At times when online shoppers tend to discover and buy things online, you have to appear on the first page of Google results to get noticed. Irrespective of how great your products and services are, if your potential buyers don’t end up on your website, you can’t make sales.
Approximately 80% of online users that visit Google search pages to find products or services never go beyond the first page of results. Moreover, the results on page one get over 40% of total clicks.
Now you can fairly understand why search engine optimization is important for online websites and digital marketing. Over the years search engine optimization has leveled up its authenticity. It’s now beyond stuffing keywords to match search queries. Instead, it’s now all about understanding the user intent behind the search queries.
In a nutshell, Google now prefers websites that offer better search experience and to-the-point answers to the queries asked. Your SEO strategy should now be focused on search intent and user experience.
How to Improve Your Google Keyword Rankings?
You can’t achieve the results just by focusing solely on keywords and backlinks. Google considers over 200+ ranking signals to rank a website in SERPs. Thus, to win over the top positions in Google search results, you should consider the following ranking signals to improve your Google keyword rankings.
Audit your current rankings
Putting your house in order is the first thing you can do to see signs of improvement. To improve your SEO efforts, you should start by measuring your existing rankings. Unless you understand your keywords’ performance, you can’t predict how much work has been done and how much is left. It will show you your progress to date.
You can also get immediate help from the search console and Google analytics to fetch keyword data and landing page traffic (organic and total) respectively.
Once you have the data at your disposal, you can unearth the following:
- Valuable keywords/landing pages
- Immediate opportunities for improvement
- Underperforming keywords/landing pages
Your focus should be on improving those keywords that are ranking in positions five through fifteen. These keywords can be improved easily by putting in some good SEO efforts.
Target The Right Keywords
Keyword research is another important element of your SEO strategy. It ensures that your target keywords being used are aligned with business objectives. Find out the search intent and difficulty of keywords before launching your next SEO campaign.
Based on the user intent, keywords are of three types namely informational, educational, transactional, or navigational. Run a thorough keyword analysis to understand the current ranking of keywords in SERP.
The tool can also provide important information about everything that is required to rank a particular keyword. It will help you build new and improvised content marketing plans from scratch. Target both money keywords and long-tail keywords equally. Long-term keywords have lower search volume but they serve a relatively highly targeted audience.
Improve your website structure
Your website structure plays a significant role in website SEO. It’s therefore important to find and fix a website's technical glitches to set a solid foundation. Technical issues can hurt a website's organic keyword visibility.
Work on your site navigation so that users and search engines can find and navigate site pages. If search engines find it difficult to crawl your website, you will see a considerable drop in your keyword rankings. If you succeed in offering an intuitive user experience for both users and search engines.
Start from scratch. Find and fix the broken link and duplicate link issues. A comprehensive technical audit is necessary to identify technical issues and address them on priority.
Identify user experience signals
User experience plays a vital role in improving organic search visibility. Though it’s not a direct ranking signal, it works in correlation with SEO to bring superb results in terms of organic traffic and ranking. You can go through Google’s Core Web Vitals report to find how your website is doing around user experience.
Some of the important UX factors that you need to look into are:
- Website responsiveness
- Website meta tags
- Content optimization
- Page speed optimization
Create an engaging post title
I am not exaggerating by saying that post/page title tags are the most important SEO element. Your post title is the first thing that users see when they interact with your listing on search engine result pages and social media platforms where you have posted.
A great title encourages users to click on the link and visit the website page. Use the keyword in the title that you want to rank the page for. The keyword should be at the very beginning of the title.
Similarly, use catchy meta descriptions organically filled with your targeted keywords. Emotional and catchy headlines always drive interactions and engagement. They should be written in a way that explains the benefits to users, provokes emotion, and triggers engagement.
Conclusion
To see your website on top for the competitive keywords, you have to work consistently on your SEO and other aspects. It takes time and patience to get results. So, if you don’t see results overnight, keep working. Delayed results don’t mean you’re not on the right track. Having your website on top with commendable traffic SEO best practices and white hat strategies.
Tarun Gupta, CEO of Brainpulse Technologies, is a prolific author and digital marketing specialist. His insightful writings span SEO, content marketing, social media strategy, and email campaigns, offering invaluable expertise to businesses worldwide. Tarun’s contributions continue to shape the digital marketing landscape, guiding success in multiple niches.
