For online businesses in 2023, we can synonymize ‘having good revenue’ with ‘having a good rank in the SERPs’.
And what does that mean?
This basically means that if you want to make your online business successful, you need to get yourself a spot on the first page of the SERPs for keyword queries related to your niche.
We can understand this from the fact that 71.33% of Google’s total traffic opts for the first 10 search results whereas only 3.99% visit the second page. What can then be said about the 3rd page and onwards?
But don’t worry. In this post, we are going to be looking at some ways in which you can improve your Google ranking.
Let’s begin.
1. Focus On Your On-Page SEO
Essentially, the steps that you have to take for improving your Google ranking all fall in the category of SEO. Since SEO stands for ‘Search Engine Optimization’, it more or less covers everything that you have to do in order to make your website appear closer to the top of the SERPs.
So, we can split this guide into two parts: one to deal with the on-page side of SEO and the other with the off-page one.
Here are some things that you can do to improve your site’s on-page SEO.
1. Upload Excellent Quality Optimized Content
Uploading high-quality optimized content on your website is one of the quickest and most efficient ways of boosting your SERP ranking. Many websites, apart from publishing site content, have a dedicated blog section where they upload posts and articles on a regular basis.
When publishing this type of content, you just have to be sure to properly optimize it for SEO. This usually involves things such as:
- Adding and optimizing images with alt tags
- Adjusting keywords properly
- Using heading tags
Adding relevant keywords is essentially the main and most important thing that you have to be careful of when publishing content on your site. The keywords you use tell the search engines what the content is about. This helps the search engines to determine the relevancy of your website more efficiently, and they, in turn, favor it in the SERPs.
While this is the technical aspect of how quality content can help to increase your Google ranking, there is a more indirect role that it plays as well.
When you publish authoritative, high-quality content on your site, you can attract a steady stream of regular visitors to your site. Your readers may also share your posts and articles. All of this will contribute to an increase in your site traffic; which is also, in itself, a factor that can improve Google ranking.
As far as the quality of the written content goes, you should make sure that it is grammatically correct, engaging, and free from plagiarism.
Plagiarism can be harmful (and fatal, in extreme cases) to your site’s ranking. Mild offenses can merely lower the rank while repeated cases can result in complete site de-listing.
As a rule, you should have the following things in your post-writing checklist:
- Checking for grammar errors using a grammar checking software.
- Making sure there is no plagiarism in the content using a high-quality plagiarism checker.
- Using a readability checker to make sure that the readability grade is not too high.
2. Website Design
Having a good website design is also an essential part of on-page SEO, and it can largely contribute to an increase in your site’s rank in the SERPs.
Among other things, there are two factors that should necessarily exist in your website design. And those are:
- Fast loading speeds
- User-friendly and easily navigable layout
The main benefit of having these two things is reduction in bounce rate.
The bounce rate of a website is the percentage of visitors that leave it without opening more than one page. In other words, if a visitor were to open a website and then leave without navigating to any of the other pages, it would count as a bounce.
Having a low bounce rate and a high retention rate (which is the opposite of the former) is good for your website since this indicates that the users visiting your site are coming back repeatedly.
3. Internal Linking
Internal linking refers to the practice of placing links on your website that point to the other pages on the same site.
Placing internal links is most effective in blog posts and also on the text published on the home page.
There are two main benefits that you can enjoy with proper internal linking:
- The search engine crawlers will be able to crawl your website more efficiently, which will help them rank it better in the SERPs.
- It will provide ease of usage to your visitors, and it will increase the chances for them to engage with your website.
Both of these factors play a role in increasing your site’s Google ranking.
2. Work On Your Off-Page SEO
Other than taking steps to increase your site’s ranking via on-page SEO methods, you should also pay attention to off-page SEO.
While we could go into some detail about all the various steps included in this branch of SEO, we will, for the sake of brevity, stick to discussing the most important one. And that is…
Building An Authoritative Backlink Profile
Other than high-quality optimized content, backlinks are the next major factor that can increase your site’s ranking.
Backlinks from relevant authoritative websites help to define the relevancy of your site to the search engine. Furthermore, when an authoritative website adds a backlink to your site, it is taken by Google to be a token of confidence. Since Google finds your site to be backlinked by an authoritative platform, it (Google) ranks the site higher up in the SERPs.
When it comes to acquiring backlinks, there are a lot of different ways that you can try. However, the most common and effective approach to link building is guest posting.
We can appreciate the widespread use of this technique considering the fact that more than 60% of blogs publish 1 to 5 guest posts every month.
Conclusion
There is a lot more to SEO than we can cover in just a brief blog post. However, for people who want to learn about the raw basics, the above guide can be a good place to start.
Basically, there are two main sides of SEO i.e., on-page and off-page.
On-page SEO refers to the actions that you have to take for improving your site’s ranking on the website itself. This can involve things such as publishing excellent content, improving site design, and doing proper internal linking.
On the other hand, off-page SEO refers to all the activities that you have to do away from your website. This can involve promoting your website, building backlinks, and so on.
