Is your company doing everything it can to improve its visibility? The vast majority of businesses these days have an online presence as we become an increasingly digital society. And ranking on the first page of Google for popular search terms is one of the major priorities for any enterprise looking to attract new customers. The importance of being on page one cannot be understated – previous studies have revealed that 71.33% of searches resulted in a page one organic click. By comparison, pages two and three combined amounted to just 5.59%.
Google’ Search Quality Rater Guidelines offer a valuable insight into what search engines are looking for and the data proves the importance of being on page one. It can be crucial to the success of a business, but there is no easy fix that can take you from position 50 to the top 10 overnight. Instead, there are a number of factors that can contribute to a higher SERP ranking. Here are just four of them.
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Mobile Optimisation
With mobile browsing having long since overtaken desktop usage, it’s vital that your site is usable on all devices – including mobile, desktop and tablet. This will require some development work around the likes of the scaling of images, and ensuring your site is fully responsive to fit all screen resolutions.
Technical SEO
There are plenty of aspects to technical SEO and some of the required changes can feel overwhelming. As a result, many businesses outsource this work and enlist the services of SEO experts to conduct an audit and advise on and/or oversee the subsequent actions that need to be taken. These may involve checking for crawl errors, reviewing the backlink profile, amending duplicate title tags and meta descriptions, checking the site’s indexation and assessing the quality of content on your site.
User Experience
The site’s UX encompasses every aspect of the user’s interaction with your product, service or company and its importance cannot be understated. Ensuring your site in engaging and easy to use can play a crucial role in your success. To begin with, your site needs to be easy to navigate, offering the consumer a clear journey that hopefully results in a sale or conversion. The content within your site needs to provide value and be credible and trustworthy, while the site should also feature design elements that evoke the desired emotions in the user.
Link Building
There’s no doubt that link building remains fundamental to search rankings so it’s an element of your strategy that should not be overlooked. It’s very much a case of quality over quantity – Google can spot and devalue spammy links – so you need to ensure that yours are adding value. That may be achieved by creating high quality content, fixing existing broken links to your website and claiming unlinked brand mentions.
