5 Ways to Improve Your Website’s SEO for Higher Ranking
Have you ever searched for a keyword in your industry on Google search page only to find out that your website did not show up – not on the first page or the third page, but nowhere at all?
Given this realisation, it makes you think, what drives traffic to your website? How can you improve at Google rankings? If you rely too much on people to find you online, SEO or search engine optimisation should be given more focus and must be on top of your priority list.
Remember, if nobody can’t find you, you will not be able to generate leads for your business.
Here are some known facts:
- 93 per cent of customer experiences online start with a search engine
- The website that appears on top of Google search has a 33 per cent chance of being clicked or visited. It means missing out one-thirds of the potential traffic if yours is not on top of the list.
- 75 per cent of visitors will not even click on the next page of the search results
For many companies who want to be successful in their industry, ranking higher on the Google search page is their top goal. Investing and making a conscious effort to improve their SEO are among the things they put focus on to guarantee that their goal is achieved.
There are various website fixes you can do to improve your site’s SEO and get your page on top in no time.
1. Publish useful, high-quality and relevant content
In every website, quality content is what drives your search engine rankings to the top—and there is no replacement nor substitute for excellent and relevant content. These contents specifically created for your intended market or users increase your site’s traffic, thus improving your site’s relevance and authority.
2. Page load speed
Both Bing and Google take into consideration a website’s page-loading speed in its website ranking algorithm.
When users find it challenging to browse a section on your website because loading takes forever, they will immediately leave your site and visit the one that offers more convenience of browsing. When a user leaves your site after a few seconds, it will affect your dwell time, dramatically increase your bounce rate, and decrease the number of pages viewed—all factors can have negative impacts on your site’s ranking.
There are various ways to improve your page load speed, such as optimizing image sizes, installing caching plug-ins, ensuring that the codes are streamlined and clean, minimizing redirects, and reducing the number of plug-ins.
3. Image optimisation
Research has shown that one way to increase conversion rate is by using good quality images or photos. When you properly optimize your images, you are taking advantage of using images to increase trust, generate empathy, and boost your customer’s overall experience, which could affect your ranking.
Besides sizing and image file format, there are a lot of ways to ensure that your images are doing its job. Huge files can slow your page loading speed, so compress or resize your images to optimize them. By naming them accordingly, images can also be used to sneak in some keywords. Additionally, you can strategically use keyword phrases in the title of your photo or image, as well as in the description or the caption.
4. Broken links or 404 bad gateway error
Broken links are never good website usability—nobody wants a 404 error after clicking on a link. Aside from that, search engines categorize several broken links as an indication of an old, neglected website, which will definitely hurt your search engine ranking.
Luckily, you do not have to manually go through each link on your page to check for any broken links. There are many tools and apps that you can use to make sure that your site is free of broken links, such as:
- Google Webmaster Tool
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider
- W3C Link Checker
5. Alt tags
Describe your video and visual media using alternative text descriptions or alt tags. They let search engines to locate your page quickly, which is very important, especially for those who use screen readers or text-only browsers.
These are only a few ways and tips to help improve your site’s SEO. If you need assistance with building your brand and SEO strategies that yield impressive results, get in touch with Dot Media to see how we can help.
