There are many ways for people to find you online, one being through Google searches. With Google Searches, your best bet at people finding your website is if it has a favourable ranking in search engine results pages.
That makes search engine optimization a top priority for websites keen on increasing organic traffic. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) makes it easier for search engines to find information on a website and rank it against similar ones.
A better ranking means more chances of a website getting in front of the target audience, which translates to a higher conversion rate.
So, how to improve SEO for website?
Here are some tactics to Improve Website Rank in your arsenal:
Understand your online customers
Google is in the business of providing its users with the most relevant results for their searches. The closer a website meets user searches, the higher it will rank on relevant search engine results pages.
Understanding your online customers is essential when fine-tuning your content and SEO game. You need to know how your target audience behaves to tailor your website to meet their demands best. It is crucial to understand customer search behaviour from the point they identify a problem, search for solutions on the internet and decide which website to patronize.
Knowing your customers means serving them better, which puts you on Google’s radar and improves website rank.
Use keywords on your website
It is no news that content is king in the SEO world. And keywords are an essential player in the content game. Keywords are the phrases or words people use when doing searches. The closer your content matches the keywords, the higher the likelihood of ranking highly in search results.
You, therefore, need to sprinkle some popular keywords in your content. They could be at the page title, image title or woven into the main content.
The keywords should be relevant to your industry and location and read naturally. Stuffing your content with irrelevant keywords will have the opposite effect. It could lead to penalties that will harm your website’s ranking.
The goal is to write for your audience, not stuff keywords. The priority should be creating educative, authoritative and credible content to attract users. You will add keywords naturally to your content when your top priority is writing for your audience.
Remember to mix up the keyword phrases. Use different variations to make your SEO writing sound more natural.
Also, mind the keyword density. Keyword density is the ratio between the number of keywords and the number of words in a content. An awareness of the density will keep you from looking like a keyword stuffer or spammer.
Update existing content
The is no denying the place of content in SEO. However, for the content to be relevant, it should be evergreen and up-to-date. Updating your content improves your website relevance, which increases the chance of ranking favourably.
Be sure to refresh your website content to encourage search engines to visit your website more often and reward you with a better ranking if your content is top-notch. According to a survey by Orbit Media, Bloggers who update old posts are 2.8x more likely to report strong results.
Some of the new content you can add are customer testimonials, videos and tutorials about your products and services, and news relating to your business and products. It also helps to review your website regularly and remove outdated content that is no longer relevant to keep things fresh.
Install an SSL Certificate
If two websites are similar in every other aspect, but one has an SSL certificate, the one has no SSL certificate then, Google will give preference the site which has an SSL certificate in SERPs rankings. Google gives the advantage to secure websites.
It is necessary to install an SSL certificate on the site to secure online transactions. Before installation, a site owner should choose a single domain like RapidSSL, Comodo SSL. wildcard SSL like Sectigo wildcard, Comodo essential SSL wildcard, or any multi domain SSL, etc.
Google wants its users to have the best browsing experience online. And part of that is knowing their confidential information is safe from malicious hackers. An SSL certificate is a surety that a website is secure and encrypted. It is a step towards utmost security, hence a significant ranking factor.
Find (and steal) Your Competitor’s Broken links
Broken link building is an excellent SEO tactic to boost your search engine optimization and improve your website rankings in SERPs. It entails looking for broken external links on high authority websites, contacting the owners and requesting them to link to material on your website instead.
Consider finding broken links pointing to your competition and stealing them for yourself. Analytic tools will help you identify broken links you can convert to backlinks for your website.
Improve your website loading speed
No one likes a slow website. Google knows that and uses the load speed of a website as a ranking factor. A website load speed refers to time a visitor waits for content to appear after landing.
Optimizing your page load time is non-negotiable if you want your website to appear at the top of Google search results. According to a report by Google, if a mobile site takes more than three seconds to load, 53% of mobile users will abandon the site.
Google’s PageSpeed Insights is a perfect place to gauge your website speed and see if you need to optimize your website further.
Here are some tips you could use to speed things in your website:
- Use a better host
- Remove unnecessary third-party scripts
- Compress your larger CSS, HTML and JavaScript files
- Optimize the videos and images on your website since they affect webpage load time and occupy significant space
- Make the most of browser caching
- Reduce redirects on your website to minimize the HTTP request-response cycle.
- Consider using a Content Distribution Network
Stay up to date with the latest SE techniques
SEO is nothing if not dynamic. The tricks that worked years ago may not do anything for your SEO today. Stay updated with algorithm updates to employ the prevailing best practices to boost your SEO and website ranking.
Research new keywords to use in your content to make it appealing to search engines and users. Update yourself on new technologies and search behaviours and optimize your website to reflect the trends.
Conclusion
High website ranking means more potential traffic, which further translates to higher chances of conversion. Use the tips above to improve your SEO and rank higher in relevant search engine results.
