A responsive website that is fully optimised is no longer an added advantage but a must-have for any business that wants to generate sales online. Already, we have discussed three ways that Google refines queries to match searchers’ intent.
Making sure that your website content matches the target audience’s needs will increase its visibility in SERPs. Your website doesn’t have to be the first in the results page, research shows that the third result gets 18.6% of all clicks.
Photo Credit: Backlinko.com
Here are 11 no-fail tips on how to improve your website visibility on Google search results pages.
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Enable Google to Crawl your Web Pages Easily
Google only displays sites or pages that it has crawled and indexed in SERPs for certain search queries. As a result, the search engine bots continuously crawl the web to add new posts and pages to its database.
Enhance your website to make it easy for the bots to crawl it. It will greatly improve your site visibility and discoverability for various target keywords and phrases. The faster it can crawl the pages, the quicker it will index and display them for related searches.
Here are three ways of making your site more crawlable.
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- Carry out technical SEO Audit: The audit will pinpoint issues with the coding and other technical aspects of the website that could be hindering bots from properly indexing the pages.
- Internal Linking: Creating a robust internal linking structure will help the bots understand your site architecture. It will also enable it to understand what the site is all about.
- Usage of Keywords: Keyword is the pillar of any SEO strategy. Make sure that you include the target keywords in the content and the page’s meta title, meta description, image alt text, and URL.
The technical SEO audit report often contains complex terminologies that may be difficult to understand if you are not an SEO expert. It’s, therefore, recommendable to hire an SEO agency that is reputable to do the audit and apply the recommendations to avoid ruining the website.
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Use Target Keywords to Optimise Content
You need to understand that Google bots can’t notice good websites, but they can differentiate between good and bad websites based on the quality of content and keywords used.
Over the years, the search engine has introduced algorithm updates meant to ensure that the SERPs match the searcher’s intent. Remember to include the target keywords even as you strive to create top-notch content for every page and blog post.
Keywords should also be used in ads, especially if you plan to run a Google Ads campaign. Every page should be optimised using a particular keyword. Therefore, you need to conduct in-depth keyword research to find the most relevant keywords with high search volume and low competition.
Keyword stuffing is now a blackhat strategy that will get your website penalised. Use the keyword sparingly and include question-based queries to optimise the content for voice search.
Concisely, the more targeted and specific a page is to a particular topic, the higher the chances of getting ranked on the first page of Google search results for the keyword.
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Get your Business Listed on Multiple Online Directories
Google often fetches information from online directories when users search for specific information using keywords or brand names. Based on this fact, it’s recommendable to get your business listed on multiple online directories. Ensure that the information you submit to the directories is consistent and accurate to avoid misleading the target customers.
For example, the logo, business name, and NPA should be the same on all the directories. If you happen to change the logo or any other aspect of your business, make sure that you update the citations. Confirm that the website URL works properly to avoid sending prospects to the wrong site or a 404 page.
Create a Google My Business Profile and optimise it fully to inform Google about your business. Be sure to enhance your profile by including customer testimonials and quality photos of your team or products. Such additional information will give prospects a clearer perspective of your brand and encourage them to do business with you.
The point is; the more places your business is listed, the more visible you will be in SERPs. Some of the top directories today are:
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- Yelp
- CitySearch
- Manta
- Yellowpages.com
- Angie’s List
- Foursquare and the list is endless
If possible, focus more on the industry and country-specific directories to get qualified leads and traffic. It’s also important to note that the links posted in the directories are actually backlinks that will help your site rank better.
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Get Verified by Google
As mentioned earlier, Google crawls and indexes pages depending on the content’s quality and ease of interpreting. One way of enabling this search engine to crawl the pages more efficiently is by submitting your business details to Google Maps and creating a Google My Business profile.
Claiming your Google My Business will give the search engines more details about your brand, such as its location and services offered. Going the extra mile to submit its address to Google Maps will make your website visible on local search results pages.
Google will send a verification code via the mail address you provided when registering to confirm your GMB profile. Therefore, it’s imperative to ensure that every detail is accurate to get verified fast. Here is an article we recently wrote on leveraging Google My Business.
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Create Compelling Titles and Optimise Description Tags
A blog post with awesome content may fail to get organic traffic from search engines merely because it doesn’t have a compelling title. The title helps users decide whether to click on a particular title displayed in SERPs or ignore it and move on to the next one.
Photo Credit: Backlinko.com
When creating blog posts, take the time to create compelling titles that resonate with the content discussed in the article. The title will help you stand out from the mammoth of similar posts displayed for the target keywords.
