users so that it gets shared. You know that backlinks are a crucial ranking factor, and only when you put out highly engaging content, people will link to your content/website.

 

2. 2. Write User-friendly & not Google-friendly Content

   Whatever content is available on your website or blog is ultimately for the end-users and not for the search engines like Google, hence frame the content accordingly. Keywords are essential to help you rank higher on search results and hence, choose the appropriate keywords that you wish your content to rank for. After jotting down the keywords, do not scatter them here and there in your content or do not stuff them unnecessarily. Frame your website content such that the keywords are incorporated naturally and blend well with the content. Meaningless stuffing of keywords sends bad signals to search crawlers about your content. Write your content based on search intent rather than just focusing on keywords and include long-tail keywords as well.

 

3. 3. Perform On-page SEO

   On-page SEO is the optimization technique you apply to your website content. It is equally necessary to optimize and hence make a list of the keywords relevant to your content and for which you want to rank on Google. Out of the keyword list, have one primary keyword included in the title tag, H1 tag and meta description. Include bulleted lists or numbered lists on your content so that it gets ranked for featured snippets.

 

4. 4. Image Optimization

   Most of the searches on Google are image searches. Imagine if your images could rank on Google image search, how much traffic it could bring? Because every time you click on an image to view it, you get directed to the parent website where the image is available, driving traffic to the website. Also, images and infographics convey information in a nutshell and hence are highly shareable ones. But make sure you optimize your images and compress the size of the images such that the page loads faster. Images that occupy much space increase the page loading time. You know it well that people do not stay on pages that load slowly or take longer than 2 seconds to load. Though you compress the images, ensure that image quality does not get distorted.
   Include alt tags for your images. Google or search crawlers do not understand images, but they understand the alt tags and the title tags. Hence do not miss the opportunity and include your keyword in the alt and title tag. Image filename and its storage path are also considered when search crawlers comprehend the context of an image. Hence, give appropriate image file names.

 

5. 5. Link-Building

   You would have heard about the importance of links in SEO. Link building means gaining hyperlinks for your content. When an external website links to your website by placing your website/content link on their website, it is known as a backlink. To gain backlinks for boosting domain authority and search ranking, people try to get backlinks from irrelevant and toxic websites. This is a black hat technique, and search engines do not promote such techniques. Driving links from trusted and relevant places is important as driving backlinks. And you will get links from trusted websites only when your content is impressive and engaging enough. You can get the backlink profile of your competitors from thorough competitor analysis and try approaching the websites that link to your competitor’s website for a similar piece of content.
   Link building not only focuses on generating backlinks, but internal linking is also a crucial component and a deciding factor for your search rankings. Internal linking is inter-linking the various pages of your website. When the pages are interlinked, crawlers index and crawl every page, understanding how the navigation has to be done. The bounce rate gets reduced when people navigate through the other pages of your site.

 

6. 6. Keep Updating your Website

   Google’s algorithm loves the websites that are fresh or regularly updated as it supports new content. Blogging is one of the best ways to keep your website updated now and then. You would have seen that most of the business and brands have a blog on their website. Blogs provide extra information about the brand and its services and also finds a place in the organic searches. Even though you don’t write new blog often, keep updating your older blogs with new points and updates. Businesses and websites that run blogs have more indexed pages and better indexing when compared to the ones that don’t have a blog. Only when the web pages are indexed by search engines, they become visible to the world and also rank higher. Blogs also allow you to incorporate more keywords into your site, and if your blog performs well, your audience will subscribe to your blogs, and you can generate a list of emails for email marketing.

 

7. 7. Mobile Optimization

   Maximum of the searches happen on mobile phones these days. If your site is not optimized for mobile devices, you’re missing out on a bigger opportunity. Make your site mobile-friendly as it is one of the crucial signals for website ranking. Google indexes and crawls your site for its mobile version as you can check on Google search console thus the site needs to be mobile-friendly. Also, reduce the page load speed by keeping things simple and avoid clutter for the mobile version of your site and enable AMP. You can implement caching on your website to keep track of the analytics.

 

8. 8. Social Share

   Social media is not a separate island when you consider search engine optimization. As you know, social media has become mainstream for marketing, advertising and branding, it has also become a crucial factor for your search rankings. Post the link to your website or blog on social media channels to drive traffic from social media. Post engaging content on social media to drive user’s attention and bring them to your site. Platforms like Pinterest and Instagram are mainstream ones to drive increased traffic to your website.

 
 
Getting to the top of the search rankings is not a piece of cake, you have to strive every day to get there. Also, it’s not a one-time task but a marathon where you have to be consistent with your optimization, content creation and marketing techniques to retain your top spot. While you focus on the core competency of your business, you can outsource SEO and marketing to a marketing agency for a better return. If you’re looking to gain a top spot on Google or revamp your marketing and branding, connect with us. Entitledarts(https://entitledarts.com) is a leading digital marketing agency based out of Hyderabad, India helping businesses with their 360-degree digital transformation with branding, designing, web/app development and marketing services.