How can I rank my website on Google?
Help! My website isn’t showing up on Google…
Picture this, you’ve made a beautiful website. It looks great, highlights your business values and works like a dream, but for some reason you still can’t find your website on Google. What’s happening?
It’s most likely that you need to work on your SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it’s the process of improving a website for search engines. Google crawls the web looking for new or updated web pages. It then indexes them so that users can find the most appropriate answer to their question. For example, when a user types in “best nail technician in Birmingham” into the search bar, the results will show nail technicians in Birmingham.
Putting the effort into your SEO means that you are more likely to show up in search engine results. Ranking higher in the search results means that you’ll get more traffic to your website.
SEO can sound scary at first, but when you break it down, it really is about describing your webpage accurately so that your ideal readers can find you. That’s why I have put together a guide on how to improve your search engine ranking. Your search ranking won’t improve overnight as it can take Google a while to index the pages, but we all have to start somewhere. By following these steps you will see improvements over time.
A beginner’s guide to improving your SEO and driving more traffic to your website.
What do you want your website to rank for online?
First things first, you need to figure out what words you want to rank highly for. When a potential customer goes to Google, what words or phrases are they likely to search for when looking for a business like yours. It’s better to be specific with this, especially in saturated markets. For example, you would have difficulty ranking high for yoga studios because there are so many good yoga studios. However, if you targeted best hot-pod yoga studio in Birmingham, you will more likely be found by searchers looking for a hot-pod yoga studio in Birmingham.
How to figure out which keywords to use?
Write a list of all of the words and phrases associated with your business.
How can you make these more specific to you so that you aren’t lost in all of the other search results?
Think like a google user. What type of words or phrases would a potential customer use to try and find a business like yours? What questions are they asking and how are you answering them?
Start typing these phrases into a search engine - what does it begin to autofill with? This will show you some popular searches that are being used.
Target people in your location. Even if you are an online-only business, targeting people in your area will help to reach those potential customers.
Use a relevant page titles and meta-descriptions:
Every page should have a unique page title that is short but relevant to the content. It also needs a meta description. This is a short summary of text describing what the page is about.
Remember that a real person will be searching and seeing the results in Google. This means that it needs to be written well and clearly show that the page will provide the information that they are looking for. If the description isn’t relevant to the content on the webpage, then they are likely to leave the website quickly because it wasn’t what they were looking for. Imagine clicking onto a search result expecting to find a webpage with a cake recipe and then finding yourself on a holiday website. You’d probably think it was strange and click off the page straight away.
Where do I put the page titles and meta descriptions?
This will depend on how your website is hosted. If you are using a website builder such as Squarespace or Wix, they have SEO sections in their editors where you can put this information - no code necessary. If you are working with a website developer, then they will input this information into the html head part of your website.
Use headings to structure your content
Make sure to use headings appropriately in your website. In web design, there are 6 types of headings, starting with the most important H1 to the least important H6. You need to use the heading types correctly.
Think as if you were writing a magazine article, the main heading (H1) should reflect what the article/ webpage is about, then the sub headings (H2) should describe what is in the sections.
For example:
Heading 1: How can I rank my website on Google?
Heading 2: What is SEO? Heading 2: How to improve your SEO?
Check your site speed
A slow website will affect your search ranking as Google prioritises websites that load faster. Large images and video files are often the biggest cause of a slow website. Of course you want to have eye-catching imagery and videos on your website. They engage the user and keep their attention on the page. So, how can we still have these engaging images without slowing down the website?
The trick is to find the balance between a high quality image and file size:
Only use PNG files for images that need a transparent background. You can use JPEG files if they don’t need to be transparent, as they have a much smaller file size.
You can also use websites such as https://tinypng.com/ - they’ll compress your PNG/ JPEG images without losing the picture quality.
When exporting your images, you only need 72 dpi for use on screens.
Provide quality content
The final tip is to provide quality content that will keep the user on your website once they have found you through a search engine. The content should be engaging and relevant to your business. It should be written using the keywords and phrases that you want to rank highly in Google for. Now this doesn’t mean listing the keywords in your page for the sake of it. Instead, you should use the keywords in a natural way that make sense to the reader.