Aim to get noticed, not just identifiable on the search engine results page. However, it would help if you aimed to strike a balance between writing a compelling title and overpromising.
Users can tell whether a title is genuine or just created to act as a clickbait. Here are three examples of titles to give you a hint on creating the best titles for your blog posts.
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- Not Compelling: Benefits of Working Out Outdoors
- Too Extreme: Why Working Outdoors is the Only Way to Lose Weight
- Compelling: 10 Reasons You Should Consider Working Outdoors
Notice the difference between the three titles. The first one is not compelling as its generic and doesn’t really intrigue the reader, even though it offers insight into the blog post. The second title is too persuasive, while the third title is balanced.
Your goal should be to create clear and captivating titles that matches the content in the blog posts.
While at it, check the quality and relevance of the description tags. Today, organic click-through rate is a ranking factor that Google uses to determine the user-friendliness of a page. In a nutshell, the higher the CTR, the higher the site will rank in SERPs.
The position of your website in SERPs has a direct impact on CTR, with the top-ranked websites receiving the largest portion of CTR. Nonetheless, you can rival the top sites by writing compelling meta descriptions.
The meta description should resonate with the content on the post or page and complement the SEO title. Also, include the target keyword in this section to tell Google that your blog matches the search intent who uses the keyword. Carry out A/B tests to know which meta description writing style, format, and keywords best suits your niche.
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Confirm Your Site is Mobile-Friendly
Mobile-friendliness is a ranking factor, and Google downranks any website that is not optimised for mobile users. The mobile-friendly update was informed by the fact that most people use their smartphones to search for information instead of desktop.
There are many tools you can use to check if all your website pages are mobile-friendly. Still, we recommend the Google official mobile-friendly test tool. Google Search Console can also pinpoint mobile-related issues that need to be resolved.
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Focus on Creating More Quality Backlinks
A decade ago, sites would rank high for having backlinks from sites unrelated to their niches. Google soon got wind of the tactic and changed the algorithm to focus only on links from relevant sites.
For example, if you run a dental clinic, your website will benefit more if you get links from authority blogs and websites in the dental industry. Backlinks from unrelated sites such as software development blogs will not impact your site SEO.
Concisely, having many quality backlinks will boost your site ranking, and with a high ranking comes more visibility and organic traffic from SERPs.
Note that there are websites that will link to your blogs without seeking your consent. Woe onto you if the sites are penalised by Google for malicious activities such as hacking and phishing. Links from gambling and nudity websites can also affect your site’s credibility and ranking.
Therefore, it’s recommendable to carry out a regular backlink profile to know which sites link to you. Request sites with a poor domain authority or have a bad reputation to remove the links. Go ahead and submit a disavow list to Google if the web admins of the said websites fail to comply with your request.
. Edu and. Gov links can also enhance your backlink profile. However, you should use them well to get the best results. Here is our guide on using the two types of links to boost site ranking and visibility in SERPs.
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Optimise Website Content for Dwell Time
Nowadays, Google is focused on providing the most accurate results to searchers. It ranks website pages that people love at the top, and one of the factors it uses to determine if a site should get a top spot is Dwell Time.
Photo Credit: Backlinko.com
Dwell Time is one of the signals that this search engine uses to determine the quality of user experience a website offers to visitors. This metric also signals how well the content matches the searcher’s intent.
Obviously, if the content is great and matches the audience’s needs, they will spend more time on the page. Google takes note the number of people who click on a result and visit the website but soon after go back to the SERPs to search for a better website.
If most users leave the site ranked #1 to spend more time on site ranked #2, it means that the content on the second website is more valuable, and the page is well-designed.
Note that Dwell time is different from bounce rate even though both give Google an idea of the quality of content and user-friendliness of a website page.
Bounce rate refers to the percentage of people who visit a page but soon after clicking the back button without interacting with the page in any way.
To date, search engines haven’t openly confirmed that they use dwell time to rank websites, but we know it’s an important signal that can make or break your website.
Here are tested, and proven ways of improving your website dwell time.
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- Apply the PPT Formula
If you want visitors to stick to your website longer, you need to grasp and retain their attention immediately after landing on your website. The PPT formula will help you achieve that goal by redefining how you create and structure website content.
The first P stands for Preview. This is a brief of what the post or page is all about, and it’s at the top section. Craft it well to convince the visitors that the content matches their needs and is exactly what they are looking for.
The second P stands for Proof. Explain to them or convince them that the content will amicably help them solve their problem. Use graphics and statistics to show that your content is legit, accurate, and trustworthy.
