Where you rank on search engine pages can have a massive impact on your business, affecting everything from user trust to conversions. Learn how to master the art of dominating search results below.
What Is Search Engine Ranking?
Before we delve into the how-to, let’s get our bearings. Search engine ranking refers to where your website appears in the results of search engines, such as Google, after a user enters a query. You can look at rankings like a popularity contest in which brands, companies, and blogs compete for clicks. Obviously, ranking closer to the top increases the odds of capturing user attention.
In our fast-paced world, internet users are looking for content that gets straight to the point. They want accurate, authoritative, and reliable blog articles and videos that meet their search intent and help them find the products they’re looking for or the information they desire.
Google knows this and also wants to maintain its place as the king of search engines. Because of this, the cyber giant strives to provide users with exactly what they’re looking for. Not only does it want to match the intent behind their query, but it wants to provide them with the best-quality content available.
Summary
Search engine ranking determines your website’s position in search results. The higher your content ranks, the more traffic it’s likely to get.
Why Is it Important to Improve Search Engine Ranking?
Now that you’re all clued up about search engine rankings, you’re probably keen to learn how to rank higher. After all, having your content links perched near the top of a SERP (search engine results page) will help to drive traffic, increase sales, and expose your content to the world.
Before we get into the nitty-gritty of the factors that Google considers when it comes to ranking, we want to motivate you to shoot to the top of SERPs. So, dive into the following section to continue discovering the key benefits of improving your search engine rankings.
Spoiler alert: they include enhanced credibility, cheap marketing, and far higher conversions. Get ready to take your brand, business, or blog to new heights.
Increased Traffic
Website traffic is absolutely key to any online business. Whether you’re running an e-commerce store selling specialised items or starting up a blog looking to earn revenue from advertisers, without adequate traffic, you simply aren’t going to pull it off.
There are a variety of ways to build momentum when it comes to directing traffic to your blog. Social media channels, in-person events, and email campaigns are all good strategies. However, they all pale in comparison when it comes to ranking highly on SERPs. Why? Well, internet users worldwide search Google 99,000 times per second, over 350 million times per hour, and over 8.5 billion times per day. Get your content strategy right, and you’ll divert a stream of this monumental river of traffic towards your content and business.
Improved Credibility
Improving search engine rankings significantly enhances brand and company credibility. When a website appears on the first page of search results, and especially when it ranks close to the top, it signals to users that Google trusts this content or company as a good and trustworthy source of products and/or information.
Think about it—how many times do you stray into the dark back alleys of the second, third, or tenth page of search results? You don’t, and neither do your potential customers, readers, or viewers. Making an effort to rank highly in SERPs boosts credibility, which has the knock-on effect of building trust—a trait key to attracting both customers and future employees.
Cost-Effective Marketing
You have many different tools at your disposal when it comes to marketing your blog or brand. However, most of these methods have one thing in common: they cost money, and will continue to cost money. Search engine optimisation (SEO) strategies also require some initial investment, but they often don’t require ongoing financing once implemented. You can view ranking highly on SERPs as a very cheap but very effective digital billboard that broadcasts your website to potentially millions of people.
This cost-effective form of marketing also has the advantage of generating high-quality leads. Rather than placing your marketing materials in front of an audience that might not fall into your customer base, ranking highly on search engines will put links to your business directly in front of those who are actively looking for what you have to offer.
Competitive Edge
Unless you’re operating a business in a particularly niche territory, you’ll spend the majority of your marketing time and efforts competing against other brands in your space. Fostering brand loyalty, offering truly innovative products and services, and creating outstanding marketing campaigns will all help you stand out from the crowd. However, other businesses also strive to meet these same objectives.
While maintaining an upper hand will be a persistent effort, simply ranking higher than your competition in SERPs will give you a significant competitive edge. When users see your link close to the top, they’ll view you as more authoritative, trustworthy, and convenient. Rank just a few positions above your competition and you’ll reap the rewards; rank on the first page while they’re on the second and you’ll start to dominate your market.
More Conversions
Naturally, all of the above benefits of ranking highly on SERPs accumulate into more conversions—the ultimate goal of any e-commerce business. Most importantly, good rankings help to boost macro-conversions, or the act of a customer going through with a transaction and purchasing a product or service.
However, even if a customer doesn’t go all the way to and through the checkout, ranking highly in search results will also help to increase micro-conversations These small, incremental actions include engagement such as adding items to a shopping cart, creating an account, or signing up to a newsletter. While not quite the same as a transaction, they’re still prized by online businesses and are a good sign that your marketing efforts are paying off.
Summary
Improving your search engine ranking increases visibility, credibility, and traffic while providing a cost-effective marketing strategy that increases conversions.
How to Improve My Search Engine Ranking: The Basics
Now you’re aware of what exactly search engine ranking is, and you’re familiar with the key benefits of implementing a marketing strategy that emphasises scoring high positions in SERPs.
