How to Improve My SEO Rankings: A Definitive Guide

Improving your SEO rankings should be your top priority if you rely on people finding you through a Google search.

Your success depends on your website traffic and a steady stream of users interacting with the content you're providing.

This article gives you insights into the following:

• An in-depth understanding of SEO
• Tips on how to improve SEO rankings
• The importance of search engine ranking

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization or SEO, is the process of improving your website to increase online visibility. If your site is well-uptimized, whenever users search for goods or services on Google, Bing, and other search engines, it will come up on page 1. 

SEO aims to assist search engines

• discovering the information on your website (web content)
• comparing your website with other sites

Search engines look for web content that matches a user's search term closely. Understanding the following can help your site rank higher for search terms:

• The way customers search for goods and services online, and
• How search engines determine which content is more relevant.

Why is SEO Ranking Important?

People conduct trillions of searches each year, often with the commercial goal of finding information about products and services. This is what makes SEO a critical component of digital marketing.

Search is the primary driver of online traffic and complements other marketing avenues. Greater visibility and higher ranking in Google's search results than your competitors can significantly impact your results.

The more visible your pages are in search results, the more likely you'll get noticed and draw new and returning customers to your company.

By knowing what your website visitors want, you can apply that to your marketing campaigns for paid and organic traffic, social media platforms, and more.

You may start boosting your SEO ranking with SEOLeverage™️ App.

14 Tips on Enhancing Your SEO Rankings

Image Source

You can do some things to improve your chances of ranking higher in Google search results.

1) Produce high-quality content

Improving your SEO ranking should be your top priority if you rely on people finding you through a Google search.

There is no alternative to great content, especially when engaging in SEO marketing. Quality, credible content is the main factor affecting your rankings.

The more site visitors you have the more authoritative and relevant it becomes because of the quality content you've created with your target audience. Improve your web writing skills and position yourself as an expert in the field.

2) Increase site loading speed

Google will notice if your loading time is too slow, hurting your ranking. A slow website will also influence how your website visitors participate in your pages. These negative interactions will consequently lower your ranking as well.

According to research, if a website's page takes longer than three seconds to load, 40% of visitors will leave. Even more shocking is that 80% of those users won't revisit the website.

It ultimately reduces website traffic, which is terrible for your SEO ranking. On the other hand, if your page loads quickly, site visitors will stay on it.

Google's algorithm will recognize the popularity, which will then modify your search ranking.

Several factors affect how quickly a page loads. It is crucial to optimize your server response time as well as the speed of your website. You might want to evaluate your website theme and plugins if you notice it running slowly.

If your slow server is the problem, switch to a different host.

3) Obtain recommendations from other websites

When ranking your web pages, search engines consider how many other websites link to or cite your page and your entire website.

Search engines view links from other websites as a referral of your content's truthfulness, applicability, and value. But, not every referral is given the same weight.

Referrals from websites with a high reputation carry more weight than those with a lower reputation. Your website will rank higher with the more credible websites that link to it.

4) Optimize links

Attracting links from other websites increases when they’re authoritative and impartial. It also helps if the site aid users in learning more about what they are interested in.

You can increase your authority and credibility by including relevant links within the text. Instead of generic "click here" links, use the destination page title.

Always link keywords to descriptive links to improve SEO and provide more value to your readers, including those with disabilities or screen readers.

You can connect the pages on your website with internal links. If many pages on your site link to a specific page, internal links can help you improve that page's SEO.

Links play a significant role in achieving high rankings and establishing credibility online. To grow organically and establish your brand as an authority in your industry, ensure you fully utilize their potential.

You can do that with SEO Leverage App’s SEO Lab feature, which allows you to conduct SEO experiments and track their results.

For instance, you can add several internal links to a group of blog URLs and track their performance over a specified period. That way, you know your internal links are helping you boost your rankings!

Get experts to work on your linkbuilding!

5) Adapt your website to mobile devices

Mobile usage is increasing. It is growing that it has already surpassed laptop and computer technology.

In actuality, mobile devices account for over 60% of Google searches. Google recognizes this trend since it ranks websites by following this analytics figure.

It would be best to make your website mobile-friendly; there is no way to avoid this. If your site isn't optimized, it will hamper the user experience, hurting your ranking.

6) Maintain regular content updates

People search for many different things online from time to time. The search trends also evolve as time goes by.

