The Ultimate Step-by-Step Guide on How to Improve Your Google Ranking

We all know that ranking highly in Google searches can be beneficial for our businesses. However, most of us don’t know how to go about improving our ranking. The following will explore several things that you need to do to boost your site’s ranking within Google search.

What Is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is a series of tactics designed to help you rank better within different search engines. The reason people want to rank well is that it exposes them to more viewers, readers, users, or potential customers. More than this, the people who discover your website through online searching can be considered warm leads, as they are actively seeking out information, products, or services that you have.

How Do You Improve Your Google Ranking?

There are hundreds of SEO techniques involved in getting a site or page ranking well. This being said, in the broadest sense, you need to make your site useful to readers and viewers and make its utility clear to Google. Every time you consider adding to your site or making a change, you need to ask yourself the following questions.

• Will this alteration will make the page more useful, helpful, or beneficial to your users?
• Will it help Google better understand how useful your site is.

Understand There Are No Shortcuts

When it comes to improving your rank on Google search, you need to understand that there aren’t any overnight tricks or hacks you can employ to skip steps. If someone figures out how to game the system, Google promptly releases a new algorithm (and typically, that algorithm penalizes people who were using the trick).

Audit Your Site

Before you begin tweaking things:

1. Take a moment to learn about your current situation.
2. Run your site through testing tools to see where you stack up.
3. Read through the analytics available on your site to understand your current viewership, demographics, and behavior on your site.

While you’re at it, make sure all aspects of your site are functioning—click every link, view the pages on desktop, tablet, and mobile devices. This is to make sure that it is optimized for all viewing devices. Critique your site crawl by going to Google and typing your homepage link into the search box (not the URL box above, but the search box). Take a moment to see how many links come up when you do this from your site.

Examine your URLs and simplify any of them that are full of endless numbers and letters. You want a URL that is completely readable and understandable—a viewer should understand what a page will contain based on the URL alone. Plus, you want your keywords there so Google can also discern what your page is used for.

• You don’t want: www.mywebsite.com/7462997=/ans9d7f79asf. 
• You do want: www.mywebsite.com/blog-post-title.

When renaming, separate words with hyphens, not underscores. Be wary of any pound (#) signs in your URL, as Google will ignore everything that follows that symbol.

Learn About Your Keywords

Researching keywords is probably the most time-consuming part of SEO, but it’s also always the very first step to improving your ranking. It involves learning about how people are searching for certain words and phrases and choosing the right ones to incorporate on your site to help bring the right people to you. The ideal keyword selection involves understanding how competitive the keyword is (how many people are posting with it). It also means learning how in demand the keyword is (how many people are looking for it in Google search).

Keyword research often requires the help of an excellent keyword tool. There are countless on the market that allows you to search keywords and look at the data surrounding them—most of these tools require a paid subscription for in-depth use. As an alternative to paying for a subscription, you could consider hiring a professional to handle your eCommerce SEO services. A professional SEO marketer will have access to one of these programs, but also the skills and experience to decipher the data the tool spits out.

Improve Your Speed

It turns out that Google judges websites harshly on their speed. When viewers have to wait for a page to load in 2021, they don’t. They click back and choose another option that does load—you want instantaneous speed. There are online tools designed to check the speed of your website for free. If you find that it’s slow, compress image files and consider upgrading your host for higher speed.

Backlinks Are Crucial

One of the most significant factors in how Google weighs your site’s usefulness is the number and quality of backlinks you have. This means that getting your backlinks right is an essential part of your traffic generation strategy. Backlinks are when other sites link back to your pages. But not all backlinks are created equal; the higher the domain authority of the site providing the link, the more Google trusts it. You need competent, trustworthy sites linking back to your webpages. Guest posts are one of the best ways to accomplish this.

Use Headers In Your Written Content

Do you see how we put “Use Headers In Your Written Content” up above, in a bigger font (marked as a header, not just formatted differently)? Using header tags not only makes your written content easier to read by breaking up the text, but Google also uses headers to understand your content and who your work should be recommended to.

Pay Attention To Local Search Optimization

One of the easiest ways to grow your business is by starting with a focus on the local level—getting more people in your town, city, or county to the site. You can claim your business through something called the Google My Business listing to start off with. You can also emphasize creating relevant content in Google Posts to encourage showing up in local searches and directories.

The above information should get you started on the long journey that is search engine optimization. You need to understand that this isn’t something you can do once and then leave it alone—new competitor sites are popping up every second, and the Google algorithm is always being updated. Moreover, all the search engine optimization in the world won’t help you out if your content isn’t strong enough to hold someone’s interest. Your content’s goal should be to help your potential customers—answering common questions, teaching them how to use products or services, addressing the things your target audience struggles with, or providing interesting, valuable, or entertaining information.