Improve Keyword Rankings On Google

15 tips to learn how to improve keyword rankings on Google. Do you want to improve keyword rankings on Google? If yes, then I have got you covered. 

 

Google is the one-stop destination for all online businesses trying to drive organic traffic on their website. After all, this search engine giant processes over 3.5 billion searches per day. This means that websites ranking on the first page of Google must be getting a huge amount of traffic, especially organic traffic.

 

However, due to increasing competition on SERP and SEO, ranking a website on top of Google is getting difficult day after day.

 

Gone are the days when you could rank a keyword just with basic SEO and content. Today, in 2021, Google SERP has changed a lot with dynamic information now appearing on the first page. That’s why all online businesses must stay updated with all the SEO trends and techniques. This way, they can easily rank a keyword on the first page.

 

So, if you are wondering how to rank a keyword on the first page, keep reading this post. Today, we’re going to cover 15 free and paid actionable tips to help you improve keywords rankings on Google.

 

Before moving ahead, let’s understand why improving keyword rankings on Google is important. This can help you create your SEO strategy in detail.

 

Why is first-page ranking important for an online business?

 

Higher clicks

 

The first result on the Google SERP gets an average click of 28.5%. Such a number of clicks is more than enough for getting tons of organic traffic on your website.

 

 For example;

 

Let’s say you’re ranking on the first spot for a keyword with a search volume of 50,000. In this case, your website might get around 28,000 organic traffic per month. Isn’t it cool?

 

Of course, it is.

 

Another cool thing about this traffic is that it’s completely free.

 

Higher traffic

 

Google’s first page gets around 72% of the entire website traffic.

 

This can be a great opportunity for you to increase your organic traffic, provided that you rank a keyword on the first page of SERP.

 

Besides, higher organic traffic will eventually give you more income, sales, and revenue.

 

 

Exposure

 

Of course, getting on top of Google will also help you increase your brand awareness and exposure.

 

Google has introduced something called featured snippets or zero rankings.

 

These snippets show a summary of information for a particular keyword. According to Search Engine Land, a featured snippet gets 8% of all the clicks.

 

Such clicks are more than enough for increasing your website’s awareness and exposure.

 

Visibility

 

Let’s say that you own a restaurant. If you had to choose between setting up your next outlet on the main road going through town and a quiet place.

 

Which one would you choose?

 

The town of course, right? After all, it will allow you to make everyone focus on your new outlet.

 

In the same way, getting on top of Google will help you bring more attention to your online business. Remember, billions of people search for information on Google every day. So, if you create content and optimize it well, your website will also rank on Google.

 

Leads

 

If you rank the keyword that your audience searches the most, you can turn them into leads and then customers.

 

Improves trust

 

With more than 90% of the market share in search, Google is the biggest search engine in the world. Today, billions of people rely on it for all kinds of queries and information. In fact, people have complete faith in the results and information that this search engine provides them.

 

This clearly means that you can also gain the trust of your audience by creating content that solves their problem and by improving your rankings.

 

You already know how important is to be on top of Google. Now, it’s time to learn how you can improve keyword rankings in 15 easy ways.

 

15 free and paid ways to improve keywords rankings in 2021

 

1. Start with keyword research

 

The very first step that you need to take to improve keyword rankings is to decide which keywords you want to target. Keywords are the foundation and backbone of any SEO strategy and they can either make or break your rankings.

 

So, with the help of keyword research, you need to identify and select the keywords or a phrase that your target audience might be searching on Google.

 

Let’s say that;

 

You run a digital marketing company in New York. In this case, the following keywords are what your targeted audience might look at on Google.

 

1. Best digital marketing agency in NYC
2. The best marketing firm in NYC
3. Top SEO companies in New York and so on.

 

To do keyword research, you can use free tools like Google keyword and answer the public. On the other hand, if budget isn’t an issue, you can use paid tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs.

 

2. Target more long-tail keywords

 

When it comes to keywords, there are two important types in SEO. These are long-tail keywords and short-tail keywords.

 

Let’s explain both the type of keyword in detail.

