How do you increase your Google ranking? Work on the five things Google actually reads: know exactly who is already ranking for your keywords, build a homepage that presents your whole business cleanly and links to every subsidiary page, write a meta description that earns the click, keep every title tag between 40 and 60 characters with the focus keyword inside it, and then publish SEO friendly content consistently for months rather than weeks. Realistically that means 4 to 5 months for a low to medium competition long tail keyword, and 6 months to a year for a popular primary keyword. There is no shortcut. There is only the right work, done in the right order.
Why does a great website still fail without SEO?
It is common knowledge that to build a solid online business and increase your Google ranking, you need to have a wonderful website. What people forget is that a good website is good for nothing if it does not rank well on the search engine result page, the SERP. Nobody sees the site you spent months building if it sits on page four.
A website has to be search engine optimised to earn a better ranking. Search engine optimisation involves many different tips and tricks that make your website accessible to more people, and you would be surprised how simple most of them are.
There are many ways to search engine optimise a website. In today’s blog we are covering 5 SEO friendly practices for Google that can carry your website to the top of the result page. For more SEO tips and blogs, check out onlinereputationmanage.com.
To be upfront about it: the practices below are built for the Google search engine. They will not necessarily work the same way on alternative search engines like Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo, which weigh signals differently.
Who are you actually competing with on Google?
The first and most important thing to do when you want a good Google search engine result is to get a clear idea of your competition. Develop the primary keywords for your website and run them through Google yourself. That single exercise shows you the websites that already own your market.
The websites sharing your primary keywords, as well as your long tail keywords, are your real competitors. Note their rankings, the posts they have published, and the structure of their websites, so you know exactly what you are up against. Several tools will analyse a competitor’s website for you, and the ones we lean on are listed below.
Winning market share right off the bat is tough, but a solid start is always required, and a solid start in search engine optimising your business means taking careful note of your rivals. Research suggests it takes 4 to 5 months of publishing SEO friendly content on your website before you see that first ranking in Google’s SERP, so the earlier you understand the field, the less of that runway you waste.
Tools to study your competitor
- Keywords: Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest
- Analytics: Google Adwords
Why does your homepage matter most?
Your homepage is undoubtedly the most important page of your website. If you have a unique business name, the homepage is what most potential customers land on first, so it needs to be a hit out of the park. Even when a website draws most of its traffic from affiliate marketing or clicks on published content, the homepage is still what drives the site. It should present every option neatly, and more importantly, attractively.
Your homepage should carry assortments of all sorts for the consumer and should be properly linked to each subsidiary page. It should have all the primary keywords, as well as the major long tail keywords, linked to it in an SEO friendly manner. It should not read as a cocktail of keywords. It should read as a good presentation of your entire business. Build the homepage for the consumer first, because consumer first design is the practice Google has been promoting for years now.
What should your meta description do?
When you search a keyword on Google, every result carries a short description under the URL. That is the meta description. You can write it properly by editing the HTML source code of your website, and if you use a CMS like WordPress, an option to edit the meta description is built into the platform itself. Various plugins will also help you with meta descriptions and many other SEO friendly practices.
Along with the meta description you can add meta keywords for your website. These will only help your SERP ranking on search engines other than Google, because Google stopped using meta keywords for its SERP some years ago. We will expand on meta keywords in a following post on how to increase SERP ranking for other search engines.
How important is the title tag?
The title tag of your post is what pops up on Google’s search engine result page. It is the first impression a user forms of your website, and it is the title that decides whether they click your link or scroll past it. A good title tag runs between 40 and 60 characters including white spaces, and carries the focus keyword. Exceed 60 characters and the search result shows a truncated title, which can drastically reduce the click through rate of that page.
That is why the title tag matters so much. It is the line that gets potential customers to click through and browse your website. A good title is essential for a solid click through rate on Google’s search engine result page, and click through rate feeds back into ranking.
How long does it take to reach the top of Google?
To take the top rank in Google’s SERP, expect 4 to 5 months of publishing SEO friendly content regularly against a long tail keyword with low to medium competition. For a primary keyword with medium to high popularity, expect 6 months to a year. Those are the honest numbers, and anyone quoting you a fortnight is selling something else.
Should you get it done by professionals?
If you can go through that ordeal alone, that is great. If you would rather not, we would recommend bringing in professionals. Onlinereputationmanage are market leaders in producing top results for Google as well as alternative search engines. We are the best SEO company for businesses and individuals, and we have over three hundred happy clients. Onlinereputationmanage.com stays well versed and updated on every SEO practice, and we know how to win a top Google SERP ranking for our customers efficiently.
Our search engine optimisation is top of the line and we have the numbers that prove our skills. With a 98% success rate, online reputation management gets its customers the Google SERP position they deserve.
Tell us the keyword you want to own and we will tell you what it will take to get there. To see more of what we can do for you and your business, follow us on our socials: Facebook and Linkedin.