When users search for a word or phrase on the browser, the keyword ranking determines the order of website listings. The websites that get top positions have more visitors as users are likely to click the sites that appear on the SERP’s first page. It is helpful for inbound marketing, and lead generation becomes easy. It creates a better image, and a top ranking is also an indicator of a website’s authenticity. Thus the sites that rank well have more business opportunities.
Google is the most commonly used search engine, and websites need to optimise for Google ranking. With machine learning and artificial intelligence, search engine bots continuously understand user requirements and list the best-matching website at the top. Thus, businesses have to monitor keyword performance and ranking. Below are the essential SEO tips to improve keyword rankings.
1. Choose the right keywords
One has to classify the keywords as transactional and informational. Informational keywords are for new users looking for answers to common questions regarding a product, industry, or service. Thus the content having these keywords should introduce the brand to customers who are about to make a purchasing decision. These words and phrases belong to the money-maker category.
One can use keyword planner tools to come up with a content strategy. Another essential factor to consider is the quality of traffic that the keywords bring. One can make the long-tail keywords specific to the user’s requirements. These phrases have lower competition and traffic but ensure higher conversion rates. Once you select the keywords, it is essential to monitor their performance. You can always make changes as per the trending keywords without compromising user-friendliness and satisfaction. However, people usually make many SEO mistakes, and not paying attention to keywords while keeping search intention in mind could lead to big losses.
2. Prioritise site architecture
Google assigns a crawl budget to the website, and one has to make the search engine bots crawl the main pages and index them. If there are too many pages, you can use Robots.txt to prevent a few pages’ indexing. Also, every page should be reachable within five clicks. So, flat architecture is preferable. You can link pages via anchor texts. It is best to use topic-specific keywords as anchor texts. Such pages are only a click away and should have engaging and useful content. A note of caution: Do not have too many keywords and internal links.
At times you can have broken links; these do not work due to reasons like incorrect URLs, page removal, firewall issues, etc. These affect Google’s ranking badly as the visitors cannot get the desired information. You can check them with the Google Analytics tool. The page titles containing 404 give broken links. One way to fix them is to keep track of all the changes that you make to the site structure. You can hire a broken link building service for quick remediation. It is advisable to consolidate pages with similar content. Instead of removing pages, use 301 redirects.
3. Optimise for vocal and local searches
In this age of IoT devices and NLP technologies, people prefer to talk to their smart devices rather than keying in the text. Therefore, it is necessary to make the content suitable for voice assistants. One has to make the language as simple as possible. It should have a conversational style and try to give answers to users’ queries. The search algorithm is becoming more intuitive, and with voice searches, it becomes easy to know the user intent. Prioritising context is the key to organic ranking. One should think of questions regarding the product, service, industry, etc., and try incorporating them as long-tailed keywords.
People are using voice searches mostly to find products and services that are close to them. So, displaying business information, registering on platforms like Google My Business, and local directories, and having an active social media presence are a must. Also, mobile-optimised sites are helpful for voice searches.
4. Analyse the content
Google offers no-click search results. These are in the form of featured snippets, answer boxes, and knowledge panels. At times, we could see site links, reviews, images, and videos too. The snippets can have FAQs, lists, and tables. We have to design the web pages such that they can appear in these no-click boxes. The first step is to check sites featured by the search engine for your targeted keywords. Apart from the Google search page results, there are sites like Similarweb, SEMRush, SpyFu, etc., where you can find the webpages ranking for similar keywords.
In the HTML code of leading websites, it is possible to see the usage of keywords in the title tag and meta descriptions. As part of SEO, it is necessary to perform a content audit. It helps you identify the best-performing pages and keywords that you haven’t ranked or covered.
5. Get more backlinks
Backlinks are links from other sites to your web page. Search engines value these and rank the websites with quality backlinks higher. The anchor texts have the target keywords, and the users can reach your site with an affirmative opinion. Therefore it is necessary to create linkable assets like informative blog posts, videos, and surveys. One has to ensure that the backlinks refer to active and updated content, as a broken link can harm your impression. The links should be genuine and come from websites that are related to your field.
On the other hand, you can also consider Blogger Outreach Service which will help your brand in terms of visibility, traffic, conversions and trust.
Final Thoughts
Choosing the right keyword and effectively positioning them is a must for ranking higher on search pages. You need to design the content from a customer perspective. The search engine algorithms also try to understand the user intent and give a better ranking when the context matches. It is a highly competitive process and requires constant monitoring. In the long term, a consistent appearance among the first few sites on the result page helps you build trust and authority.
