Five easy ways to improve your website ranking
Quick wins to help boost your search engine rankings
Getting your website seen isn’t as easy as it used to be. Between Google’s ever-changing algorithms, advertising space, and companies investing hundreds, or even thousands, a month on search engine optimisation, it can sometimes feel like an uphill battle.
Fortunately, there are some simple steps you can take to improve your website ranking and boost your chances of being seen in the search engine results page:
Claim your Google My Business listing
More people than ever are using local search queries. These are searches like "web designers near me" or "restaurants in Plymouth". Claiming your Google My Business listing makes it easier to be found by people who are nearby and looking for your service. Making sure that Google knows where you're located boosts the chance of your website appearing locally.
Google My Business listings are also a chance to sell your business to would-be customers. You can improve your listing with copy and photographs, as well as inviting customers to leave Google reviews. Potential customers can see your opening hours, website address, location and more, all at no cost to you! Claiming your listing is easy and free of charge.
Make sure you're posting regular website updates
Keeping your website updated doesn’t just give people a reason to keep coming back, it also helps keep your search rankings buoyant. Every time you update your website it tells search engines to recrawl and rerank your website. If you want your website to get a higher ranking – and keep it from being usurped by competitors – make sure you update it frequently. Whether it’s product updates, blogs or refreshes of the on-page copy, it’s worth making this a regular job
Edit your on-page copy
Editing your website copy isn’t just helpful for keeping your website updated. It’s also a chance to repurpose old content to make sure you’re including the right key phrases. You don’t have to spend days rewriting pages, but a few changes here and there to include relevant, popular search terms can help improve your website ranking.
Fix your broken website links
404 - or “page not found” - errors aren’t just annoying when your browsing a website, they can also damage your rankings. Search engines put a lot of emphasis on user experience…and broken links do not make for good user experience. Too many broken links can send your website rankings tumbling. It’s a good idea to use a free tool like Google Search Console to check your website for 404 errors regularly and fix them as soon as you can.
Get your meta descriptions up-to-date
Metadata tags are bits of data in your website code that help search engines work out what pages are about. When you scan a search results page, the text under each of the results is what’s called the meta description. While meta descriptions themselves aren’t always used in rankings, it gives search engines additional information about your webpages. They’re also important for encouraging people to click your result by giving them a summary of the page content.
If you’d like to invest a bit more time in making sure your website is fully optimised for search engines, get in touch today.
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