SEO For 2019

5 Things You Can Do Now to Improve Your Rankings

14:53 17 April 2019

It's not always as simple as it may seem to raise your Google rankings, the SEO competition can be hard and there are thousands of web pages contending for the first page of the Google SERPS.

However, this doesn’t mean that it’s impossible - with the correct mindset and plans in place you can boost your rankings and increase your organic traffic using SEO.

In a nutshell, the whole idea behind the process is simple, recognise which keywords you want to advance your Google rankings for then set up a plan of action, after this go ahead and implement the plan then watch your rankings surge.

What are the benefits of achieving high rankings?

There are many advantages to utilising SEO to attain high rankings, below we have listed a few:

• Rise in targeted organic traffic – we have started by listing the most valuable source of traffic a website can have.
  
  
• Increase in sales and enquiries.
  
  
• Rise in social prominence – this means users are a lot more likely to share a webpage that they have come across on the first pages of Google with their supporters/followers.
  
  
• A huge surge in trust – if Google has confidence in your site and gives you a better ranking for some keywords, even though they aren’t that competitive, this is still a very good sign that what you are doing is in the right direction and you will slowly start to see more and more benefits over time.
  
  

What can I do to improve my rankings?

1. Create a ranking report

A plan is not whole without having clearly defined achievable goals so the first step is to recognise what you would like to achieve. Unlike most trades, in the land of search engine optimisation, everything you do is measured so in this case you should begin your preparation process by creating a ranking report to find out what keywords are currently bringing organic traffic to your website. You need to completely understand your current SEO position and then use more data to come up with your targets. If you’re not sure where to start, consult an SEO agency who’ll be able to advise.

To generate the SEO report, you need two things:

• Data from the performance report from your Google Search Console Account - set the date range on this to 3 months as this will give you a good impression.
  
  
• A tool to help you track your ranking positions e.g. SEMrush.
  
  

TIP – Eliminate brand type keywords, for instance, your domain name.

2. Define your ranking goals

In the step above you created a ranking report that contains keywords that at present bring traffic to your website from Google. The next step is keyword research to find out which keywords can possibly raise your organic traffic and hit your ranking goals. You need to identify which keywords can grow your organic traffic if you improve their rankings. These keywords are ones that you have ranking at present, and also have a fairly good monthly search volume.

TIP – You can class your ranking report by monthly search volume and look at your ranking places.

Complete keyword research to find new possible keywords, other than looking at keywords you already have a good ranking for, you also need to identify other keywords that can bring you more Google traffic.

These keywords are:

• Connected to your current keywords
  
  
• Have a good monthly search volume
  
  
• They are long tail keywords
  
  
• The keyword difficulty value isn’t high
  
  

You can also use the Google keyword tool to do your research or you can use a feature in SEMrush named “Keyword Magic.” The “SEO Magic” of this tool is that it helps you find keywords that meet the four standards above in a very easy and fast way. For example, let’s assume that you have a beauty and fashion blog and are looking to find more keywords to target. You already have loads of blogs that relate to “how to get clear skin” and you want to find more possible keywords. You can enter this into SEO keyword magic, and it will come up with linked searches and suggestions of what to target for example “how to get healthy skin in a week.”

3. Think about your competitive advantage

Now that you have a stronger impression about your targets the resulting step is to examine your competitors i.e. the websites that now have a higher ranking for your keywords and reflect about your competitive benefit. The entire idea of this stage is to make you think of how you can improve your content and provide a better experience to users compared to what is currently accessible because this is precisely what Google wants. At this stage it’s mainly all about the content on the pages.

You will need to click on each of the websites on the first pages of Google and take notes about:

• The kind of content they have, for instance – text, videos and pictures
  
  
• The length of the content – page headings and page images
  
  
• The page format
  
  
• Any external links they have in their text.
  
  

Once the above info is gathered it’s time to compare it with yours:

• Is your content higher quality?
  
  
• What about your website structure compared to theirs?
  
  
• Did you miss any points in the content that you have similar to them?
  
  

Don’t forget when doing this step be strict on yourself.

4. Work on your on-page SEO and Content

Nearly all of your above findings have to do with your on-page SEO. Things like page headings and descriptions, content length, h1 headers and pictures.

TIP – An SEO agency will be able to complete a full audit of your current website for you.

Firstly, you must work on current pages and try to improve their rankings and furthermore make new pages to target keywords that you don’t have ranking at the current time.

To improve rankings on your existing pages the below would help:

• Build links internally – link other related pages from your website
  
  
• Evaluate your headings and H1 headers and make sure that they contain your target keywords
  
  
• Try improving the loading speed of your pages
  
  
• Review content to guarantee it’s all up to date and does not have any broken links. If you feel like it's essential to add new content to make the page more stimulating after looking at the competitors, go ahead and do this too.
  
  

5. Generate a link building plan

What important SEO factor is absent from the above phases? That’s right, backlinks.

How to generate a link building strategy, although links are very good and we want them on our websites, it must be made clear that not all links are good. Bad links can do more harm to your website and may be the reason for getting a Google penalty or fine, which would mean that your rankings would drop hugely. What you need to add is a “natural” link, this is a link that’s added by the website owner because it increases value to their content and improve the user's experience as it makes it easier to navigate. To avoid some of the “bad” links that you don’t want to associate your website with you would need to disable comments on your blog posts as this is where others tend to go and add links to their websites.

The main note to takeaway from this piece is that there are key SEO tactics you could be doing to advance your rankings now without taking any risks of violating any of Googles procedures and rules. Follow the above tips to improve your rankings or consult a local SEO company for further guidance.