Want to boost your website’s online visibility and increase your conversion rate? If yes, you need to focus on improving your site’s search ranking. Studies show that 75% of users do not scroll past the first page of search results, making SEO a necessity rather than an option. Moreover, websites that appear on the first page of Google receive 95% of total search traffic.
These figures show that if your website isn’t ranking on the search engine’s first page, you could miss out a lot on potential traffic and revenue. So, how to make your website stand out to improve its rank and draw in more visitors? This article discusses some practical steps for website ranking.
Ranking Your Website: Exploring 8 Essential Steps
If you are a marketing expert, you will know the significance of SEO in achieving higher site ranking in the search results. Wondering how to handle the intricacies of SEO and boost your site’s search ranking? Just follow these eight steps for website ranking:
- Conduct Through Keyword Research
Your first step for website ranking is to conduct keyword research, which involves identifying and analyzing the words and phrases that your target audience uses when looking for your products, content, or services.
By understanding these search terms, you will be able to understand your potential customers’ needs and intent as well as opportunities and competition in your industry.
Follow these tips to identify relevant keywords:
- Look for keywords with substantial volume but low competition.
- Identify keywords that align closely with your niche.
- Use longer, more specific phrases.
- Optimize Your Website’s On-page SEO
Wondering what is on-page SEO optimization? It’s all about optimizing several SEO elements on your website to accelerate search engine ranking and user experience. Make sure your website has:
- Unique, compelling, and keyword-optimized meta titles and descriptions
- Headers and subheaders (H1, H2, H3 tags)
- Clean and descriptive URL structure
- Alt-text for images
- Internal links bridge varied web pages on your website.
- Optimize Your Site Speed
You will be shocked to know that a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load loses 53% of mobile visitors. As a business owner, you can’t afford to miss out on such a vast customer base.
Does your website take time to load? If so, measure its current speed and identify areas for improvement, such as optimizing videos and images, minimizing HTTP requests, etc. The faster your website loads, the better experience you can guarantee to your visitors, helping you achieve a better rank.
- Curate High-Quality, Engaging Content
Always remember that content is the most important component of your site, particularly in terms of SEO. High-quality, relevant, and educational content will help draw visitors, hold their attention, and rank your site higher in search results. Even research shows that websites with blogs generate 67% more leads than those without.
You should diversify your content by incorporating various formats, from blogs and articles to videos and case studies. In addition, make sure it’s engaging, valuable, and regularly updated.
- Build a Strong Backlink Profile
Backlinks, or inbound links, from reputable sites, can help boost your website’s credibility and authority. When you secure these links from other genuine websites, it indicates to search engines that your site content is informative and trustworthy, and, thus, shown higher in the SERPs.
To gain backlinks of high quality:
- Guest posts on authoritative websites
- Create shareable infographics and reports
- Get mentions from industry influencers
- Practice broken link-building
- Optimize for Mobile-Friendliness
With over 60% of Google searches coming from mobile devices, having a mobile-friendly website has become essential to provide a consistent user experience and increase your search engine rankings.
To optimize your site for mobile-friendliness, you should make sure your website is:
- Responsive on all screen sizes
- Free from intrusive pop-ups
- Easy to navigate
- Set Up Google Analytics and Search Console
Besides improving all vital elements of your website, you should also know how your website is actually performing. One of the most important steps for website ranking is monitoring and evaluating your site’s performance.
To determine your site’s performance and make data-driven decisions, you should set up and effectively use Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Doing so will help you track key performance metrics of your site, such as traffic sources, bounce rate, user behavior, keyword performance, etc.
- Enhance Technical SEO
For your site to appear on the first page of search results, it needs to be crawled and indexed by search engines. How to get search engines to crawl your site? It’s by improving your site’s technical SEO.
Here outlined are some elements focusing on which can help optimize your website’s technical SEO:
- Repairing broken links
- Maintaining a clear, logical site hierarchy
- XML sitemaps and robots.txt files
- Ensuring HTTPS security
Conclusion
You have designed an attractive website but it’s not mobile-friendly or optimised for technical SEO. Such a website is of no use and can’t secure a good ranking. Following these eight steps for website ranking will help optimized your site, improve its online visibility, and drive quality leads. Looking for SEO experts? At Raprisa, our experts know how to tweak your website to improve its search ranking!
