If your site isn’t currently ranking in the top 10 search results on Google, you are failing at SEO. While that might seem a little severe, it’s true. According to HubSpot, 75% of searchers never go past the first page of search results.
Is it possible to improve your rankings on Google without spending all of your free time optimizing your site? Yes! There are several strategies and techniques that you can follow to rank higher on Google by following best practices and focusing on the basics. By laying a solid foundation for your website, you can increase visibility, improve your rankings over time, and get back to focusing your efforts on growing your business.
6 SEO Best Practices to Improve Your Organic Rankings
Paid search is excellent because the gains you experience are immediate. However, with paid search ads, you’re paying for your traffic. With search engine optimization, you have the opportunity to improve traffic without going over budget, and all it takes is a little effort on your part.
- Align Your Content with User Intent – Optimizing your content for keywords is great, but it will never perform well if it’s not optimized to match the searcher’s intent. Google’s algorithms are intended to serve up the most relevant search results based on the searcher’s intent. All of your content should be divided into informational, navigational, commercial, and transactional. Vary your content with long-form and short-form pieces to appeal to your target audiences and to meet them where they are in the conversion funnel.
- Don’t Ignore Meta Tags – Your page title and meta descriptions are still two of the most important pieces of real estate on your web page. Title tags are designed to give users a clear idea of why a piece of content is relevant to their search. Include target keywords, make it unique, match searcher intent, and keep it concise. While meta descriptions don’t directly impact search rankings, they are also important because they can impact click-through rates. Design meta descriptions that match user intent, provide a relevant summary, and always include a call to action. Keep descriptions under 160 characters, or there is a good chance it will get truncated by Google.
- Optimize Your Images – Site speed is an important ranking signal identified by Google, and images are often a major contributing factor to slow load times. Compress images by choosing the best file format, scaling them down for quality, and keeping file sizes small.
- Provide Alt Text for Images – Sizing your images down isn’t the only way to optimize them for search. By including relevant, information-rich alt text, you can improve your rankings on Google and your website’s accessibility.
- Focus on User Experience – While site load times can impact the user experience, there are also other factors to consider as well. By providing users with a good experience, Google will deem your site and your web pages more relevant and serve them up more often. Focus on adding H1s and H2s to have a clear flow for your content, make content visually appealing, and make your navigation easy to use.
- Internal and External Linking – Internal links are a simple way to keep users on your site engaged and moving through a logical flow to conversion. An SEO best practice is to add internal links from top-performing pages to pages that need a boost. Backlinks are also an important ranking signal. Google uses backlinks from other authoritative sites as a signal to rank your site higher.
Most people think of search engine optimization as simply targeting keywords on their website. SEO is so much more than that. At JDM Growth Group, we focus our efforts on creating SEO strategies rooted in best practices to ensure your site gets the attention it deserves. We stay up to speed on all the latest SEO trends and Google algorithm updates, so you don’t have to. Trust our team of digital marketing professionals to help you work your way onto the first page of Google so you can start capturing some of the organic traffic in your niche. Reach out to us today for a risk-free consultation of your website.
