How to Improve Your Ranking on Google: A Guide

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If you own a business but your website is just not reaching its full potential on Google search, it can feel extremely frustrating. You have a great website, yet no one is seeing it – meaning missed opportunities, fewer leads, and slower business growth.

The truth is, being able to rank high on Google isn’t just about having a website, no, it’s about making sure your site is optimised, user-friendly, and packed with valuable content that search engines (and your target audience/ visitors) love. 

With billions of web pages competing for attention, implementing effective SEO strategies can make all the difference when it comes to boosting your visibility and driving organic traffic.

In this guide, we’ll break down the key factors that influence your SEO ranking and help your website get the attention it truly deserves.

Improve your organic ranking on Google by following these 6 steps:

1. Focus on User Experience

First things first, you must be focusing on user experience (UX) if you want your website to flourish. And if you haven’t heard of this term before, UX refers to how a user interacts with and experiences a website. It involves factors like how easy a page is to navigate, how fast the page takes to load, mobile responsiveness, how visually appealing it is, accessibility, and overall satisfaction of the customer.

Search engines prioritise websites that offer seamless, quick, and responsive experiences, making UX an incredibly important aspect of your website if you want to improve your SEO rankings.

What’s more, according to a study, 88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a site after a bad experience, meaning that not only does a poor UX impact your SEO rankings, but it can also directly impact your business by reducing customer retention, engagement, and conversions.

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A good UX ensures that visitors can find what they need quickly, engage with content effortlessly, and complete their desired actions, whether that’s making a purchase or filling out a form, without feeling frustrated.

2. Create High-Quality, Valuable Content

Ever heard the saying content is king? When it comes to SEO, having high-quality, valuable content on your website plays a crucial role in improving your rankings on Google. And this is for a number of reasons

Firstly, if you’re constantly writing and publishing engaging and informative content that speaks to your target audience, users will naturally stay on your website for longer, which signals to search engines like Google that your page is relevant and offers the reader value. Google will see this and reward your site with higher rankings, as longer dwell time and lower bounce rates are key indicators of quality content that aligns with user intent. 

Another way high quality content can help improve your rankings is that, if a reader finds your blog informative and references it in their own work, you will obtain backlinks from authoritative websites, which boosts your domain authority and credibility.

Learn more about how blog posts help SEO and tips for writing high-quality blogs, here.

And if you need assistance writing SEO-optimised blogs that will rank highly on search, our experts can help! Give us a call on +44 (0) 77110 52211 or enquire via this form for a friendly chat about our services.

3. Optimise On-Page SEO

A fundamental part of SEO is on-page optimisation, which is the process of optimising individual webpages, ensuring the content is both relevant to the page and provides a great user experience. By optimising on-page SEO, you’re directly telling Google what your page is about, improving its ability to understand and rank your content.

What Is On Page Optimisation​?

On-page optimisation begins with smart keyword targeting, where keywords are threaded naturally throughout content and only mentioned in key elements when necessary. Learn more about why keywords are important for SEO here. 

After carrying out extensive keyword research for your website and each page, you’ll want to focus on optimising the following on-page elements:

  • Titles (H1’s, H2’s, H3’s etc.) – The main headings/ subheadings of each page
  • Title tags & meta descriptions (metadata)
  • Alt text (images)
  • Internal linking – These are links to other pages on your website. 

4. Optimise Off-Page SEO

Unlike on-page SEO, which involves optimising certain elements within your website like content, meta tags, and internal links etc., the goal of off-page SEO is to basically get search engines (and users) to view your site as more trustworthy, credible and authoritative. 

This is especially important for Google’s ranking algorithm, which uses signals beyond just the content of your website to determine its position in search results.

What Is Off Page Optimisation​?

One of the most critical elements of off-page SEO is building high-quality backlinks, which we touched on further up the blog. These are links from other websites to yours and search engines consider them as “votes” for the quality and relevance of your content. 

As well as creating high quality content that people reference in their own work, other common ways to gain backlinks include PR tactics things like responding to journalist requests, getting your guest posts published on other websites with a link to your site or press releases.

Learn more about off-page optimisation in our guide.

5. Improve Technical SEO

Another absolutely essential thing when looking to improve your website’s ranking on Google is to ensure that your technical SEO is under control. Technical SEO looks at improving the technical side of a website and focuses on ensuring that search engine crawlers can access, understand, and index the content of a website efficiently.

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A well-optimised website will meet the technical requirements of modern search engines.

Technical SEO improves things like page loading times, mobile friendliness and how the website content is structured, which are all incredibly important for Google as, if a website takes a long time to load for example, the user is likely going to click off the page and onto another website due to the poor user experience. This then has a knock on effect for dwell time and bounce rate, which we touched on in point number 2.

How Lumen SEO Can Help

We at Lumen SEO can take care of your whole SEO strategy, including keyword research, link building, content writing and technical SEO. And you can learn more about what an SEO agency, like ours does, here.

If you like the sound of working with us, we offer free, no-obligation SEO audits on business websites. To claim yours, simply enter your details here and we’ll get a free SEO audit to you within 7 days. It will include the strengths and weaknesses of your website along with the top three aspects you should focus on improving, in order to enhance your business’ ranking.

For a friendly chat about the SEO services we provide here at Lumen SEO, contact our SEO consultants today. Alternatively, you can message us on either our LinkedIn or Instagram pages.

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