Search engine optimisation should be part of all businesses’ marketing strategy. The beast part about SEO is that it doesn’t have to cost anything, and that’s also why small businesses as well as huge corporates invest in it. By just investing your own time, you can get incredible ROI that is hard to beat.
By working with SEO, you can increase your organic traffic from search engines and increase the number of potential customers who find to your site. And when you have more relevant visitors coming to your site, you’ll also increase your chances of conversions.
Therefore, in this article, I’ll list 5 quick and simple ways you can improve your website’s SEO to gain better rankings.
1. Think about the basics
When working with SEO, it’s important to know the basics and what it is that leads to better rankings.
Therefore, it is helpful understanding what makes Google rank some websites high and other websites further down.
Google’s goal is to provide the most relevant website to the search entered. The end.
If you can provide that, Google will favour you with better rankings.
Therefore, everything you do on your website should reflect that and be done with the user experience in mind.
The more value you are able to bring visitors, the more happy Google will be to present your website far up in search results.
In other words, understand what the consumer wants – give it to them and then let search engines to their job.
2. Solve website errors
Google’s goal is to provide a good user experience for their users. If they present a result which leads to a website with lots of bugs and errors, it will significantly harm the user experience.
And Google doesn’t want that, right?
The quality of the website is playing a bigger role in SEO in later days, and it’s no longer only about the content that visitors can find on your site that’s important.
Instead, you need to be able to provide a good overall experience for the person visiting your site.
When Google crawls your site, they’ll be able to find any errors and bugs you have on your site. And when they do, they are less likely to present your website at the top and more likely to rank it lower compared to websites that are better optimised.
Do your best to remove any dead links or 404 pages.
3. Decrease page speed
Pages peed plays a huge roll in SEO rankings. Both Google and Bing has admitted that their ranking algorithm pays attention to the loading time of a website.
Since they are all about user experience, they know that if a website loads slowly, the user experience will be harmed, thus risking that people will have less in trust in them.
As a result, you need to make sure your website is super quick and allows visitors to instantly access the information they are looking for without having to wait.
Images are often what makes a website load slowly (among many other things of course), so do your very best in reducing the file size of those and you’ll be able to see a decrease in your page’s loading time.
4. Pay attention to mobile
In 2016, Google reported that the number of mobile searches on Google surpassed desktop searches.
The result?
Mobile is playing a bigger and bigger role in search engine rankings, and Google has now started using that as a ranking factor when ranking websites in their search results.
If your website isn’t optimised for mobile, it will provide a bad user experience for the majority of searchers on Google, and as a result, Google will punish you with worse rankings.
With the number of mobile searches rapidly increasing, it is safe to say that mobile is a crucial part of website SEO, and if you aren’t following the trend by optimising your website, you’ll miss out on valuable traffic from your decreased rankings.
5. Use the right keywords
The foundation to great rankings on Google is still keywords
When someone search for a keyword, Google will look at the whole context of your page and see if you include the keywords the searcher searched for in your copy.
Therefore, keyword research is essential to improved SEO, as it will help you include keywords that your target audience is searching for, and answer questions and provide them with information about those keyword.
Great rankings is not about repeating the keywords as many times as you can as it used to be, called keyword stuffing, where the more times you repeated the keyword on your page, the better rankings you would get.
Today, it’s more about the user experience and the value of the content that your website provides.
Therefore, you should, in first hand, focus on providing your visitors a good experience, and then try to incorporate relevant keywords to your industry on your page which will help for discoverability. But be careful and don’t overdo it. If your use of keywords harms the reading experience, you’re probably using too much keywords, and if Google finds out, they’ll punish your website for attempt of keyword stuffing.
About Author
Jens Wirdenius is the editor-in-chief and co-founder of Veloce – All You Need for Social Media and Marketing blog and the influencer directory Veloce Network. He is a social media and marketing nut, sharing his passion for business in his articles.
