Achieving a high Google search ranking can be a difficult venture, but an extremely important one no less. Google employs the help of millions of internet bots called ‘web crawlers’ that comb through pages looking for relevant, accessible, and updated information. During this process, certain aspects of your site are rated, and those ratings are used to come up with your Search Engine Optimization score. Optimizing your site and content is a great way to get a better SEO score and, in turn, a higher Google ranking. Your company, product, or service can be the first thing a new customer sees when searching for a solution to their specific problem. Here are some great ways for you to successfully navigate Google’s search ranking system.
Unique Titles, Descriptions and Content
This may seem like an obvious best practice, but it can be challenging to manage. It’s a good idea to avoid duplicating content across your site. Having unique content in every element of your website can help significantly boost your Google ranking. Pay attention to tags such as title, meta descriptions, product, image alt, and category. Publishing pages with a unique set of tags can become tricky when you’re an e-commerce site, but the benefits it provides are worth the effort. Consider combining pages with similar content or use a canonical page to define similar or duplicate pages.
Front-load Your Main Keyword
Front-loading your main keyword means to begin your title tag with it. The reason for this is that search engines pay attention to the terms you use in your title tag, and Google puts more emphasis on the first few words that show up, so front-landing your main keyword in your title provides a lot of benefit to your Google page ranking. The goal is to start your titles with your primary keyword, but sometimes it can be difficult – no worries – just use your keywords as soon as you can on your page.
Another thing to pay attention to is how many keywords you’re using within your title. Don’t load up your title with keywords. Google has been very specific with using only one main keyword in your title and optimizing your page around that one keyword. Google will take care of the rest.
Publish High-Quality Content
Publishing content is a big part of an effective digital marketing strategy. Publishing high-quality content once a week can gain your website favorable rankings from Google and other search engines. Having a small catalog of highly optimized and quality content is a thousand times better than having a massive library of low quality content. Consistently posting high-quality blogs, videos, and resources will result in better indexing of your website on search engines. Here are more materials on The Importance of Fresh Content.
Optimize Your Website
Your website’s loading speed, accessibility, and responsiveness are massive contributors to your SEO score. Google has included website speed in their ranking metrics for the past two decades and having a fast-loading website is key to ranking high. If your site is running slow, there are few things you can do to speed it up:
- Optimize images before uploading to your website
- Avoid any redirects when possible
- Use Google’s Lighthouse page scanner to gather information on your site’s slower elements
- Delete and clean any unused elements, pages, or plugins
If you’ve looked at any previous optimization processes and are still experiencing slow load speeds, then it may be time for a website update. Check out one of our recent blogs on How to Know When it’s Time for a Website Update.
Another part of optimizing your website is making sure your pages and content are accessible to users with disabilities and are responsive to mobile users. With U.S. customers spending on average three hours on a mobile device, it’s safe to say a good chunk of your website visitors are reaching your site on a small screen. Having a site that sizes correctly and optimized for those smaller screens is vitally essential to your digital marketing and SEO rankings. Without responsive design, users looking at your site can experience hard to read text, broken elements, and odd spacing/layout. Search engine web crawlers experience the same issues and provide a score accordingly.
Search Engine Optimization is a large, but vital task for a company to take on. If you feel you need assistance or have questions on how to optimize your website and its content better, feel free to reach out to our marketing and web design specialists.