Ranking in organic search can be very important to secure traffic for your website and subsequently generate leads and/or sales for your business. Search engine optimisation is one of the most important digital marketing channels which goes hand in hand with the importance that the world wide web now plays in our daily lives.
Growth of the World Wide Web
Before taking a look at some practical steps to improve your websites rankings it is important to understand why ranking in organic search is so imperative to success. There are over 1.8 billion websites worldwide and this number is constantly growing. The likelihood is that there will be a number of websites offering the same products and/or services that your website does.
How do people find websites?
Search engines are still the most popular place that people turn to when they want an answer to a question or want to look for a product and/or service.
Google processes 2 trillion searches every year worldwide, which equates to 5.5 billion searches per day and 64,000 search queries every single second. When people type their query into the Google search box a number of results will be returned. The goal is for your website to show when someone types in a query that is related to your business’ offering.
There are of course other search engines such as Bing and Yahoo!, but Google has an 85% market share in the UK compared to Bing’s 12% and Is therefore undoubtedly the leading search engine.
3 Practical SEO Steps to Rank Higher
There are a number of things you can do to improve the chances of your website ranking in search engine results. In this article we’re going to take a look at 4 important things you can do to help your website rank higher.
1. Define what keywords you want to rank for
Your SEO keywords are the key words and phrases in your web content that make it possible for people to find your website via search engines. You need to decide what you want to be found for and then find the keywords that are most relevant to your products and/or services.
The best way to do this is to conduct keyword research to identify opportunities and then create high quality content targeting these keywords.
There are a number of keyword research tools that you can use. SEMrush is a highly effective tool for performing in-depth keyword analysis. Add a keyword to this tool and it will generate a number of related search terms including the search volumes for these keywords and the competitiveness of the term.
This tool is very effective, but also costly. A good digital marketing consultancy should have access to a tool like SEMrush or similar, and this is where seeking search engine optimisation services can be beneficial for your company, as the consultancy can use these tools to provide you with an in-depth keyword analysis.
Alternatively, there are some free tools that you can make use of to get started.
Google Trends
This free tool from Google allows you to enter a term and get a trend graph showing how the popularity for that term has evolved over a custom date range from 2004 onwards to the last one hour. The tool will also provide a number of ‘Related queries’, which can provide an idea of what else is searched for around the term you originally entered and show content creation ideas.
AnswerThePublic
This is another free tool that will provide you with great content creation ideas. Simply visit AnswerThePublic, enter your keyword into the search box and click ‘Geht Questions’. This will generate a number of related questions around your search term.
The drawback is that you do not receive any search volume data for the questions generated, so you are not able to tell which queries are performing best from the organic viewpoint. This can make it difficult to prioritise content creation.
A tool like SEMrush will give you search volume statistics, which can help you to make better informed decisions on what content to create.
2. Provide useful content
Content is key to being found online. It doesn’t matter how ‘pretty’ your website is, without quality content it will never rank. It is important to produce high quality, optimised content.
It is important to remember that Google aims to show people the best possible answer to their query. This means that to rank highly in Google your content piece must be better than what else is out there.
If your piece of content doesn’t provide the best answer, then it won’t rank highly.
3. Optimise for local search
Have you setup your Google My Business listing? Google My Business offers a free opportunity for your business to appear in Google search results. It is highly recommended to set up your business listing in Google, which will help your business to appear in local search results and appear on Google maps.
Improve your business’ local search visibility by setting up and optimising your Google My Business listing.
Your Google My Business listing will dominate page real estate if fully optimised, so make sure to fill in all the details on Google. You can share blog posts, events and product/service offers via the post function to further promote your business.
Your business will then have a Google Map result, which makes it easier for people to find you. In addition, you can embed a Google Map on your website easily.
The power of Google Maps goes beyond someone just searching for your business name. It can also be a great way for your business to show for more generic searches. For example, one of our clients Tanshire Park, is a business park in Surrey and when you type ‘business parks in surrey’ into Google Maps Tanshire Park shows as the top result.
As you can see from the screenshot the more information that has been filled in on the Google My Business listing, the more information that is displayed on the map result including the address, the type of business it is, opening times and reviews.
Reviews is something that we would certainly encourage pushing for as there is an option to filter by reviews, meaning if someone selects 4.5 starts or above and your listing has one bad review that’s dragging it down, then you won’t appear.
Google My Business Insights
In addition, to the benefits described above you can also get data in the ‘Insights’ tab in the Google My Business dashboard. You can get data about your Google My Business listing performance, which can prove the value of time invested in optimising the listing.
Improve your organic rankings
Taking steps to improve your websites organic rankings can have a number of benefits for your business. Increased website traffic can lead to increased leads and sales, and subsequently increased profit for your company.
The Innovation Visual team work with a number of clients to improve their organic rankings. If you would like to find out more about our search engine optimisation services, then please contact our team to find out how we can help get your website to rank.
