When it comes to ranking a website on Google, we get asked time and time again how to do it and what’s involved. There are many factors that will help you move your website up the rankings and it involves hard work and making sure your brand or services speaks loudly and more to the point relevant to your target audience and location. In regards to our customers who are generally small to medium businesses on our pay monthly plans, these are the general rules you want to follow and we hope this makes more sense in how we want to partner with our clients going forward.
1 – Building your digital weight
This is what we call it, but we know that the more relevant information there is out there about your business (notice we said relevance – this is the buzz word here), the more hits your website will get and with it being relevant your CTR (click through rate) will be much higher. So, we need you to have social media platforms in place for your business – Facebook page, Twitter, Linkedin, Google Plus and any other more local platforms that suit your business needs such as Houzz, Checkatrade, Rated People (for trade markets). Once we have the social media all setup, we then need to blog about your business, when blogging about your business, you want to show people before and afters, new products, company news, new services, new staff – anything that promotes your business and again – keeps your website relevant. Adding news to your blog enables marketers like us to write out relevant content about your services and locations meaning more chance of keyword variations being seen.
2 – Backlinks
Google’s algorithm relies on links coming back from high pr websites to your website. So, how Google ranks the site is by getting relevant backlinks from websites Google already trusts that link back to your site thus showing Google you must have good services or news to convey. The best way to do this is to reach out to companies you may have worked with that rank well and ask them to write about an experience they had working with your company. This will provide a good relevant backlink which will help your site rank for the keywords you are pushing. Also, UK Directory sites and local sites provide the fundamental foundations of any link campaign and can be keyword focused.
3 – Onsite Optimisation
Making your site title, page title (meta titles) page descriptions (meta descriptions) around your keywords are a must. Also, making good use of keyword density in your copy such as making sure the keyword is in the first paragraph and closing paragraph and used throughout the copy (be careful to not overuse as this is classed as keyword stuffing). Where you can, it is always good to use header hierarchy such as H1 for the title then H2,H3,H4 and so on. This enables Google to read the content better and organise.
Make sure you optimise your images with alt text and make sure they image size is not causing the page to run slowly. Use videos where you can especially if embedded from Youtube as Google owns Youtube and knows video marketing is more effective than reading articles – we are in the video marketing age.
Creating a clear and concise sitemap is essential for Google to crawl the pages on your site and putting this in to a clear and easy to follow sitemap will help with the ranking process. Also, make sure robots.txt is set to allow for all pages you want to index and then go ahead and submit your website sitemap to Google Console. Google Console is a great tool for monitoring your website’s health and to see how Google is crawling your website.
There is a 4th golden rule in making sure you have a mobile optimised website, but we have covered this another article.
So, following these 3 basic core rules will be the foundations of creating a website that will, over time rank well and keep you high in the search results but also keep your business relevant. Remember the 3 core value to ranking a site:
- 1 – Keep your site relevant to your business
- 2 – Backlinks from higher PR websites
- 3 – Keep your page load quick
