How to Get Your Website to Rank | The Basics
Do you have a hard time getting your website to rank on Google? Are you getting frustrated and feel like there’s no way you can beat out your competitors if they continuously rank above you? Follow this six step guide to ensure your business ranks on Google and engages your target audience:
1. Do your research
Not just any research, but keyword research. First, you have to understand what a keyword is. Have you ever written down a list of words or phrases that you’d love your site to populate for if someone types them in on Google? Those are your keywords. If you’re an auto mechanic, the list might look like the following: Car Repair, Car Repair Shop Near Me, Auto Repair, Auto Repair Shop Near Me, etcetera. If you aren’t sure what your keywords are or what they should be, utilize online tools like Ahrefs.com. Not only will they populate what your keywords are, but how competitive it can be to have your website rank for them.
2. Optimize your site pages
We cannot emphasize the importance of this step enough. If your website pages and blog posts are not optimized for search engines, as well as for your readers, there’s a high chance your website will not be ranking any time soon. So how do you optimize your site pages? Right now, the basics are ensuring there’s an H1 tag on every page of your website. Past headers, ensure that you have around three-hundred words on each page of your website. Why is this? Because without content on the page, Google will push searchers to other sites that do have content or an explanation of what they were looking for in the first place. Pro Tip: utilize plugins, like Yoast, to make sure the content on each page of your website has a high readability score and follows SEO rules.
3. Build a sitemap
If you don’t already have a sitemap, please go do that right now. Put this article on pause and make sure this is implemented and then crawled in Google Search Console as soon as you possibly can. Why? Because without a sitemap, Google and any other search engines, are not able to crawl your website content and not being able to crawl content means that your site will never rank. It does not matter how many links you have or how many blog posts, you simply won’t rank without a sitemap.
4. Get backlinks
Now that your sitemap is implemented and crawled for indexing, it’s a prime time to get backlinks to your website. What is a backlink? It’s content (think another website or blog) that points back to a page on your website. How do you go about getting back links? Well, you have to create content first. If you don’t have content (such as blogs) then those sites won’t have anything to point back to.
5. Post on social media
Believe it or not, posting on social media helps your website rank way higher on search engines. This is because Google actually tracks how many engagements and click throughs your content receives. The higher the engagement number, and the more that your content spreads, the more that Google trusts in your site for information. And the more that Google trusts your site for information? You guessed it! The higher you’ll rank.
6. Create content...lot’s of it
The unfortunate part about SEO and ranking on Google is that it takes continuous work. You can’t just reach the first page of search results and then quit. Why? Because there are other businesses that want the first spot as well, and they’re creating content to be on the first page of results, or even in the first organic spot on a search result. You should be publishing at least one new article on your website per week to hold your ranking on Google.
Not sure what kind of content you should be creating? Give our team a call - We can sit down over coffee or Skype for a FREE 30-minute buzz session on how to tackle your SEO goals.
