How to Improve Your Website Ranking on Google
Having good search engine rankings is essential for getting a steady stream of visitors to your website. If you’ve noticed that your rankings are low, it could be affecting the number of customers that you should be attracting. Here are just some of the reasons why your rankings may be low and what you can do to help boost them.
You’re focusing on the wrong search queries/keywords
If you run a restaurant and you’ve noticed that your site doesn’t show up until the 10th page of Google when you search ‘restaurant’, it could be because there’s a lot of competition in your area. You may find that you have little luck when trying to optimize the word ‘restaurant’ because there are already so many other restaurants optimizing this keyword in your area. Instead, focus on more keywords that are more descriptive to your business.
For instance, you may find that your rank higher when people search for more specific terms like ‘Chinese restaurant’ or ‘restaurants that accept dogs’. Even if you don’t rank highly for these more specific terms, you could find that it’s easier to optimize for them so that you appear on the first page.
There are many keyword research tools that you can use to help find the best keywords to optimize. Make sure that you’re using these keywords naturally when writing copy on your site – keyword stuffing or inappropriate use of keywords could have a negative impact on your rankings.
Your site has no inbound links
An inbound link is a link found on another site that leads to your site. Having lots of inbound links can improve your rankings – search engine algorithms perceive your site as popular because lots of other sites keep linking to it.
Generating inbound links isn’t easy. As with keyword usage, inbound links need to be incorporated naturally. The anchor text can be an important factor to consider – this updated anchor text guide could be worth reading to ensure that your inbound links don’t all look the same. Search engines may lower your rankings if your inbound links all share the same keyword as their anchor text, so variety is important.
There are broken links and redirects on your site
Broken links and redirects can also negatively impact your rankings. These could be links to deleted pages or links that haven’t been typed properly. Broken links aren’t always easy to identify, and it could be worth using online tools such as this broken link finder to try to remove and fix all broken links.
You don’t update your website regularly enough
Search engines like to know that a website is still active. If you haven’t touched your site for a while, it could be negatively affecting the rankings. Constantly editing or adding content to your site will show that you’re still invested in your site and it will prevent your rankings from falling.
Starting a blog on your site is one of the easiest ways to keep your site regularly updated. You can keep adding new posts every week – these could be simple advice posts to consumers. Blog posts are also a great place for adding keywords, helping to boost your rankings this way.
Your site takes ages to load
If your site takes ages to load, search engines may also penalise you by lowering your rankings. Page load speed can be due to a variety of factors. It could be that there’s too much multimedia or too many high-quality images, which take much longer to load. Alternatively, the code used to create the site could be very bulky.
One common issue is that you may be using a slow hosting provider. This guide on how to find a fast hosting provider could be worth reading if you suspect this to be the case.
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