How do I improve my website ranking in the search engine results page?

In 2019 on the first page of google the five first organic search results account for 67.60% of the total clicks, which means it’s now more important than ever to perform highly online. Google usage is on the rise, which means it's now just as important to be in the top 5 to survive.

SEO is often neglected by the majority of digital business owners due to distractions such as paid advertising through social media and google. If a business SEO strategy is consistent and relevant, it has the potential to drive a 14.6% conversion rate depending on the niche in comparison to the traditional style of marketing which delivers a 2.0% average conversion rate.

If done right, optimising your website for ranking in the SERPs, (search engine results page) gives you a far greater chance of competing in your market.

Ensure that the content on your website is relevant & consistent

Every piece of content/ copy on your website must be relevant to the topics and keywords that you wish to rank for, in addition to this, google rewards your website for consistently uploading high quality posts that are relevant to the search term. The more pieces of content that you have out there, the more chances that the target market has of joining your long list of customers.

Improve site authority via links

When it comes to SEO, in basic terms there are two types of links, and they are:

Internal linking is the process of linking to another page on your website, for example on our website in this blog post, you can see we have linked to another relevant blog of ours. This almost creates a network for SERPs web crawlers to find relevant content.

Back linking is the process of another website creating a link incoming to your website, if a website with lots of authority such as https://www.nytimes.com/ backlinks to your website, google would recognise you as a site with more authority.

Use the alt tags for search engines to find your content

Using alt tags not only enables visually impaired users and users who have restricted accessibility due to the web browser they are using but it helps the search engines rank your website, so don’t neglect this!

Invest in good website build quality

Google now looks at the way that a site has been built, the certifications of authority and the overall security when making a decision based on your ranking in the search engine results page. It uses factors such as whether or not the website is responsive on all mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets and also if there is a SSL (secure socket layer) installed on the webpage.

Have an SEO professional audit your website

Have professionals such as ourselves to conduct a full SEO report of your website, including a strategy going forward and how to improve traffic from your SEO efforts. If this sounds like something that would interest you then simply get involved today, fill out the contact form and our team will be in touch promptly.

Submit a sitemap to Google search console

A tip that not many small businesses know about, but a very effective method of increasing your websites compatibility with Google is submitting a sitemap to the Google search console.

Moz - An SEO tool designed to help out with seeing what your site’s domain authority is.

Ahrefs - An SEO tool designed specifically for backlinks.

Ubersuggest - An SEO tool which targets keywords and provides data such as search volume etc.

Domain authority is an arbitrary scale of how important, relevant and high quality your domain name is, it can also be affected by the date in which the domain was registered. It’s almost like a scale of importance, if your domain has a larger authority than another one, then you will be able to out-rank it in the search engines. It’s now quite easy to be able to identify domain and page authority through Moz.

Download the google chrome extension, ‘Moz’

Use this download link here.

Type in the search term and then click on the icon to the right of the URL.

In our example, I have searched for, ‘what is back linking in SEO’, I’ve attached an image below.

Scroll down to the first organic search result

Moz only works on the organic search rankings, and as you can see for our search term the domain authority otherwise known as DA is 71.

What this means is that your site should be +71 DA in order to compete with ranking for this post, Moz is an arbitrary scale, and therefore 71 is an estimation of the relevance and quality of the site in comparison to all others.

If you’re well read on the digital marketing aspect of running an online business, then you know that keyword research is one of the most important factors in determining what to find out what to rank for. It’s now easier than ever to pick and mix your favourite keywords with tools such as ubersuggest, which can be used for free.

Simply click the link, type in your domain name and it will automatically spit out keyword suggestions and lots of cool statistics about your site that you probably didn’t even know about.

On average it will take 6 - 12 months for your website to become number one in the SERPs, however it obviously depends on various factors such as the following:

Within the first 6-10 months of the content being published, the post should have received roughly 80% of its total traffic and it could take 12 months to reach the number one spot. This is completely depending on the site niche, competition and also volumes of traffic for the particular search term. Note that it’s possible to reach the number one spot in a matter of hours but it’s not very likely.

If you take into consideration all of the above and implement the tips, your site will be ranking on page 1 in no time.