Google makes anywhere between 500-600 changes in its algorithm annually. While the major changes are announced, the exact working remains unknown. After all, if we all knew what Google tactics are, we would have been able to hack our way up to the top, making art of ranking obsolete and making Google searches redundant!
Marketers are thus always speculating what they can do to win the SEO wars, and constantly changing p;laying with Google’s search algorithms. And there are ways to do it, if you know how to. Here are 6 amazing SEO tools and tactics that you can use to rank on page 1 on Google.
What you Need to Improve
You can only improve when you know where you currently are. This holds equally true for decade old domains and newly launched sites. This can be done in different ways.
Keyword Ranking
To find your keyword ranking, you can use Google Rank Checker. Type in the keyword for which you want to know your rank. The results will tell you how you rank on different search engines basis the keyword, the first page of your website that shows up baiss the topic, the monthly searches on an average, and the average cost-per-click for the keyword.
Speed of Website
One of Google’s main ranking factors is the website’s speed – the faster your site’s speed, the higher your ranking is likely to be. For example, even a retail giant like Wlamart witnessed a decline in its conversations when its page load speed rose from one second to four seconds! There are many tools that you can use to check your site’s speed. Some of these are Google PageSpeed Insights, WebPageTest, and Pingdom Website Speed Test
Health of Website
When analysing your website, you also need to assess the health of your website. If the site has witnessed a sudden fall in organic traffic and especially if it is because Google has banned your website. You can use tools like MxToolBox’s Domain Health Report tool. This tool will help you to analyse the general issues of your website, whether it has been blacklisted or not, issues regarding the mail server and the web server, and DNS.
Important Metrics
Your ranking will improve if you monitor and improve the metrics that are vital to your site. For this, you can set up an SEO dashboard in Google Analytics to track important metrics such as bounce rate, active users, news sessions and so on. A study conducted by BrightEdge found that other than for media and entertainment, organic search was the highest revenue source for all other industries. Hence, it is important for you to keep track of how many visitors are locating your site on Google.
Tips Improve Your Ranking
1. Use the Right Keywords
If you want to improve your ranking on Google and generate revenue, you need to use your keywords effectively.
- Know the difference between commercial and informational keywords. If you use only informational keywords, you will increase the organic traffic to your site, but these might not get converted to buyers. For example, someone searching for ‘home remedies for acne’ is likely to use the web content for information while the one who searches for ‘best acne creams’ is likely to be a buyer looking for purchase options.
- Once you know the keywords where you want to rank higher, you need to use them in the meta description as well as on-page SEO.
- The right keyword in the title of your article will give you a higher ranking on Google – the more towards the beginning of the title it is, the greater the weight it carries.
- When you’re writing an article, use your primary keyword in the first 100 words of the article.
- Using the target keyword in the URL will also improve your chances of ranking higher.
- Long-tailed keywords are those that are not as competitive in nature and they focus on a specific search. Hence, using them in your content will give you chances of a higher conversion rate.
- Google uses latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords as a part of its algorithm, These are synonyms and words with similar meanings as your primary keyword. Using LSI keywords will also contribute towards pushing up your ranking on Google’s search page.
- If you find that your competition is ranking higher than you in Google search results, you should try and find out what strategy they are using to get there. You can use Google’s Keyword Planner for this. Type in the URL of your competitor and click on ‘keyword ideas’ to find out the hidden keywords that your competitor is using.
2. Create a Mobile-friendly Website
A study revealed that around 60% of searches take place on mobile devices. In fact, back in 2017, Google announced that pages whose content was not easily accessible would not get a high ranking and this still holds true.
- You can use Google’s Mobile Usability Report to find out if your website has any issues with regards to mobile usability.
- You can solve your issues with the help of tools like Mobify, Duda Mobile, or bMobilized.
- You can use mobile plugins like WPtouch for WordPress.
- Make sure that you are up to date on the business listings of your area as Google is focusing on hyper-local search on mobiles.
3. Use a Proper Linking Strategy
To improve your ranking, you need to analyse the health of all links on your website and remove all unhealthy links. You can do this by:
- Using tools like Majestic and Open Site Explorer to analyze the links. Remove the harmful ones from your website. For example, Google Penguin 2.0 identified links coming from websites on the same IP class address, web pages that have plenty of external links, and others as links that don’t add much value
- Identifying the links within your industry that will improve your backlink profile when a search engine uses the search algorithm
- Over using anchor texts will lead to over-optimization. So, when you use anchor text, diversify it, else you can be penalized for using an exactly matching anchor text.
You also need to identify unhealthy and spam links that point to your page. In such cases, instead of removing your webpage, you need to get these links removed. You can contact the owner and request removal of the link or use Google’s disavow links tool.
Here are some other linking strategies that you can use to improve your rank on Google’s search page:
- You can build on your links by adding alt tags to images
- Try and get others websites with high domain authority to link your articles on their blogs. You can also write guest blogs or comment on others’ blogs wherein you add links to your articles. This is because Google gives more weightage to what others are saying about you rather than what you say about yourself. Also, just getting inbound links is not enough – you need to try and get it from both domestic and international websites.
- The better your internal linking, the more time people will spend on your website – going from one page to the other. This will reduce the bounce rate of your website.
4. Focus on Content
Boost Well-Performing Articles
If you find that one of your articles or pages is performing well on Google’s search, then improve on it. You can do this by:
- Promoting it more
- Writing a more in-depth post
- Identifying the keywords that will boost the post further
- Incluse research studies in the post
- Add links related to the topic that are doing well
Write Long Articles
Studies have shown that articles with 1000-2000 words helps to improve ranking on Google. Longer content will help you to add more keywords and will also be regarded as having more information in it. Hence, Google considers such posts to be more relevant as compared to shorter posts. However, remember that you must research the article well so that accurate and detailed information is present in it. Also, make sure that there are no spelling or grammar errors.
Use Data
When you are writing an article use data to back up your information. Usage of statistics makes people view your content as authoritative and this leads to greater shares on social media. With more shares, your organic search goes up and thus, also, your ranking.
Don’t Use Plagiarized Content
Avoid writing duplicate content as Google gives more weightage to articles that are relevant and original. You can use tools like Copyscape to find out whether you are duplicating your content or not.
5. Pay Attention to Title Tags
Title tags play a big role in how your website will rank on Google. So, to improve o the ranking you need to:
- Write title tags that are unique and descriptive
- Don’t repeatedly use the same keywords or use excess of keywords in your title tags
- Don’t write in caps lock
- Avoid using default title tags like ‘Home’ as Google will think that it is duplicate content
- Adding a number to the headline
- Write a title that will generate curiosity
6. Create a Sitemap
If you have a sitemap then Google will get to know about your organization. This will help Googlebot to crawl more intelligently through your content, which, in turn, will make your website be available more readily on SERPs for ranking.
Final Thoughts
One of the most important methods that B2B marketers use to drive traffic to their websites is through organic search. If your website is not listed on the first page of the search results, getting found will be tough. In fact, studies have shown that more than 75% of the clicks happen on the first page! The competition is so tough that you must use the right SEO tools to rank on Google’s page 1. However, don’t get overwhelmed – with these tips, you are sure to get there.
