Once you launch your online website, the next thing to consider is that from where your website traffic is coming. If you are seeking to get traffic from search engines (organic traffic), it’s important to shift your focus on search engine optimization (SEO).
By definition, SEO is a set of techniques, tools, and strategies that help brands get tons of and targeted organic traffic from search engines. Ranking in top SERPs becomes crucial when you know that the top result on Google has a 33% chance of getting clicked.
The reason why your nearest competitors are ranking higher and getting decent traffic on similar keywords is that they have invested time, effort and resources to improve their SEO.
If you have missed out big in terms of SEO or don’t know how to push forward, here are few things you can do to boost your website ranking in Google search.
1: Page Loading Speed
Your page speed is an important ranking factor. Google considers it quite seriously. If your website fails to comply with the page load algorithm, it could harm your ranking. Slow-loading websites also hurts your website’s overall engagement with visitors that result in a severe ranking drop.
Research shows 40% of visitors will abandon websites if the page takes longer than 3 seconds to load. And most of the abandoned visitors never return to the website. People love to stick to fast loading, responsive pages and keep coming back. This is therefore important to optimize your website both for page speed and server response time.
2: High-Quality Content
Your website content is the most important element of your website. It gives users a reason to come back or skip. To receive huge traffic on your website you need to produce quality content that can deliver value to readers. The content should be of high quality, genuine and relevant to the users. Interesting content engages readers. It eventually increases the overall time people spend on your website per visit. Exceptional and evergreen content improves the engagement rate on your website. If you keep producing high quality and value added content, it will increase the chances of your website being bookmarked by the readers.
3: Optimize Your Post/page Images:
Visual elements like images complement your websites well. However, it’s important that these images should be optimized properly for improved ranking. Image optimization boosts your page rankings. Images should be optimized to reduce its file size. Huge images and images with unsupported file formats can slow your page loading time which hurts ranking.
Resize your post images before using them. Name them accordingly using keywords in the name. Use keywords in the title and caption of your images.
4: Use Heading Tags Properly
From H1 to H6, headings play a significant role in website rankings. They are a great way to help websites, accelerate their user experience by breaking up the content in parts and making it easier to read. A page filled with plentiful of the content without headings looks awkward and disengage readers. It will hurt your SEO rankings. If you’re not using heading tags, you’re missing out ranking opportunity.
5: Start Writing Blogs
Guest blogs are the finest way to generate user traffic and leads. Through guest posts, tons of user-centric, fresh and updated content is produced that drive people to your website. It directly impacts SEO rankings since the user experience is an important ranking signal.
By writing and publishing quality blog posts you can create an ardent follower base of ardent readers. It will get you lots of traffic to your website in return on a regular basis. While producing blogs, give due weight to other elements such as links, increased readability and keywords also. They boost the power of your blog posts.
6: Use Outbound Links:
External outbound links help you in two ways. One, they can be used to validate claims made in the blog post and two, provide readers more useful related resources they can check out. Make sure that the claims made and resources offered are linked to trustworthy and authoritative sources. While using outbound hyperlinks to those websites, you must ensure that all the information is recent and updated.
7: Add Visual Elements:
When it’s about expressing emotions and thoughts, sometimes you may go beyond the text. In addition to the text, you can add visual elements to improve your SEO ranking. Add infographic, audio, video, and slideshows to improve the user experience. Multimedia elements boost the level of engagement manifold as they can dramatically improve the amount of time someone spends on your website.
8: Fix Broken Links:
Broken links appear when a linked page is permanently deleted or moved for any reason or the other. It’s not very frequently if you link up to authority sites. Broken links turn, the user experience soars if they appear anywhere on the website. Pages navigating to dead websites or 404 pages can hit your SEO rankings badly as Google considers poor user experience a ranking bottleneck.
The recommendation would be to use a broken link checker tool. Such tools notify and fix broken links as soon they appear. Anytime a link goes dead, you’ll be notified via an email so you can replace it immediately.
9: Mobile Responsive Website
When more than 50% of the searches are made through mobile, you must have a website that’s responsive. A responsive website is one that offers clutter-free user experience irrespective of the screen size it’s opened at. Recently, Google made significant changes in its mobile algorithm and put forward steps to recognize the mobile usability of a website.
Now, Google is severely punishing non-responsive websites with drop-in ranking traffic. Therefore, if you haven’t yet optimized your website for mobile users, you are putting your website on the back burner. It’ll disturb the user experience and adversely affect your ranking and revenue streams.
