9 Simple Ways to Improve Your Website’s Google Ranking

January 5, 2021 Carlos Arnavat Local SEO, SEO

Getting a high Google ranking for your content is an essential way to boost traffic to your site. The process of getting to those coveted spots in the search results can be difficult, though. This is especially true if a lot of your competition is also working to earn rankings for your niche keywords.

Fortunately, there are some simple ways that you can improve your Google rankings through the process of marketing tactics, including Local SEO.

We’re going to briefly cover 9 of those options in this article, giving you some direction as to how to move forward with your digital marketing campaign.

Let’s get started:

Table of Contents

1. Create Quality Content
2. Research Strategic Keywords
3. Link to Other Sites
4. Make Sure Your Site Works Well
5. Fill Out Your Google Business Profile Page
6. Generate Positive Reviews
7. Hire Out Professionals
8. Use PPC Advertisements
9. Make Your Site Mobile Friendly
FAQs
Need Some Help with Your Google Ranking?

1. Create Quality Content

If you’re wondering how to improve your Google search ranking, the first step in any successful SEO strategy is creating great content in the first place. Service pages, product landing pages, blog posts, ebooks, white papers—anything and everything on your website is considered content. And when you imbue that content with value, you’re helping search engines direct customers to your door.

Besides just value, the more content you create, the more chances you have to rank in the search results. For instance, HubSpot found that companies see as much as a 55% uptick in leads when increasing their number of landing pages from 10 to 15.

Keep in mind that content shouldn’t be random. It should be high-quality for the user and well-optimized for the search algorithm. Google values the quality of content over all else, though, so don’t skimp on the content in favor of stuffing in a few more keywords.

2. Research Strategic Keywords

The next essential piece of getting content to rank is choosing the correct keywords to optimize your content. Keyword research takes a look at what users in your target demographic are searching for specifically. You can see which keyword phrases are popular among your audience and base your content on those specific phrases.

This makes sure that the content you’re creating is relevant to your users’ interests. You’ll have a clear avenue to naturally input the keyword phrase instead of forcing it into other content in a clunky way.

You may also want to incorporate what are known as LSI keywords to boost your rankings for a phrase even more. LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords are essentially related keywords that help search engines know what your page is about.

For instance, if your focus keyword is “running shoes,” some LSIs may include arch support, Nike, Adidas, running shorts, and exercise shirt. If you want to start incorporating LSI keywords, just type your core phrase into LSIGraph’s search field and see what pops up.

That being said, talking about your core keyword’s topic naturally will usually hit on a good chunk of those LSIs automatically. So don’t get too wrapped up in keyword research. Instead, focus on being educational, delivering value, and speaking to the problems your audience actually has.

3. Link to Other Sites

You should be inserting hyperlinks out to other sites in your niche in all of your content. The more connected you are in a network of links, the more chance Google has to find you. Additionally, links signify that your content addresses an issue and uses outside sources to try and solve the issue.

Don’t overstuff your content with links, though. Try to insert an outbound link or two about every 200 words if possible. And if you can, use sites with high domain authority and that are especially reputable (.gov, .edu., etc.).

On top of outbound links, you should also link back to your own site’s pages in different areas, too. These are called internal links. And they’re helpful for SEO purposes for a number of reasons.

For instance, they:

Help search engines crawl your site more easily
Establish a website architecture
Spread link equity throughout the website
Keep readers on your website
Reinvigorate old posts with new SEO power

Most importantly, be sure you’re linking back to a page on your site somewhere in the call to action. A call-to-action link tells your prospects exactly where to go. And without it, you have to just hope they’ll know how to become your customer.

4. Make Sure Your Site Works Well

Another thing that Google values is how well your site functions for users. In other words, user experience is a big piece of optimization. That means things like load times, organization, functioning links, and aesthetics. Google scans your site, interprets how well it functions and is organized, and uses that information to compare you to similar sites.

Search engines will evaluate your website on a range of other factors too. Factors like:

Website security
Page speed
Mobile-friendliness
Social signals
Header tags
Meta descriptions and titles
Alt tags
Schema markups
Duplicate content
Sitemaps
Crawl errors
Image optimization
And so much more

Using site-builders like WordPress can make it easier to keep up with some of the more technical details. But if you really want to get the most out of your SEO efforts, you’re going to need to work with a professional SEO and design company.

In the end, the key takeaway is that a website that works well is a website that gets found.

5. Fill Out Your Google Business Profile Page

We’ve all seen the information that pops up when you’re searching for anything on maps. And when you find a business, in particular, you can view their store hours, location, website, contact info, and loads of other information right there on the page.

But all this information doesn’t appear there magically. Instead, it’s pulled in from the Google Business Profile page.

If you’re wondering how to increase your SEO on Google, a Google Business Profile is hands down one of the best tools you can use.

Google My Business is essentially an online listing for your business. You can input a ton of info about your business on your profile. And once you do, you can start getting found by Google Search, Google Maps, and a host of other services.

Plus, you can even post updates on your hours, new media, written content, and so much more.

So if you haven’t already, be sure to create and fill out your profile as soon as you can.