One of the best ways to gauge how relevant a site is is by how frequently its content is updated, so make sure to do this. Regularly audit your content and update it as necessary.

You can add new content, such as:

• details about any further goods or services you're selling
• client success tales
• video or blog post describing your goods or services
• updates regarding your business, your products, and other offers.

Additionally, reviewing your website's existing web content pages at least once every six months and deleting any outdated information is crucial.

7) Encourage social media sharing

It is common knowledge that every website and business must be active on social media.

What is less well known, however, is that social media sharing of links to your website can help you improve your SEO ranking.

Including social sharing icons in your content is one of the best ways to achieve this. You should share links on your social media pages as well.

It only takes one click for people to share that information once it appears on their timelines.

8) Optimize keyword phrases

Every content on your website, from About pages to posts and media, provides SEO opportunities.

Including keywords, particularly keyword phrases, in all types of content, as well as titles, tags, and descriptions, can help to increase organic search visibility naturally.

Use your target keyword in your title and content. Your target keyword should appear in your title tag and a few times in your article. It would help if you sparingly sprinkle words that readers will search for throughout your content.

Your ranking will suffer if you oversaturate your website with keywords, which Google will notice and penalize you for.

Keywords should appear naturally in sentences. You may add them to the image captions and header tags as needed.

9) Make use of alt text

Use alt tags, or alternative text descriptions, to always give your image and video media a description.They are essential, especially for people who use text-only browsers or screen readers, as they enable the internet to find your page.

10) Create titles and descriptions that are click-worthy

Pointers for coming up with click-worthy titles are as follows:

• Put keywords in the front of your titles. Most of the time, people will only read the first two words of a title, so it is best to put all your keywords in the front. 
• Keep it predictable. Your title should direct readers to a page that meets their needs.
• Make it clear and concise. In 65 characters or less, the reader should be able to determine the topic of your webpage.
• Create an emotional connection. One of the crucial parts of writing titles and descriptions is to create an emotional connection.

To make sure your titles and descriptions are working for you, use the SEO Lab feature of the SEO Leverage app to test them. It works just like A/B testing, except you can experiment on a specific group of URLs and track their collective performance.

You’ll get insights on the comments, clicks, impressions, CTR, average position, transactions, and conversions of each URL group.

11) Use metadata

Each page on your website should have a space between the <head> tags for metadata—information about the page's contents.

If you have a CMS site created by the UMC web team, this information will already be pre-populated. However, you must review and update the metadata as your site evolves.

Here is the metadata you can use on your website.

12) Keep yourself up to date with the newest SEO strategies

Search engines can alter how they rank websites and generate search results by modifying how they use web content (including meta tags). To maintain your site's ranking, make sure you:

• Keep up to date on what search engines consider necessary when ranking web pages.
• Keep an eye out for new keywords related to your products and services.
• Keep up with new search behaviors and technologies (like using voice search or image search).

Again, SEO Leverage’s SEO Lab feature is perfect for this. You can run experiments every time you want to test a new SEO strategy. 

Simply click the “Add New Experiment” button on the upper right corner of the screen to start a new test.

13) Use Google Analytics and Google Search Console

Google Search Console and Google Analytics are frequently used in tandem. People specifically add data from Google Search Console as a source for Google Analytics.

These tools can give you more detailed data on your digital marketing, which will assist you in increasing site traffic and optimizing your SEO efforts. Additionally, since you can generate reports and visualizations from Search Console data, it facilitates the reporting of your marketing data.

SEOLeverage™️ app gives you a quick view of Google analytics and Search console. There’s no need to open another tool. Simply go to the Menu on the left, you’ll see it under Evolution >> Dashboard. 

14) Consult SEO experts

You can find many SEO experts who can help boost your search rankings. Hiring them will ease your workload, and you can focus on other aspects of your business.

SEOLeverage™️ offers consultations, action plans, and more SEO programs that can help you with your business needs.

Conclusion

It is best to focus on search engine optimization for your website now and in the future.

Implementing the SEO strategies mentioned above is not too late if you're just beginning to focus on SEO.

You validate your SEO strategy by looking at your website's traffic and search position. You can use Google Analytics to check your results and experiment with new tactics. 

With the help of the SEO Leverage app, you'll soon be moving toward Google's first page of search results!