 

Long-tail keywords

 

Long-tail keywords are those keywords that consist of 4-5 words or a phrase. These keywords have a low amount of search volume as well as competition. Such keywords are an ideal targeting option for those who are looking for quick rankings on Google. Apart from this, long-tail keywords also have a good conversion rate.

 

Now, if you target long-tail keywords wisely, you can also improve your conversion rate, sales, and revenue.

 

Here’s an example of long-tail keywords.

 

Short tail keywords

 

Short tail keywords are exactly the opposite of long-tail keywords. They contain 2-3 words or phrases. Since the search volume for these keywords is high, the competition also remains high.

 

Many webmasters and online business owners want to get ranked for short-tail keywords as they bring a hell of a lot of traffic to the website.

 

Which keywords should you target?

 

In our opinion, you should go with long-tail keywords first, then target short-tail keywords once your site has developed some authority.

 

3. Include keywords in all-important tags

 

Once you find your keywords, you need to tell Google what keywords will you target. Google works by crawling, indexing, and ranking the content. Whenever a user searches, Google scans its index and gives the most relevant results to them.

 

So, to improve keyword rankings on Google, you must make it easy for Google to scan, crawl and index your content. For this, you can include your targeted keywords in the following areas;

 

Title tags

 

Title tags appear on top of SERP in blue color. Google uses these title tags to better understand the context of the content. For the best results, you should include your primary keywords in the title tag.

 

Meta tags

 

The meta tag appears below the title tag. They give Google and users a summary of your content. You can include primary as well as secondary keywords in your meta tags.

 

URLs

 

Including keywords in your URL will help Google to better identify what your web page is about. Try to keep your URLs as short, simple, and sweet as possible. If your targeted keywords are “digital marketing companies in New York” then your URL should look like this;

 

“https://domainname.com/ digital-marketing-companies-NYC”

 

Alt tags

 

Image SEO is the next big thing. Because of this, if you want to add another layer of optimization, you should add your keywords to your images. This way, you will get organic traffic from image searches.

 

4. Focus more on local SEO

 

In 2014, Google came up with an algorithm called Pigeon. This update aimed at increasing the rankings of websites that were targeting more local keywords.

 

Today, approximately 46% of all the searches on Google are locally intended. This means Local SEO will play a huge role in the near future. So, if you want to improve the rankings of your keywords, you should start targeting local keywords.

 

For example;

 

You are running a cakeshop in Chicago. In this case, you can create content around the following keywords.

 

1. Best cake shops in Chicago
2. Cakes shops in Chicago
3. Chicago cake shop
4. Cakeshop near me and so on.

 

By targeting such keywords, you can easily improve your rankings on Google.

 

5. Optimize your site for mobile searches

 

During 2019, 69% of organic traffic on Google came from mobile devices such as smartphones.

 

However, the number of smartphone and internet users will keep increasing year by year. That’s why Google wants to give the best experience to its users by favoring websites that are mobile optimized.

 

Today, you’ll hardly find any website on top of Google that isn’t mobile optimized.

 

Because of this, you must create a mobile responsive website to get better rankings on Google.

 

6. Create content for users

 

Content is king and you might have heard of this phrase quite a lot, especially if you belong to the internet marketing industry. Yes, content is surely a king and you must focus on creating content for users to satisfy their needs and queries. In other words, you need to create such content to solves the problems of your audience and entice them to take action.

 

But the harsh reality is that a lot of people underestimate the power of content and they start stuffing their keywords in the hope to rank better on Google.

 

You need to understand that Google has become much smarter with algorithm updates like Panda, Penguin, and Rank Brain. Because of this, it can easily detect any kind of spammy or fishy activity that manipulates search engine rankings.

 

Hence why you need to stay away from such activities and focus on creating the best content for your users first. After this, you can optimize it for search engines.

 

7. Create the best user experience

 

Having a mobile-friendly website is not enough for improving your keywords ranking on Google.

 

Along with mobile-friendliness, having a great, attractive-looking, and stunning website are also important.