6. Generate Positive Reviews

Google’s goal is to find the websites that are engaging for users, provide the most value, and hopefully solve the problem their searchers are going through. In fact, all search engine algorithm’s search factors try to parse out how useful your site is compared to other sites like yours.

Online business reviews are one of the most direct ways Google can tell how individuals feel about you. And when you incorporate those reviews online (through your website, on your Google My Business, etc.), you’re sending a very clear signal that people value what you have to offer.

On top of that, potential customers love checking out reviews before buying from a business. In fact, 9 out of 10 buyers look at reviews before making a purchase online.

If you want to attract more customers and climb the search rankings, you need to start gathering reviews and posting them online as soon as possible.

There are plenty of ways to start getting more online reviews. But five best practices to follow are to:

Encourage customers to leave reviews during and after the purchase cycle
Avoid using spammy methods (e.g., fake reviews)
Never assume your customers know how to leave a review
Respond to all reviews you receive (even the negative ones)
Leverage the Google My Business tools that are available (like Google Marketing Kit)

7. Hire Out Professionals

The entire SEO process doesn’t have any serious barriers to entry. In other words, almost any person could create a website and try to optimize it themselves. The difficult thing is that most people trying to optimize their websites are doing so for their small businesses.

Those small businesses require a great deal of time and effort from the people who run them. Similarly, a good digital marketing campaign and great Google rankings come from serious time and effort.

The more time you put into the process, the more likely you will see results that actually boost your business’s bottom line. That’s why hiring out a professional team to write your content, optimize your site, do your research, and keep an eye on the entire process is a great idea for many small businesses.

It’s not always viable to hire another employee who just handles social media and digital marketing, so outsourcing your marketing to an SEO Agency can be a really cost-effective way to get it done.

On top of that, there are a few aspects of SEO that are more on the technical side. And for those without a lot of in-depth knowledge, making sense of this denser info might be like trying to read another language.

When you work with a professional SEO agency, on the other hand, you’re leveraging the expertise of people who do this for a living. They have years, sometimes decades of experience. And most cases, they’ll be able to tackle the technical stuff that’d make you a lot more time and effort to understand.

8. Use PPC Advertisements

Pay-per-click (PPC) ads aren’t a direct way to improve your Google rankings, but they are an excellent way to get a great deal more people to visit your site. When people engage with your site, and you have more visitors, Google takes note and uses that information as a sign that you’re attractive and can engage users.

So, indirectly, using pay-per-click advertisements can improve your Google rankings.
Independent of your rankings, though, these ads are straightforward to put in place and can attract thousands upon thousands of people to your site with very minimal effort from you. So long as you choose the right keywords and target audience, your advertisement could cause thousands of engagements from users on social media and search engines.

Additionally, you only have to pay for as much as you get. You’re charged only when a user engages with your ad, even if it’s displayed on thousands of screens before it gets a click.

9. Make Your Site Mobile Friendly

Rewind 15, maybe even ten years ago and mobile browsing was the rarity.

At the start of 2012, just 8.49% of internet traffic came from a mobile device. But thanks to near quantum leaps in technology since then, mobile browsing has overthrown desktops for the majority share of internet traffic. And at the end of 2021, 54.86% of all internet traffic came from mobile.

For business owners like you, the writing on the wall is clear—if your website isn’t mobile-friendly, you’re going to get left behind. But it isn’t just customer satisfaction that’s going to drop. So too is your SEO ranking.

Mobile-friendliness is now one of the biggest factors in how search engines rank your site on their results pages.

There are a few criteria in particular that go into determining whether your site is mobile-friendly.

If the text can be read without zooming in.
Your pages use mobile-incompatible software like Flash.
If the page content adapts to the screen size of the viewing device.
There is enough room between links so that visitors can tap with their fingers without encountering any problems.

You’ll also want to make sure your pages achieve reasonable load times, so users don’t tap off your page before even viewing your content.

FAQs

Below are some of the most frequently asked questions about how to improve your Google ranking.

How Can I Improve My Google SEO?

There are a lot of ways to improve your SEO. The nine best techniques are:

Create quality content
Research strategic keywords
Link to other sites
Make sure your site works well
Fill out your Google My Business page
Generate positive reviews
Hire out professionals
Use PPC advertisements
Make your site mobile friendly

How Do You Become #1 on Google?

Ranking in the top spot on Google is no easy feat. It takes lots of hard work, a well-planned strategy, and a fair amount of time. But there are a few things you can do to make your chances of earning the #1 ranking more likely.

Niche down in your industry
Target realistic keywords
Generate high-quality content regularly
Earn and maintain a good reputation
Understand and play by Google’s rules
Have a mobile and user-friendly website design
Get plenty of backlinks

Can You Pay Google to Rank Higher?

In a sense, yes. You can pay to rank higher on Google. But only through Google’s PPC advertising.

PPC advertisements on Google appear above organic search results. And if you pay enough and target the right keywords, you can in fact earn the top search result (even though it’ll be marked as an ad).

Beyond that, there is no way to pay Google to rank higher organically.

Need Some Help with Your Google Ranking?

Getting a solid Google ranking can be difficult, especially when you’re doing it all by yourself. We’re here to help.

Have you checked your Local SEO Health? Get a free local SEO audit right now!

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