4 easy and effective ways to boost Your Google ranking
Love it or hate it, Google is a superpower that has changed the way the world does business. Businesses that have nothing to do with technology or the internet are finding themselves having to optimise their business strategies for an online customer base.
People don’t use phone books anymore, they use Google.
The key message in this is that your business needs to be online in order to stay in the race. Not only that, but customers and future clients need to be able to find your business online.
Some of the options for getting your business online include websites, social media and even online directories. All of these give varying depths of information for your customers to use. Having a website for your business is the most valuable resource for making yourself available to a digital audience.
Having your own website allows you to control the information that you make public and the image you portray. Through your website, you are also able to make adjustments to ensure that you are getting the best possible rankings on Google for your industry.
Google uses algorithms to determine who appears highest in its search results. Their aim is to show the best quality websites and the businesses that are most relevant to the searcher at the top of the list. There are a number of ways you can make sure that your website ticks all the boxes. We’re going to list some of the easiest implementations for you to follow to boost your ranking.
Write good content and write it often
We’ve spoken about content being the key to search engine optimisation (SEO) before, so we’ll just touch on it briefly here. Having your website full of good quality content and updating it regularly shows that you are a business who knows what they are talking about, is active, dynamic and ready to help customers.
Google favours websites who have good content on their websites. To have consistent activity, you could utilise a blog or particular sections of your website, updating them on a regular basis, giving quality information that is relevant to your business to anyone visiting your website.
The more content, as regularly as possible, the better. This makes blogs a pretty useful tool for keeping the content flowing. Not to mention this is a place where you can really demonstrate your expertise. A good, long blog post full of valuable information is what Google looks for when it is establishing industry leaders in its search rankings.
Make sure your website is mobile-friendly
Another trick that Google holds up its sleeve is the ability to analyse websites for their usability, based on what device the searcher is searching on.
Ensuring that your website follows a responsive design, means that it will adapt to suit whatever device it is being used on. Google recognises websites that are optimised for mobile devices and ranks them higher when users are searching on a mobile device.
Give your images attributes
We’re firm believers of the fact that humans are very visual beings. Using images with your content and in your website helps people to engage with what you are saying. By giving your customers something to look at, you are helping them absorb the information you want them to.
Naming every image that you put up on your website, with keywords that suit your industry is an easy way to help your website’s visibility on the search engines.
Optimise your site speed
The average time that a user is willing to wait for a web page to load is three seconds. As soon as a website takes longer to load than this, people start clicking away from it. The digital age has developed in all of us a very low tolerance for things that take too long.
Knowing this, Google prioritises websites that load quickly, enabling people to find what they need in just seconds.
Making sure that your website loads at optimum speeds is one way to get it appearing higher in the search rankings. There are a number of websites and services you can use to test the speed of your website, pingdom is one of these. They will also give you a report on what needs fixing in your website to make it faster. You can use this to fix it yourself or take it to someone to help you.
By ticking off these things, you are giving your website a better chance to be seen by your intended audience. These options will help, but there are a number of further ways to boost your ranking.
Getting into the nitty-gritty of Google’s requirements takes a lot more time and training. To get your website performing at it’s absolute best, you might want to think about enlisting the help of an expert.
Originally published at https://hutsix.com.au.
