If you own a website, then you probably know how hard it can be to climb the search engine rankings. When you first make your website, sometimes it won’t show up in search engines for months. For many business owners, this can often be off-putting and usually ends with them neglecting their website altogether.
In order to get the most out of your website, you need to continually work on it in order to improve your search engine visibility. You won’t hit number 1 without putting in some hard work!
How to Improve Your Search Engine Visibility
To improve your search engine visibility, it requires a detailed SEO plan with actionable steps you take to improve your website’s rankings.
If you’re not ranking as highly as you’d like on search engines then don’t worry, we’re here to help. We’ve put together this simple and effective guide that can help you boost your search engine visibility in just 5 simple steps. Perfect for readers of all skill and backgrounds, by the time you finish reading this you’ll have the complete blueprint to improve your search engine visibility.
So grab a pen and find a notepad, here’s everything you need to know to boost your rankings.
Optimise Your Website
If you truly want to increase your search engine visibility, then you need to make sure your website is optimised for search engines. It might sound obvious, but you’d be surprised at how many websites make it difficult for search engines to read their website.
The truth is, if someone like Google can’t crawl or understand what your website is about, then they won’t give you good rankings. This means you’ll be stuck on page 5 forever! (Or until you optimise your site).
If you’re currently struggling with rankings and not consistently hitting page 2 or above, then you should really consider reviewing your website. The chances are you aren’t using the right keywords or no keywords at all.
In order to improve your search engine visibility, you need to optimise your website around a particular set of keywords. This means including the keyword on your web pages, in your titles, and even URL.
For a comprehensive guide on how to optimise your website for a certain keyword, we suggest reading our previous post An SEO Checklist To Dominate Google. By the time you’ve finished that you will have left no stone unturned on your website. Once you’ve completed the process of optimising your website, it’s time to sit back and see what the changes have done. If your website had no optimisation to begin with, then you’re likely to see big ranking changes. By focusing on making your website easy to understand for search engines, they’ll reward you by increasing your rankings. Simple stuff.
Build More Backlinks
Another powerful way to improve your search engine visibility is to increase the number of backlinks pointing to your site. If you read our previous post on Why Backlink Building Is So Important For Your Website’s Rankings, then you should already understand their importance.
Google and other search engines put a lot of emphasis on a website’s backlinks as it is often a sign of authority. By taking into consideration the quality and amount of backlinks pointing to a website, Google can determine how authoritative a website is. And for those that don’t know, an authoritative website has a much easier time ranking for keywords.
Now you might already be thinking, how can you get more backlinks to your website? Well the answer is there are actually several different ways you can achieve it. From guest posts, to directory submissions, there are plenty of ways to generate backlinks for your website.
One of the most popular ways in recent years has been guest posting. This is simply posting an article on someone else’s website that is relevant to yours. In return for your original and unique content, the website will link back to your site and give you a backlink. Since this link is from a very relevant website, Google views it as an authoritative link and therefore ranks your site higher.
In order to get the best visibility for your site, focusing on building backlinks is essential. You’ll quickly start to notice that the more quality links you get, the higher you’ll start to rank.
Speed Up Your Website
The next step on our list might not be as well known as the others, but it’s still incredibly important. As the internet has evolved and websites have got more and more complicated, there has also been a considerable effect on sites loading speeds. Instead of just being simple HTML websites they are now full of scripts which can often increase page loading times.
Let’s face it; nobody likes a slow website, not users or search engines. If you want to stand a better chance of ranking higher on search engines then one of the things you can do is speed up your website. This means reducing the amount of scripts, images and page blocking items that stop the website from loading instantly. If you didn’t know already, Google actually uses page speed as a ranking factor and will rank faster websites higher than slower ones. If you want an advantage over other websites then you need to make your site as fast as possible.
A good tool to use to test your website is the official Google PageSpeed tool. Not only does it give your website a score based on how fast it is, but it also gives you a list of improvements on how to make it faster. Whether that’s changing your web host, enabling compression or minifying your scripts, the tool gives you everything you need to achieve blazing fast loading times. Perfect for users visiting your website as well as search engine crawlers.
Focus on Low Competition Keywords
If you want to increase your chances of ranking higher on search engines then focusing on low competition keywords is a great strategy. When you first make your website, you’ll have little to no backlinks pointing to your website. This makes search engines view you as new and not trustworthy. This means you have almost no chance when it comes to trying to rank for competitive keywords. Instead, you should be focusing on less competitive ones that you at least have a chance of ranking for.
Think about it, would you rather rank number 2 for a keyword that gets 50 searches a month, or position 100 for a keyword that gets 4,000 searches a month. You might not agree with us yet, but we’d take the first keyword over the other one.
This is primarily due to the fact that people clicking on page results drops off considerably after page 2. Basically, if you aren’t on the first 2 pages of a search result then you’re going to get zero traffic. That’s why it’s better to rank high for a very low volume keyword instead of not at all for a high volume one. You might only get 30 clicks a month but it’s better than spending the same amount of time to rank position 100 and get 0 clicks a month.
Give Users What They Want
The final strategy on our list to improve your search engine visibility is to give users content that they want to read. Google does an excellent job of understanding user intent and matching results accordingly. If you want to rank high for a specific keyword then you need to make sure you have good content to do so.
The best way is to ask yourself what people are looking for when they search the keyword. Are they looking to buy? Do they want advice or reviews? Or are they looking for the latest releases and news? By understanding why a user is searching for something, this will help you give them the answer they are looking for.
You might be wondering how this will help improve your search engine visibility, well for those of you that don’t know, user experience is a big ranking factor. This includes factors such as the time on page, click through rate and bounce rate of a website. If you’re writing great content for users that is answering their questions and problems, then they’re more likely to stay on your site. In time this alerts Google that your content is good and therefore is worthy of a higher position. By giving users what you want you can increase your rankings and give off a good first impression to visitors.
Boost Your Results Even More
Now you know how to improve your search engine visibility, it’s time to take action. Unfortunately, just knowing what to do won’t actually make you rank higher. Instead, you need to put in the time and effort before you see results.
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