Tips to increase your SEO ranking in 2020
Having a live website? Great! It’s good that you have a website for your business that people can look into your products and services. But it doesn’t work just like that. Simply having a website doesn’t guarantee proper traffic, is it?
Now, think about what you usually do when you want to look up something. You google it, right? A vast majority of internet users look up websites through search engines. 93% of internet experiences start with a search engine.
That means that your “potential” customers are doing the same. That’s why organic search traffic needs to be a top priority for businesses.
So, how can we improve one’s SEO rankings in 2020? With the changes in Google’s search algorithm, it’s best if you understand every ins and outs of it. Then you can make changes to your website by launching specific SEO strategies to get the best results.
Now, how important it is for a website to have a high rank in search engines?
The higher your ranking is in the search engines, the more traffic you get from users. 75% of all clicks go to the first page in Google search, and 33% of all traffic goes to top search results. Meaning if you’re in the top results, there’s a high chance that people can see your page as an option.
The importance of high ranking SEO is obvious, now let me tell you 5 ways to improve your SEO ranking immediately.
1. Improve Website Loading Speed
“An important metric that almost every website is failing on is site speed,” says Ryan Johnson of Critical Mass. “Now that Google indexes using a mobile-first approach, the speed at which the mobile version of your website loads is a factor in rankings.”
Loading speed is crucial since they affect the bounce rates and other metrics of a site. Pages that at the top of the first page tend to load faster than those at the bottom of it, according to a study by Neil Patel.
Users’ experience on your site plays a huge part in the ranking of that site. If your website loads too slowly, it will affect users’ decision to stay on it any longer.
SO, what you need to do is to speed up your website to have a higher ranking on search engines.
You can get an insight into how fast your site loads by using Google’s PageSpeed Insights. It can also point out which factors are slowing down the website.
“A good rule of thumb is to have a page load within 5 seconds or less,” says Suddora’s Joe Flanagan. “Google says two seconds is the threshold for e-commerce website acceptability.”
Google deems those with faster loading speed high-quality websites since users spend a lot more time on them than click back immediately. As a result, Google boosts those rankings to send more people to that site.
2. Increase Blogging Frequency
The blog is the backbone of your website’s long-term SEO strategies. If you don’t have a blog right now, start making one!
Blogging is an effective way to generate leads to your website. Moreover, it’s a tool for you to publish long-form content on your website.
Based on the recent study from Orbit Media, 63% of bloggers who publish content on a daily basis report strong results. This compares to just 32% of bloggers who publish content weekly, and 18% who publish blogs monthly. This means that the more often you post, the better off you’ll be.
Attio’s Alex Vale recommends measuring the length of your content. This is important, Vale says, because “articles with over 1,000 words perform significantly better than shorter articles in Google’s current algorithm.”
It’s not because of the length of the articles that Google decides to give them higher ranking, but the length of a 1000+-word article does appeal to search engine crawlers.
In fact, according to the study, 55% of bloggers of more than 2000-word articles reported success.
By increasing word-length for the articles, your website now has a higher chance to appear on top of the search, which then leads to…
3. Improve Dwell Time
Dwell time is the amount of time that people spend on a page after arriving from the search and before clicking back to the search engine.
“Dwell time plays a big part in helping RankBrain understand which results to rank higher than others,” says Jonathan Gorham of Engine Scout Digital Marketing. “Generally, higher dwell times suggest that a result offers more value than other, similar pages in the same search results.”
If you have low dwell times on your site, which means people bounce back from your page too quickly, Google understands that users’ experience is not satisfying. From that, your ranking on search engines will be lowered.
Now, how can you improve dwell time for your website?
Increase word-length for your articles is one way. The more time users spend on reading the articles, the higher your site’s dwell times can be.
Another way is to embed your videos onto your page.
According to this study, pages with video had an 11.2% better bounce rate than pages without a video.
A wall-of-text article? Too boring. A few pictures here and there? Nah. How about something new, like videos? Instead of keeping your users to just words and pictures, explaining concepts and theories through videos maybe a good idea. It’s fresh, and catchy to the eyes. People don’t have to read too many words. They can listen to it with a visual explanation now.
4. Target keywords people are searching for
Understanding your target demographic is a must in any marketing strategy. You have to know what they need, how they think, and what they search. That way, you can utilize specific key terms relating to both your business and your target audience to your page.
Using any SEO tools that are familiar to you, for example from ours is SpyFu, to find a list of relevant and high-volume target keywords.
However, considering your SEO KPIs, have you thought of long-tail keywords? Long-tail keywords are more specific, which leads to long-term SEO values.
For example, when looking up “bookkeeping”, there will be 37,100,000 results. But, if you search for more specific keywords, like “Bookkeeping services Irvine”, there’re 14,400,400. Still a lot of results, but compared to when you search for only one keyword, it’s 1.5 times smaller.
The competition for these keywords is lower, but it brings a higher probability of conversion.
5. Eliminate Dead Links
Aside from analyzing the content and keywords on any given page, Google also looks into your links.
A dead or broken link on your website can literally make your ranking suffer.
Why? Because it causes bad experiences for users. No one wants to click on a link on your site then to be led to a 404 error page. This can happen if you reconstruct your page without checking up to see if you’ve updated any other links.
Additionally, if you link out to a different page, there’s a high chance that the link is dead if that website isn’t an authority one.
It’s important to check up every once in a while to see if any links on your page aren’t working anymore. However, checking these up may take a longer time than necessary.
So, how can you keep it up? The website Dead link checker is a favorite auditing tool for many web developers since it can check up not only the entire site at once but also a single page at a time. It’s completely free, which is also a plus.
Keeping track of your links and making sure they’re in working orders is a must to avoid your website from the pitfall of Google’s ranking algorithm.
TO END THIS HERE…
I hope you know that SEO is a long-term game, but by utilizing these methods first, it can improve your website’s Google ranking tremendously.
Spend some time on each method first to see what can be the problems with your page, then you can implement them to your future SEO strategies. When implemented correctly, they will help land your website at the highest of search results. The first step is an SEO audit to know where you currently are and what you can do to improve.
If you still don’t know where to start or you feel overwhelmed with all these information, contact us at Irvine Marketing Services so we can help you to get the best results out of your business’ digital marketing plans.
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