Google uses more than 200 ranking signals, such as the quality of your page, how useful it has been to past visitors, and if it matches the searcher’s intent, to decide which pages show up at the top of the Google search results for any given search term.
This guide will focus on Google because it is the most popular search engine, but algorithms for other search engines, like Bing, are similar. If you make good content for Google search and make it to the first page, you’ll probably do well in other search engines as well.
SEO is Key
Improving your onsite SEO is a must if you want your website to show up on the first page of search results. Once you have this foundation in place, your other strategies will work better, bringing you more search traffic, leads, and sales.
The words “search engine optimisation” sound scary and hard to understand, but they’re not. It takes time to see results, but those results can help your business make money.
Optimise for Mobile over Desktop
At Chesterfield Website Design, we talk a lot about this, but if you don’t have a well-optimised mobile site, you’re not only missing out on traffic but also putting your Google ranking at risk.
If mobile visitors to your site have a bad time because your site isn’t mobile-friendly, they’ll go back to the search results and find a site that’s easier to use. Google will see this as a “bounce” and think that your site isn’t very helpful if people don’t stay there for long.
Along with this, more than half of all website traffic came from mobile devices. Do you really want to miss out on this much mobile traffic?
Google has been using “mobile-first indexing” for the past few years. This means that when they crawl your site to figure out where it should rank, they look at the mobile version first. If your mobile site isn’t good enough, you might get in trouble.
Page and Site Speed
People are used to websites taking almost no time to load. No longer do you have to wait for your dial-up to start working and wait 10 minutes for a website to load.
If your site takes more than a few seconds to load, your visitor has probably already gone back to Google to look for a faster site. Don’t lose a new customer because your site is too slow.
Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool can be used to check the speed of both your desktop and mobile sites. If your website is a little slower than others but converts well, don’t feel like you have to get rid of a lot of great content to make it faster.
Optimise for Your Keywords
It’s important for your website to have keywords. Each page on your website should be optimised for a certain keyword or phrase. This will help Google figure out which pages of your site are related to those keywords, so they can show the right pages to people searching online for terms related to your business.
Using an estate agent as an example, if you offer services for both people who want to buy houses and people who want to rent them, you will want to have pages on your site that are focused on each of those keywords. If you try to put all of your information on one page and don’t have separate pages for your most important keywords, your page may not rank as well.
This is because of a number of things, but the main ones are the searcher’s intent and the user’s experience.
If someone searches for “houses to rent in Chesterfield” and ends up on a page about buying houses, they may decide that the page is not for them and leave.
Google will see that they didn’t stay on your site for long and assume that they didn’t like what they saw. If they had been given a page that was clear about how it related to their search, they might have stayed longer.
Google Ads and PPC
If you have a PPC budget and want to rank on the first page for a high-volume search term, local Google Ads may be a good way to go.
It gives you a better chance of being at the top of searches with a lot of competition and often gives you results faster than organic search, but it costs money. It can be a great way for small and new businesses to get new customers if they haven’t been able to rank well for search queries yet.
There are many different kinds of ads that can show up on Google Search, but text ads and shopping ads are the most common. These can be found because the words “Ad” are in bold next to the paid search results.
Our Conclusion
Getting to the top of Google is no easy task, and it can be even harder depending on your niche and industry competition. Optimising your website will help improve the user experience and the technical worthiness of your site to Google – both key features in improving your page rankings.
If you still need a hand with optimising and ranking your website, get in touch. We’re experts at local SEO and can help rank your local business higher on Google.