Speed Up Your Website
One thing that has a direct impact on SEO, and consequently, your Google ranking is speed. How fast your page loads on both desktop and mobile is something Google absolutely takes into consideration when ranking your page.
According to studies, pages that rank at the top of the first-page load much faster than those at the bottom of the first page. Considering the top organic search result gets the lion’s share of clicks, this is an important factor to be aware of.
The speed your pages load out also affects the user experience. If you’ve got a lot of page abandonment you’ll do worse in the rankings.
The majority of users that abandon a page don’t come back to it, so page abandonment can kill traffic wholesale.
How Can You Tell if Your Website is Slow?
The easiest way to tell if your website is slow is to use a tool. For instance, Google’s PageSpeed Insights will analyze a URL and give it a percentile rating as compared to other pages.
Another tool is WebPageTest.org which digs even deeper into the factors influencing each of your webpage’s speed.
How to Improve Your Website’s Speed?
Even without tools, though, there are things you can do to hit the gas on your website loading times.
- Compress all images on your site.
- Delete unnecessary plugins
- Try changing your website’s theme
- Change your web hosting provider.
Produce High-Quality Content
Content needs to be high quality and recent to affect your rankings positively. Dwell-time or the length of time a user stays on your page also affects your rankings positively.
If you have lots of long, interesting, and informative content your dwell time will be higher. So will your ranking in search engines.
A great way to produce high-quality content is to start a blog on your website filled with relevant informative posts.
Here are some tips for creating high-quality blog content:
Use images and infographics.
Google loves infographics, and so do people. They make an article more pleasing to the eye by breaking up the content and providing useful visual illustrations of a concept.
You also want to make sure your images are optimized. This involves ensuring they have alt tags and are named appropriately on your computer.
For example, the same picture can be saved as “image #1” and “Girl riding a bike in Denver.” The second is better for SEO.
Another thing to keep in mind is that creating your own assets/infographics makes people more likely to link to them or use them in their own posts.
When another website links to yours this creates something called a “backlink.” The number of backlinks a website has is very important when determining search engine ranking.
Keep in mind mobile readability.
The majority of users are mobile users. With that in mind, it’s very important to make sure even your blog is accessible to them.
This is done by avoiding large chunks of text. Not only are they intimidating to the reader, but they’re also hard to see on a small screen.
Write in short sentences and paragraphs. The better to be seen on a mobile device.
Keep your content Long
You should be shooting for 750 to 1000 words with every blog post, ideally.
This gives you plenty of time to slip in good keywords about your topic but also ensures your content is beefy enough to keep users interested and engaged.
Update your content regularly.
Google keeps track of how recently a website has been updated for the purposes of SEO. This means you want to be updating your website with quality content as often as you can.
How often can vary on the topics you cover, the amount of competition you have, and how high you want to rank.
A good rule of thumb is to add a 750 to 1000-word post once a week (or more) until you achieve the ranking you want. From there, you can cut it down to about half to maintain that rank.
Update previous content.
This goes for more than just blogs but also includes them. If you find that a previous page or post was under the 750-word mark, take a good look at why that is.
There’s plenty of great content that doesn’t meet this benchmark. If you find yours a little thing, though, there’s nothing wrong with adding to it after the fact.
From service pages to blog posts, every webpage benefits from regular updates to keep them fresh and relevant.
Boost pages with Internal Links
Having links to other, authoritative and accurate websites throughout yours is a great way to improve your authority.
Making sure you also link to your own internal web pages on different pages is also a great way to direct traffic.
Get Exposure
Getting exposure for your website will directly affect how much traffic you have and your Google ranking
Some easy ways to get exposure include:
- Regularly posting on your website’s Social Media accounts.
- Guest posting on other people’s websites.
- Doing interviews about your website.
Use Google Business
One thing you can do to boost the visibility of your website is to create a GMB or Google My Business listing.
These are the listings that show up at the top of the search results next to the map pack.
Having one of these, especially in the service industry, can make all the difference.