Summary
Unlocking the top positions with targeted keywords
Creating quality content to improve visibility
Build authority with internal linking and external backlinks
With 81% of online shoppers conducting research before making a purchase, ensuring that your brand and products are visible during this pivotal discovery phase can help to improve your traffic and increase your conversions.
In this guide, we will help you to identify the areas that may be impacting your ranking, and how to improve your site performance. From quality content to technical issues, find out how to optimise your online performance and climb the rankings.
Unlocking the top positions with targeted keywords
Conducting keyword research can help you to identify the exact phrases your target audience are searching for. This will help you to tailor your content to include these terms. Prioritise keywords by relevance and search volume to give yourself the best chance of ranking.
While you can, and should, include keywords in the body of your content, it’s important to include key terms in headlines and subheadings to improve visibility. The most important thing when it comes to keywords is to incorporate them naturally across the content on your site.
This means balancing your brand tone-of-voice with relevant keywords, and avoiding over-stuffing content as this will negatively impact the user experience, as well as Google’s review of your site.
Creating quality content to improve visibility
When it comes to creating content, it’s important to consider both quality and quantity. However there is a fine line when it comes to how often you should publish content and what the content covers.
Publishing cohesive, comprehensive content is more important than posting lots of sub-par content. Similarly, lack of regular updates can signal that your content is stagnant. So, it’s important to regularly review your web content, ensuring that content is updated to remain relevant.
Conducting competitor research can help you to identify any gaps that you can create content to target keywords with lower competition. Alternatively, you can identify areas that you can improve your content to improve rankings for high volume search terms.
When creating content, keep in mind the Google E-E-A-T framework. This stands for:
- Experience - Demonstrable experience in your field.
- Expertise - Showcase your knowledge and credentials.
- Authoritativeness - Prove your reputation and reliability.
- Trustworthiness - Focus on accuracy and clarity.
Following this framework won’t directly impact your ranking, but it can influence how Google evaluates your site overall.
Build authority with internal linking and external backlinks
When it comes to proving, and improving, your website's authority, internal linking, link building and backlinks all play a part.
Internal Linking
Internal linking is a way to direct users to other highly relevant content throughout your site. Not only can this improve navigation and user journeys, it demonstrates to Google that your content is filled with useful content that adds value to visitors.
Backlinks
Another area that impacts your website authority is the amount of other websites that link to your website, and the quality of these websites.
If you have a lot of low-quality websites, like spam sites, linking to your site, you might want to consider a disavowing exercise. This will tell Google to ignore and remove spam backlinks. While this may decrease the amount of backlinks in the short-term, it makes room for you to invest time in a strong link building strategy.
Through building relationships with high quality, relevant sites, such as industry or consumer publications, you can land targeted backlinks that can improve your authority and visibility.
Improve the technical performance of your site
Auditing and resolving technical issues on your website can help you to identify to Google that your site is high quality and deserving a place in the SERPs (search engine results pages).
Indexing
In order for you to rank on Google, first Google needs to know that your site exists! This is a process called ‘indexing’, where Google crawls the web then analyses and stores the data that it finds.
If you search for your product or brand, and realise that you aren’t visible on a Google search, there are a few ways to get Google to index your site and improve your visibility.
Firstly, you can submit your website’s URL to Google Search Console and request indexing. Another route is to create and submit an XML sitemap that will help Google to discover all your webpages.
To increase your chances of Google being able to crawl your site, it’s worth fine tuning your robots.txt file to ensure that you remove ‘noindex’ tags from pages you do want to be indexed.
Once your site has been indexed, it’s likely your visibility in search results will be improved.
Site speed
To further improve the technical performance of your site, you may want to turn your attention to page speed. Google favours sites that have fast page loading speeds, so ensuring that your webpages load quickly and efficiently can help you to improve your rankings.
Consider things like the amount of images and videos on each webpage, and how big the files are. This can be optimised by adopting lazy loading, where images or videos only load when users scroll to their position on your page.
Not only can optimised page loading speed increase your chance of being indexed, in turn improving your visibility, loading speed forms part of Googles ‘Core Web Vitals’. These user-centric metrics help to improve the user-experience, ensuring your site is user-friendly and easy to use.
Final Thoughts
If you’re looking to boost your visibility and rankings, investing in an SEO strategy can help you to identify key content optimisations and technical improvements you can implement that not only identify to Google your authority and expertise, but also enhance the user experience for your customers.
Want to improve your visibility?
Whether you need technical SEO support, keyword research or a comprehensive SEO strategy to support your website performance, we create tailored SEO support to help you improve your rankings. Get in touch to explore the best solution for your site.
