Everyone wants their business to show up on the top of Google’s search results, but this is not an easy task. You can have the best product, the cheapest price, and the greatest Facebook ads, but none of these things will get you on the top of the search results page. If you’re seeing your competitors at the top of your Google search results page, you may need to take a look at these tips.
Unfortunately, this is not a one-click solution. Google uses an algorithm that takes over 200 factors into account to determine your site’s search rankings. Although we can’t go through all 200 factors, we can give you a few of the most important that may help bump your search rankings up.
Keywords
The first step in making sure your site is seen is choosing the best keywords. Keywords are the words a user enters in the search box when looking for a specific product or business. You must ensure your keywords match what customers are searching for. You can use Google Analytics to help determine which keywords perform best for your business.
Content
Just as important as the keywords used to get to your site are the words that are on your site. Search engines are smart, and they can distinguish sites that are relevant from those that are not. You need to ensure you have enough information to sufficiently cover your topic, but not so much that it becomes cluttered. Each topic on your site should add value to users and should have its own separate page. If your content is not relevant or valuable, your website may have a high bounce rate. The bounce rate is the number of visitors to your website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. Google will see this and will penalize your website for a high bounce rate. Be sure to keep your content relevant and up to date in order to avoid this.
Navigation
Navigation refers to the way visitors move from page to page on your website and also to the links directing visitors to your website. Your website should be structured in a manner that is easy for search engines to follow. The search engines must index you site to pull relevant content, and tools such as Java can be hard for them to read. We recommend structuring your website using HTML or CSS. You also want to ensure you have links from other websites that lead back to your site. This shows Google that your website is relevant because other sites are referencing it.
If you’ve optimized all of the above tips and are still having trouble getting your site to show up on the first page of Google, there could be another factor that you can’t control affecting your search rankings. For example, age of a website will directly impact many other factors that Google considers. If your website is fairly new versus a competitor’s website that has been around for years, your website will be lagging in links, content, and traffic numbers. You cannot necessarily control this, but it is something that will develop with age.
We hope these tips have given you a good idea of how to troubleshoot why your search rankings may not be as high as you’d like. If you need further assistance, please contact us today.