Next up, we’re going to show you exactly how to achieve these benefits. You’ll learn the basics of forming an SEO strategy that will push your blog, product, or service links up the rankings in no time at all. These tips are simple but effective and include creating high-quality content, leveraging keywords, updating metadata, and enhancing your user experience. Let’s get into it!
Get Insight Into Your Website Performance
First things first—it’ll help to know where you currently rank in SERPs. Luckily, there are several different ways to determine this.
Google Analytics frequently proves invaluable for many companies and blogs. This free tool gives you key insights into data that will help you bring your SEO strategy to the next level. To start, it’ll show you where your traffic is coming from, which can help you target specific channels. Within this metric, Google Analytics will give you insights into organic traffic—traffic that comes from SERPs—including Google itself and other big search engines such as DuckDuckGo and Bing.
Create Good Content and Keep It Relevant
Many businesses are tempted to aim for quantity over quality when it comes to content. However, you need both to score highly in search engines. Take your time with content, making sure it’s thorough, unique, and user-focused. Invest money into good writers and editors to make sure your content reaches Google’s standard.
Google’s algorithm favours content that provides value to users and demonstrates expertise and authority. Make sure you cover topics thoroughly and answer users’ questions completely. Meet their search intent while providing original and unique content that offers a fresh perspective.
Don’t forget about presenting your content in a reader-friendly way; use appropriate headers and bullet points, and stick to short paragraphs if most of your traffic comes from mobile devices. Finally, frequently update and repurpose old content to make sure it stays relevant.
Implement a Keyword Strategy
A well-planned keyword strategy is absolutely crucial to ranking highly in search engines. You can spend time crafting high-quality content, but without the appropriate keywords added in the correct quantities, your blog articles and product and category pages simply won’t capture the attention of search engine algorithms.
Using keyword tools, such as Google Keyword Planner, Semrush, and others, you can identify the optimal keywords and long-tail keywords for your content. Once you have a selection to hand, focus on search volume and relevance to prioritise which keywords to emphasise.
Remember not to get too carried away. While the algorithm values the necessary keywords to help meet user search intent, it will also flag their overuse. Strive to maintain a natural keyword density that doesn’t impact readability and overall quality; keyword stuffing will negatively affect your search engine rankings.
Include and Attract Links
Links are a reliable and effective way of driving website traffic and ranking highly in SERPs. First of all, focus on the links you can control. Using appropriate anchor text, infuse your content with internal links to other pages throughout your website, from other articles to relevant products.
Building a web of links within your site can help boost the SEO value of linked pages and help search engines identify your content hierarchy. Linking from high-authority pages, such as your homepage, will have a particularly significant impact on which pages are deemed most important.
You should also take the time to reference other content. Linking to high-authority external pages, such as scientific studies or media sites, will increase the trustworthiness of your work.
Finally, aim to cultivate backlinks—links from external sites to your content. These are harder to achieve than simply linking to internal pages, but they have a big impact on SEO and SERP rankings. To attract backlinks, you’ll need to create exceptional evergreen content, such as guides, infographics, and case studies, alongside unique and useful content—e.g. interviews with industry experts, influencer collaborations, or tools such as calculators and templates.
Update Metadata
Regularly updating metadata will help your content rank higher on search engines by providing clear and relevant information to search engine crawlers—computer programmes that automatically search the internet for new content and store information about encountered pages.
The simple step of updating your metadata will improve search engine rank through several means, including improved relevance as you update title tags and meta descriptions. Likewise, relevant and well-crafted meta descriptions essentially work as mini-advertisements. Keeping them compelling and infused with the right keywords will boost click-through rates.
Structural metadata, including H1 and H2 tags, will also help search engines understand the hierarchy of a content page and content quality, so use this to your advantage.
Offer a Seamless User Experience
To score highly in search engine rankings, you also need to develop a good user experience. Why? Because Google prioritises user behaviour and experience when ranking pages and websites. On top of this, a well-crafted user experience also matters to potential customers. Whereas an outdated, clunky, and ugly website decreases trust, a sleek, easy-to-use, and polished site appeals to users and communicates professionalism.
Aim to enhance site structure by implementing a logical hierarchy with good internal linking. Make sure to optimise your content for mobile users and improve page speed by reducing image size and minimising code. Navigation also matters; strive to design an intuitive, clear, and easy-to-use menu.
Summary
Simple in theory but requiring some care and attention, the tips above are effective ways to improve search engine rankings. Creating good content and using the right keywords should form the core of your approach.
Improve Your Ranking: This Is How You Do It
You’re now equipped to build and execute your SEO strategy to ensure your pages rank highly in SERPs. Doing so comes with the key benefits of increasing traffic, improving your brand’s credibility and giving you a competitive edge. It doesn’t take much to reap these rewards. Aim to create high-quality content that’ll attract backlinks, use the right amount of the appropriate keywords, keep on top of your metadata, and top it all off with a flawless user experience.
