As the owner of a business, it’s incredibly likely you’ve come across the importance of Google Search Rankings before. It’s something that gets talked about a lot, and there’s a huge focus on these rankings in every industry. SEO is on its way to becoming a $100 billion dollar industry due to the importance of ranking high on Google and getting that elusive organic traffic.
What we’re going to address today is what these search engine optimization rankings are and, ultimately, how you can improve yours. As well as this, we’ll discuss why improving your ranking is important for your business. To learn about all of this, you can read the introductory Google ranking guide below:
What Are Google Search Rankings?
To put it simply, the Google search rankings are simply the results you see when you search for something through Google. You’ll type in a keyword or phrase and get greeted with a list of links taking you to different sites. While some people may assume this list is random, it’s actually a carefully organized set of results where each link has been ranked in order of relevance.
It’s a very simple concept, the higher up the page a website link is, the higher its Google search ranking is. There are two types of search ranking in Google; organic and sponsored. The latter refers to any links that have been paid for. This occurs through PPC advertising where companies bid on keywords to get their site in the sponsored results.
This article will solely focus on the organic search rankings. These rankings look at websites that appear naturally in searches. You haven’t paid to advertise your site, it’s earned its ranking naturally.
Why Is It Important To Have A Good Ranking?
As you’re aware, there’s always a lot of talk about boosting your search ranking. Businesses are always advised to try and get their ranking as high as possible for relevant keywords. The big question is, why is this important?
With good search rankings, your business will be more visible. If you take a look at this article here, you will see that the top search result gets around a third of web traffic for that search. People are more likely to click on results in the top five or six ranking spots, with any results on lower pages being almost obsolete. As an example, just look at your own search habits. When was the last time you even clicked on page two of the search results? It’s very rare, which means if your business is lingering down there it won’t see a lot of traffic.
The higher your ranking, the more chance there is of gaining traffic. As a result, you also have a higher chance of converting that traffic and generating leads. It has a knock-on effect that can be really beneficial for your business. As well as the increase in traffic and leads, you also enhance your reputation. Consumers are used to seeing authority sites in the first few ranking spots. It’s always the big companies they know and trust that appear there. So, if you’re moving up the rankings for your keywords and appearing in that top 5, people start to trust your business more and more. You give the appearance of an authority figure as they see you’re a top result and assume you must be trustworthy.
How Can You Improve Your Ranking?
After seeing why it’s important to improve your ranking, we can now move onto the how part. How can you go about improving your Google search ranking? If you have a look online, you will find countless articles listing different Google ranking factors. These are all the things Google takes into account when they sort results and rank sites. If we ran through them all, we’d be here all day.
So, to make life easier for you, we’ll pick out some of the most important ranking factors to consider for your business website:
Link Building
Link building is all about generating backlinks to your website. This refers to getting other pages to link to your desired web pages. The idea is that if you have loads of links pointing to your site, then it must be valuable and Google gives you a little rankings boost.
There are two main ways you can generate backlinks to your site. The first is to try and find a lot of bloggers and ask them to include your links naturally in their content through blog outreach. This takes a lot of time, but it is highly effective.
As you can see here, the second option is to go out and buy high-quality backlinks. A lot of businesses have success doing this as it saves time, but it will cost money.
Content
Your website content is often considered the main ranking factor to consider. Google puts a lot of emphasis on valuable content. Many of their updates to the search algorithm will punish sites with meaningless content, spammy content, or plagiarized content. But, if your website has great content that provides value for users, it will start to rank highly.
The key is ensuring you have a website that includes content that people will enjoy consuming. They need to get something out of your website, put it that way. They might gain information from what you’ve written, or find it entertaining, etc. The content you have on there should include your main keywords naturally, and you should organize it properly with headers, images, and so on. If your page is simply a big block of text with no relevance to anything and no keywords, then that page won’t rank highly.
You can include high quality unique content from guest bloggers, and you can also write helpful articles for other bloggers and online publications.
Mobile-Friendly User Experience
The final factor we’ll discuss is a mobile-friendly user experience. It’s become incredibly important to put a mobile-friendly site at the top of your priority list. In fact, we mentioned it in our previous article here, as a way of making your site more SEO-friendly.
The fact is, billions of people now search via Google's mobile site. In fact, mobile searches now outnumber desktop searches! Therefore, you must ensure your site is optimized for the mobile rankings as well as the desktop ones. With Google’s current algorithm, any sites that are mobile-friendly will get rankings boosts, and those that aren’t will get penalized. So, it’s simple, make sure your website is designed for mobile use, and it will rank well in mobile results.
Voice Searches Are Growing
Tech-savvy consumers are buying tens of millions of Amazon Echo and Google Home units and a variety of similar devices like Sonos One. Your website, content, and keywords, and overall SEO tactics need to start reflecting that and optimizing for voice. Keywords will often times be long-tail and conversational instead of a few words. Your content should reflect how people actually speak, especially how they ask questions and expect answers. This will continue to be a growing trend as these devices become more popular and more advanced. Automobile manufacturers are now starting to include them as built-in bluetooth features in new cars, so people can do voice searches while they're driving.
Hopefully, this guide has been useful, and you now know everything there is to know about Google search rankings. You can see why it’s important to care about your ranking and why you need to give your SEO a big boost.
I hope you enjoyed this article about Google search rankings and everything you need to know for SEO success.
Interested in more articles about search engine optimization?
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