 

As you already know, Google wants to give the best expense to its users. So, to do so, it will rank only those mobile-friendly websites with good UX and UI.

 

So, make sure to create a good website architecture along with amazing design and looks.

 

8. Improve the speed of your website

 

Now here comes the most important tip that will help you improve keyword rankings on Google.

 

In 2010, Google included loading speed as a ranking factor for desktop searches. In 2018, they did it for mobile searches as well. So, if you want better rankings on Google, you have no other option but to improve the speed of your website.

 

Following are the tips that will help you in improving the website speed;

 

1. Use good hosting.
2. Use CDN.
3. Optimize and compress your images.
4. Reduce used CSS and Java scripts.
5. Keep your website as light as possible.

9. Keep on building backlinks

 

If you ask us which is the number one factor that determines rankings, we would say backlinks. If the content is a king, then backlinks, are kingmakers. According to research done by Sparkto, backlinks are the number one ranking factor on Google.

 

No matter how many changes does Google makes it its algorithm, backlinks will always remain the top-ranking factor.

 

The following are how you can make backlinks;

 

1. Guest posting.
2. Blogger outreach.
3. Link exchange with relevant domains.
4. Creating the best content.
5. Article submission.
6. Profile link building.

10. Enable SSL certificate on your site

 

The next in this list of 15 tips to improve keyword rankings on Google is website security.

 

Before 2010, only e-commerce websites were using SSL certificates.

 

Later on, in 2014, Google made website security a ranking factor which made it compulsory for all websites to have an SSL certificate to get a better rank.

 

So, make sure that you have enabled an SSL certificate on your site.

 

11. Keep auditing your site

 

The next important tip is to audit your website on regular basis.

 

Many webmasters and SEO experts are aware of the importance of website auditing, still, they overlook this factor.

 

Website auditing will help you identify critical errors that may or might be hampering your keywords ranking. Once you identify those errors, you can take corrective actions against them and improve the overall health of your website. For website auditing, you can use tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs.

 

12. Don’t buy paid links

 

We know for a fact that link-building is the most important ranking factor on Google. And the majority of the SEO experts and webmasters struggle with link-building. That’s why many of them opt for a paid links to scale their link-building efforts.

 

However, this is totally against the webmaster guidelines provided by Google.

 

If you start paid link-building campaigns then Google will place a small penalty on your site. This may affect your website’s ranking and you may also see a drop in your organic traffic.

 

In other words. Say no to paid links.

 

13. Add internal links

 

If you want to see a quick spike in your keywords ranking then start adding internal links on your website.

 

An internal link is a hyperlink that leads from one web page to another within the section of your website. With the help of internal links, you can pass the link juice or link equity from high DA PA web pages to low DA PA web pages.

 

The following are the best practices to use internal links;

 

1. Add keyword-rich internal links.
2. link from high DA PA pages to low DA PA pages.
3. Keep all your internal links do-follow.
4. Add 5-6 internal links on one single web-page

14. Create long content

 

Gone are the days when you could rank 500 words blog posts on Google with little or no SEO effort.

 

Today, and due to an immense amount of competition on SERPs, it is next to impossible to rank a 500 words blog post.

 

According to research done by serpIQ, the average length of content that ranks on Google is 2000 words.

 

So, keep on publishing longer articles and keep on enjoying good rankings on Google.

 

15. Publish more blog post

 

The last in this list of 15 tips to improve keyword rankings on Google is publishing more content.

 

HubSpot found that businesses that publish blogs on regular basis get 55% more traffic as compared to companies that don’t upload regularly.

 

Moreover;

 

Publishing frequent blog posts will also improve your crawl budget and will help Google to better scan and index your site.

 

 

Conclusion

 

To improve keyword rankings on Google isn’t that easy. However, if you follow these 15 tips regularly, you will see a spike in your rankings and organic traffic.

 

But remember one thing.

 

SEO is earned media and not paid media. So, whatever strategies and techniques you apply for your SEO efforts, have in mind that it will take some time to see results. Ideally, it would take around 6-7 months to see some results if you follow all these tips regularly.