How do I improve my website ranking?

2. Keywords

The main focus of your text content should be to engage with your potential client or customer so you should not overdo this element but it is useful if your text includes certain keyword phrases that a reader may be looking for such as “How do I improve my website ranking?”.

So how do you work out what keywords to include in your text? You could use Google’s own keyword planning tool which is part of Google AdWords and is available for free. This shows both an indication of the number of monthly visits for a key and the level of competition from other websites for the same keyword.

There are also many paid offerings that do the same thing and suggest which keywords will be easiest to optimise for.

Another free way of finding keywords is to see what comes up on Google for a search term in the “People also searched for” section. Often these are framed as questions such as “Why is my site not ranking?” Or “Where can I get a good pizza near me?”.

3. Incoming links to your site

It is a very important factor in ranking that your website has good quality, relevant links from other websites. Ideally, you would have websites linking to yours that are highly regarded in their own right. This is difficult to achieve without a lot of effort and caution that you don't pick up links from irrelevant sites or sites that search engines might consider spammy!

The obvious place to start with links is any social media accounts that you have. Depending on the type of business that you run you may find that regular posting of images on Instagram (which then link back to your website) can be effective if you can build up a good following on Instagram.

Another option is to sign up to local business directories if they allow you to create a link to your website which most do. They will then try and contact you to upsell their services but if you say that you are only interested in their directory for the link they will then leave you alone.

You could go to companies offering a link-building service. However there is a danger in this approach as Google are actively changing their algorithms to identify spammy sites, that are created just to provide links, so you may not get the benefits that you think.

4. Fresh content

Google and other search engines love fresh content as it shows that you have something new to say. A blog on your website is a great way to add fresh, interesting text content. Make sure that the blogging system shows a recognisable date so that search engines can easily see that the content is recent. In terms of the size of the blog posts, the more text the better and you should be aiming for a couple of thousand words ideally otherwise there is a real danger that your post may not get found by search engines.

If that is beyond you then don't worry as I have built sites for clients who write about every job they do but write only a handful of sentences and a couple of images and they seem to do OK with it

5. Finally, let's talk about the performance, accessibility, SEO metrics and best practice metrics of your website.

5.1 Speed.

When it comes to sites being viewed on a mobile device, nobody likes a slow website. The speed of a website depends on several factors including the technical performance of the hosting package that the site is on and the physical architecture of the server delivering the data. Not all web hosting companies are the same and going for the cheapest option may not serve you well if you end up paying for a slow service. If the majority of your business is UK-based then you should consider hosting on a UK-based server.

The website itself should be optimised for speed on a mobile and several factors come into play here:

The size of images and the proper delivery of images that are sized according to the device that the user is browsing on is the single most commonly missed opportunity to get the performance of a site properly optimised.

Overuse of animations can slow your website down, so the use of animations should be kept to a minimum.

Bloated code is another potential problem. Some frameworks can result in a lot of redundant code that never gets used but still has to get loaded for the website to function.

5.2 Accessibility

Accessibility is another metric being increasingly measured by search engines and Google includes this metric in its Lighthouse tool. It is a way of scoring a site to see how accessible it is for partially sighted people to be able to use a screen reader to understand what your site is about.

5.3 Best Practises

The way a good website is constructed is an important indicator of the trustworthiness and reliability of a site.

5.4 On-site SEO

Google and other search engines look at a website's metadata to get clues about what the website is intended for so it is vital that all the metadata is consistent with the text content and sends a clear message to search engines describing what a website is for and what message it is trying to send to its viewers. The on-site SEO needs to be done right in order to get ranked for the chosen keywords.

If you have an existing site that is not ranking well and you would like to talk to me about why that might be, I'm happy to have a look at your website and run my audit tools against it and then have a chat about what can be done. There might be some obvious problems such as massive images slowing the site down which, once you know that, you may be able to fix yourself with a little help. 

Another key recommendation I would make is to always be looking for ways to add interesting new content to your site, by which I mean fresh articles on your blog.

Martin Waring - for Search Engine Optimisation York