With a little time, patience, and strategy you can improve your position on the SERP (search engine results page) by implementing a few small changes.
We gathered a list of our favorite Google ranking tips and hacks to help you pump up your SEO and see more, ready to buy traffic on your site.
Whether you consider yourself to be “tech-savvy” or not, the following Google ranking tips will help boost your SEO, create a better user experience and increase engagement with your brand.
1. Optimize Your User Experience
You could have the best-looking website in the world, but if you don’t have it set up for the optimal user experience, no one will stay around long enough to hear what you have to say and see what you have to offer.
Google looks at your website visits, time on site, pages per session, and bounce rate when they’re deciding who gets to the top of the SERP. All four of these specific factors are directly related to the user experience on your website.
The premise of a user-friendly website is simple: if your website is easy to read, simple to navigate (on mobile, too!), and offers valuable, intriguing information, you’ll get more traffic and keep them there which will improve your SEO.
2. Improve Your Site Speed
This tip goes right along with user experience—if your site is slow, users will click off it before your page even loads. And today, mobile page speed is a major Google ranking factor. So, having a fast, responsive website is beneficial from both an SEO standpoint and for user experience.
3. Write Awesome, SEO Focused Content
You’ve probably heard the saying “content is king” and it’s still as relevant as ever. High-quality content on your website is one of the best ways to increase traffic, build trust, and improve your search rankings.
To write killer website content, you need to put yourself in the shoes of your target audience: Who are they? What do they need? What problems do they need solving? What are their pain points?
Then, you need to write keyword-rich content (without being keyword-stuffed!), grammatically correct, mobile-optimized, and clearly and simply written. Additionally, it’s beneficial to include links to internal and external content.
4. Use “H” Tags
H-tags or header tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.) make your content more readable and easier to understand for both Google and humans alike. In fact, there’s a strong correlation between h-tag usage and Google rankings.
H-tags break your content up and highlight your keywords. No one wants to read a solid wall of text, h-tags and short paragraphs make your content easy to scan and read.
No idea what H-tags are or how to utilize them? This breaks it down!
5. Implement a Backlink Strategy
You won’t find your site at the top of the SERP without backlinks, or links from other sites back to yours. This is another heavily weighted Google ranking factor.
High-quality, relevant incoming links to your site show that your site is trusted and seen as an authority, which sends a signal to Google that it should be moved up in the rankings.
There are dozens of ways to obtain backlinks to boost your SEO. Guest blogging, HARO, and podcasting are a few ideas that can help you get high-quality links while simultaneously increasing your brand exposure and expanding your audience.
Check out my "Link Building Ideas" Post for even more ideas!
6. Fix Any Broken Links
While it’s essential to have links on your website to establish the authority of your site, some links may be broken and will bring up a “404 error” which can hurt both your search rank and your user experience.
A broken link is a link on a web page that no longer works because the website is encountering some kind of problem, the URL was entered incorrectly, etc. There are SEO tools out there that you can use to check your site for broken links. Once you find them it’s usually fairly easy to fix them or get rid of them so that they don’t hinder your SEO efforts.
7. Enhance Your Images
If you’re just sticking any old image on your site without taking paying any attention to its size, filenames, and alt text—you’re doing yourself a huge disservice.
Not only will un-optimized images not improve your SEO, but it’ll also slow down your site speed thanks to their size. You must make sure your images are compressed, have descriptive file names, and alt text. With image optimization, your site can remain lightning fast and it’s an easy way to give your SEO a little boost.
Want more details on this? Check this out!
8. Optimize Your Site For Local Search
Today, more people than ever are using their smartphones to search for businesses “near me.” To improve your chances of having your business show up in searches local to you, you need to make sure you claim your Google My Business listing and fully optimize it.
Additionally, it’s helpful to provide relevant content in Google Posts, start racking up some online reviews and get your business listed in local directories. All of these will help improve your local search ranking, which is becoming more important than ever.
Use the above Google ranking tips to jumpstart your SEO efforts and we promise, you’ll start to see improvements. It’s important to keep in mind that SEO is a slow-moving process—you can’t reach page one overnight!
If you understand what Google values when it determines which sites deserve a top spot, you can work to implement those factors into your website as you build.
If the thought of doing this all on your own feels overwhelming, we can help! We offer a comprehensive SEO audit package that will give you the exact roadmap to ranking your website.