How to Improve SEO Rankings

Google accounts for ~95% of the Australia’s website traffic, with the top organically ranking website on Google receiving 28.5% clicks (source). So if your website isn’t even appearing on the first page, you are axing the number of users who could be interacting with your brand.

By improving your SEO rankings, you establish authority in your industry, outperform competitors, and attract valuable organic search traffic.  

Optimising your on-page elements is one of the key ways to increase SEO rankings. These include activities such as:

• Keywords: Embed relevant and commonly searched keywords that relate to your core offering within your content. Read: no keyword stuffing. 
• Internal Links: It’s important to link your content throughout your website to show Google you are sharing a cohesive and established message to your audience. Your anchor text should include a keyword that relevantly connects to it’s linked page.
• Page Structure: Ensure your page includes relevant and search-worthy H1 and H2 tags.
• Update your meta: Review your current page titles and meta descriptions for all pages on your website, including blogs and especially for your homepage. They should clearly communicate the content on your respective pages while enticing users to click on your webpage. Remember to keep titles under 60 characters, and descriptions under 160.

Google is rewarding high-quality content that is informative, engaging and valuable for users. They are using a criteria labelled E-E-A-T (expertise, experience, authority and trustworthiness) to judge whether the content on websites is written by specialists who have the knowledge and ability to share valuable information. This means you need to do more than keyword stuffing and sharing generic answers for search queries - Google won't consider blog word count for SEO more than the quality of the content itself. Your blogs, landing pages, webinars and ebooks should ideally provide practical and thought-engaging content, backed by experience, that will ultimately teach and inspire your ideal audience. 

Less is more: move away from quantity and focus on genuine, quality content. 

Start by reviewing your existing content on your website:

• Delete outdated and irrelevant content that is no longer serving your website’s performance and meeting the needs of your ideal customer. 
• Refresh content that is still valuable or receives organic hits, but may be out of date. Are there new articles or statistics you can refer to? Can you make the information more relevant to today’s context?
• Promote your strong pieces of content through social media channels or an email marketing campaign to generate interest and increase click-throughs.

Consider backlinks as votes of confidence, telling search engines that your content is trustworthy and an authoritative source amongst a plethora of similar websites. 

You can attract backlinks through a number of means:

• Media releases/media mentions in relevant industry publications. 
• Business directories (glassdoor).
• Testimonial sites and online review platforms such as Clutch.

Backling is often over looked, but is highly valuable in promoting your website as a leader and expert in a particular field. 

Search engines are prioritising websites that create a great user experience. This means that your page layout should not be confusing or difficult to navigate, users shouldn’t experience a lag when clicking on your site, and all elements should load quickly.

These are critical factors that impact your SEO ranking. 

If you’re users are experiencing any of the following when navigating your website, you should create an action plan to fix them immediately, as it will be creating a negative impact on performance in the long-term if left unaddressed:

• Your website isn’t optimised for mobile: Over 50% of all website traffic comes from mobile. If your website elements aren’t mobile-friendly, you are cutting out a significant portion of potential customers who won’t want to interact with your brand.
• Your site speed is slow: Improve your site speed by optimising images, leveraging browser cashing and minimising unnecessary code on your pages. This will encourage users to stay on your website longer and reduce your bounce rates. 

Your page structure is difficult to navigate: Focus on intuitive navigation. This means having a clear site structure and easy-to-find information, where users won’t be left wondering where to purchase or how to get in contact.