Simple Ways to Boost Your Google Rankings
The world of search engine optimization (SEO) is vast, and you’ll usually need a professional marketing agency to help get your website up to par. But there are a few easy steps that we’ll share with you below that you can follow to see great improvements.
While the basic steps below are completely doable, don’t feel bad if you can’t (or do not want to) keep up with the updates. It’s not uncommon for companies with large marketing teams to still outsource SEO to a dedicated marketing agency.
Define Keywords
The keyword selection process is part art and part science and, you’ll want to work with what you have before digging into third-party tools.
Start off by making a list of keywords that you feel people would put into a search engine for your service. Your list of words should come from a review of your website, products and services. You can also look at customer reviews to discover what words they are using to describe your products. The list of words you gather here is just a baseline starting point.
Determine Volume
After you have your initial list of words, start using tools to determine how many times the words or phrases appear in search results. A high-volume ranking of keywords means that it is something that people use frequently when searching so you may have a greater chance of your site being found if you incorporate the term correctly. Here are three site that can rank keywords for you:
- Google Adword planner
- SEM RUSH
- Keywordtool.io
Don’t forget about business fit
Keep in mind that it is not just about words or phrases. You will want to use the keywords that people (your customers) would type into a browser to find your site. If you are a company that sells medical devices directly to the healthcare industry, you will likely need content with more technical terms and need to spend less time educating the provider on what the product helps with. But if you sold medical devices to consumers, you’d need to speak in easy-to-understand terms and cover topics on managing underlying health issues the person has that the device can fix.
Implementation
After you’ve identified your keywords, you’ll want to place them strategically on pages throughout your site and have a minimum of 300 words of text per page, as this isn’t just for your customers but this also lets Google know what the page is about.
Start with adding your keywords from the top of the page to the bottom. You, ideally want the keyword to appear in the page permalink – or also known as page hyperlink – as well as in the title of the page.
After that, you can include the keyword or a variation of it in your headers and sub headers as well as aim to use the selected keyword within the first paragraph of the page.
It’s crucial that the placement of the text seems natural and not like it was randomly placed in the sentence. Your customers, and Google, both know better and it will negatively impact your content ranking and how your brand is perceived.
Behind the scenes, do not forget about including snippets of text for your meta data and image descriptions.
Last but not least, including relevant links to other pages within your site as well as external links to other sites will help your rankings. Be sure to hyperlink meaningful words for these. For example, You would want to hyperlink this entire statement “view banking options” instead of a single word that doesn’t have a keyword, such as: view options “here”.
SEO Checklist:
● 300 words
● Permalink/page hyperlink
● Include keyword in page title
● Headers and subheads
● Aim to use your selected keyword within the first paragraph of the page.
● Metadata
● Image descriptions / ALT text
● Links to internal pages
● External linking