The T stands for Transition. The reader has gone through the post and is ready to take the desired action at this stage. Include a compelling CTA in this section. You can use buttons, pop-up or display a short form.
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- Consider Embedding Videos
Embedded videos have the potential to increase web page dwell time significantly. For example, the Wistia blog recently increased dwell time by 260% by just adding a video to one of their blog posts.
There are different ways of doing this, but the best and most recommended way is by replacing content with video. With most people preferring watching videos to reading text, you can be sure that the video will grasp the visitors’ attention and keep them on-page for minutes as they watch the video.
Ensure that the video is packed with valuable information; if not, they will close the page and go back to the SERPs to search for a site with better content. Distribute the video on social media and YouTube to increase views and exposure.
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- Create Longer Content
A majority of the blog posts listed on the first page of Google are at least 1,800 words long. The short articles barely make it to this page, as Google prefers long-form content.
Longer articles are detailed and offer users more value than conventional short articles. It also takes more time to read a 3,000-word article than a 500-word article.
Therefore, publishing longer articles will increase your site ranking and enhance dwell time as visitors will spend more time reading the content.
As a result, you will get more opportunities to convince the visitors to place an order, contact the support team or even subscribe to your email list.
However, lengthy content with generic content won’t make the cut. The article should be packed with valuable information that the web visitors will enjoy reading and sharing with others online. Take time to research the topic before writing the content to get the most results.
Add more weight and relevance to the content by citing many relevant case studies and experiments. Strive to provide as many actionable strategies and hacks as possible to satisfy the visitors’ thirst for accurate information.
A picture is worth a thousand words – so go ahead and include visuals and graphics such as infographics to help the readers better understand the content.
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- Optimise Page Speed
A slow-loading page is a major turn-off to most users. Google recently confirmed that page speed is a ranking factor. Ensure that your website pages load fast to prevent losing traffic to your competitors. Use Google PageSpeed Insights to run tests on your website.
One way of increasing page speed is by compressing videos and images. Check the number of views on the videos or how people interact with the images. Delete the ones that are “stale” to increase the page’s speed.
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Work on Pages Ranked on Page 2
Most Google users don’t bother to go beyond the first page. Research shows that only 1% visit those sites. Companies whose websites are ranked on this page struggle to get organic traffic, which hurts their profitability significantly.
Photo Credit: Backlinko.com
The best and only way of increasing your site visibility if it’s ranked on this page is by re-optimising the content and design. Use Google Search Console to know the keywords you’re currently ranking for and then find ways to improve the page SEO.
Google likely ranked it there because the content does not match the searchers’ intent. In that case, carry out new keyword research and check what the competitors ranked on the first page are doing differently.
If the content is thin, research to find content, strategies, case studies, and examples more comprehensive. The additional content doesn’t necessarily have to be text; it can be videos, charts, or even screenshots related to the topic.
The visuals will make the page more interactive and impressive to search engines and users. Monitor the results achieved after optimising the page, and if the strategies work, proceed to improve the other pages.
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Optimise Content Using LSI Keywords
A lot has been said about optimising content using target keywords and question-based queries for voice search. While doing that will help increase the content’s visibility in SERPs, you need to go further and include LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords in your content.
These keywords will help Google better interpret your page and display it for the right keyword phrases. Finding LSI keywords is utterly easy; all you have to do is search for any of your target keywords in Google Images.
The results are tags/words that the Google algorithm considers tied or related to the target keyword. Using the terms in the content will tell Google that the content is relevant to the keyword, thereby increasing its chances of being listed on the first page whenever someone uses the keyword.
Some of the tags will seem off or won’t make sense for your article. Desist from making your article sound robotic, only use keywords that naturally fit the content. Forcing keywords will also make it difficult for the reader to understand the content.
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Carry Out an SEO Website Audit
If your site was initially ranked highly in SERPs, but its position has dropped over the last couple of weeks, there is a high likelihood that there are technical SEO issues need to be fixed. Maybe, Google cannot crawl and index the new pages or blog posts due to coding errors or other related challenges.
An SEO website audit will identify these issues and recommend the right action to remedy the situation. Note that even if you have stellar content and thousands of quality backlinks, a simple technical issue can negatively affect your site ranking and visibility.
Use MediaOne Marketing SEO audit tool to get a detailed website report. Don’t implement the recommendations yourself unless you have the required expertise. If not, hire a professional SEO agency to do it. The team will run tests after fixing the issues to ensure that the site is fully functional again and ranking better.
