If your business has a website, then it’s crucial to have some knowledge about what it takes to make it appear in search engine rankings. If it doesn’t come up when people search then it’s a wasted marketing tool that could be costing you thousands of dollars to host, update, and maintain. These are some key factors that you need to know about.
Mobile Responsiveness
This is now one of the top factors that impact a website ranking on Google. More people are surfing the web using mobile devices rather than PCs and Google have reacted to this. They understand the importance of a great customer experience. If your website doesn’t work on mobile properly then they are not going to be sending much traffic your way because it gives the customer a poor experience when using Google.
Page Speed
Similar to mobile-friendliness is the page speed. Your website must load quickly, even for people who are using mobile internet, which could still be 3G. This can be achieved by making sure pictures are optimized and that you have chosen a good theme if you are using WordPress. Just Legal Marketing has some great tips on design choices.
Page Content
All of the main pages on your website should have a least 300 words. This includes product pages on e-commerce websites too. Just as important is the relevance. You can’t just write a paragraph of nonsense. Google will punish you in the rankings for this. It must be highly relevant and useful to the website user.
Links
Links are a very important element. They tell Google that your website is useful for something. For example, if you have a really great piece of content about running shoes and lots of websites link to it, it tells Google that this piece of content must be good because lots of people are sending traffic to it. Much like the content, you should try and get links that are relevant to your website or industry. Links from directories or poor-quality websites will hurt your rankings.
Pictures
Any pictures that you have on your website must be fully optimized. That means trying to crop them to the largest size at which they will be displayed and saving them at 72dpi. In addition to this, you will also want to fill in the alt tags. This will make your images appear in the Google image search. Although you might not get loads of traffic from here, it is still a good best practice to follow.
Keywords
Choosing relevant keywords and including them in your content is what will make your website appear on Google and other search engines. You will need to use a tool like Google Keyword Planner to research keywords that have mid-high volumes of searches and integrate them into your written content, header tags, and alt tags. When including them in website copy make sure they don’t stand out. Try and make the copy sound as natural as possible.
