The Best Ways to Rank Your Website on the SERP with the Help of Digital Marketing Experts

  • By James Silverwood
  • 02-04-2019
  • Digital Marketing
digital marketing
An important thing to remember about improving the visibility of your business in the search engine results pages (SERPs) is that every other company is trying to do that same thing.
 
The other thing to remember is that SEO is a long game and quick results are either unlikely or unhelpful. Improving Google rankings has no set time frame, there are many variables including budget, level of competition, and of course, quality. This is why continuous improvement is vital to how your site is crawled and indexed.
 
So, taking all of that into account, let's look at some great ways that digital marketing experts suggest to rank your website on the SERP.
 
Quality website structure and information architecture
You want to make every step of the journey to quality SEO count, and the first step should feature a website that is easy to navigate and possibly even easier for Google to crawl.
 
Keep usability at the forefront of your mind and constantly perform technical SEO audits that look at issues like duplicate content. This standard issue can be multiple versions of the same page and can be avoided by ensuring proper redirects in your .htaccess file.
 
Mobile optimization
There are a few reasons why you shouldn't even dream of not being fit for mobile consumption, the main ones being the sheer number of people who are using the web via their handheld devices and the other being Google's mobile-first index.
 
Make sure your website passes the Mobile-Friendly Test which Google themselves has said means the mobile version of a page will be used for indexing and ranking.
 
In order to avoid a mobile ranking meltdown, you should double down on mobile tasks and performance.
 
The best sections of your mobile site to focus on are the tasks that users perform on your site, make sure they can happen smoothly on a mobile device, and performance. Make sure downloading times on both the mobile and desktop versions of your site aren't slowed down by images. This is particularly pertinent on mobile devices, however.
 
Speed matters
Google PageSpeed is a tool that will allow you to benchmark the performance of your site. It takes into account the following things, which you can also look at to help speed things up if you are lagging behind:
- Image file size
- Browser caching
- Script handling
 
Links also matter
Internal and external links are some of the most significant contributors to website rankings. Broken links affect your user experience and can be fixed by running a crawl on your site.
 
Pro tip: Set up a Google Alert on your business so you can turn any positive mentions into links. If you find any mentions that are unlinked, contact the webmaster and request a link.
 
On-page optimization
The last thing to discuss is on-page, and there is a Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide that can really help you in this department and is worth a read. We've touched on some basics which are a great place to start, and you will likely notice a difference if you implement them, but there is far more you can do.
 
Some handy things to do that will spruce up your on-page optimization include the use of SEO-friendly URLs. The first five words in a URL are important and short URLs will rank better. Try to add your target keyword in there as well.
 
It's also a good move to start your title tag with your keyword as it is one of the most crucial on-page SEO factors. The closer the keyword is to the start of the title tag, the more credence it is given by search engines. Modifiers can also help your title, can you spot the one in the title of this article for example?
 
The more Google about your pages via structured data throughout your site, the easier it can understand and rank accordingly. Do what you can to keep Google happy, and it will reward you by putting you in front of potential customers who are looking for whatever it is you are offering!

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Author

James Silverwood

James Silverwood is the SEO and marketing manager for a digital marketing agency in Riyadh. He helps clients grow their web visibility through all aspects of digital marketing.

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