Having your website appear on the first page of Google search results can drastically change your online business.
Why?
According to Infront Webworks over 90% of organic search website traffic comes from the first page of Google. Pages 2, 3, and 4 receive a combined total of 5% of the traffic.
Where do you want your site to appear in search results?
There is incredible value in getting to the top of Google search.
How do I know this?
I have niche websites that consistently rank on page one for hundreds of keywords. From this, I’ve gotten over 11,000 customers, several thousand leads and hundreds of email inquiries.
I’m sure you will agree that putting the SEO work into each blog post was well-worth it!
In this post, I have actionable search engine optimization suggestions that you can start using now to improve Google search rankings.
Search Engine Optimization Advantages
The Internet is flooded with millions of blogs, all vying for attention and traffic. But few get it!
Without traffic to your site, making money in your online business is a pipedream at best.
BUT … getting your website to the top of Google can change all that.
It may seem crazy and sometimes I have to pinch myself, but I still make money from blog posts I wrote in 2009.
Google loves many of the posts I’ve written and continues to show them in search results because they are relevant to a variety of search queries.
What does that mean for me?
- I don’t have to spend time every day promoting those posts in social media.
- I don’t have to update those blogs too often anymore.
- Those blog posts are on auto-pilot now and I can reap the rewards of work I did years ago.
- I still make multiple streams of income from those posts.
Clearly I am thankful that I saw the value of getting to the top of search engine results when I first started.
The chart below shows the average click through rates for page one positions. The first position gets the majority of the clicks while the subsequent positions get less and less as the search position number goes up.
The higher you rank, the more traffic you will likely get.
Now that you see how search engine optimization can help you, let’s dig into some key factors that you can implement.
Can Hosting Affect SEO?
There are two things that I see can be affected by hosting making it an indirect factor.
- Speed
- Uptime
1 – Here’s the brutal truth about website speed.
It’s a search engine ranking factor. Google’s John Mueller, webmaster trends analyst made some comments about it on Twitter:
He recommended that pages load in under three seconds.
If your site speed is slightly higher, it likely won’t hurt your ranking.
But, here’s the deal if your site is slow:
When people click your site in search engine results, they won’t wait around for your site to load if it’s slow.
This can contribute to losing search ranking because Google says:
Hmmm, this content seemed relevant but users are not waiting or staying.
Maybe not so relevant?
The host I was with was not great and my sites were so slow! It made me cringe. I was losing my mind and my coveted search positions.
I switched to a new host and my site speed increased like crazy! They also use their own SuperCacher technology to make it super fast!
Grab their 60% off deal now and they’ll even transfer your site over!
2 – If your web host sucks and has a lot of downtime, that can definitely affect your performance, especially in the SERPs.
You want your website to operate smoothly with as little downtime as possible. If the site is down and Googlebots crawl the site and it’s not accessible, that’s not good.
I know a lot of people are too cheap to fork over the funds for a great webhost but it can make or break your online business.
Accept nothing but 99.99% uptime from your host.
What can you do?
First test your website speed and keep an eye on it periodically.
The test lists a number of items that you can fix. I recommend the following for testing the site speed:
Next, install and use a caching plugin for WordPress. There are a number of plugins that increase website performance. Here are three that work!
Now that you know how site speed and downtime can affect search engine optimization, let’s dig deeper.
Is your Site Mobile-friendly?
Having a mobile-optimized site should be high on your list of things to do.
Back in April of 2015, Google released a new algorithm aimed at mobile-friendly ranking.
It was created to boost mobile-friendly web pages in Google mobile search results.
With more and more people using mobile devices to search for information online, Google is taking mobile-friendly a step further in early 2018.
Video – Google Mobile Friendly Test Tool
They already started rolling out the mobile-first index.
According to Google news, “our algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content to rank pages from that site, to understand structured data, and to show snippets from those pages in our results.”
What can you do?
Check your site using Google’s mobile-friendly test tool.
If there is a problem, you’ll get a list of items that need fixing. If so, be sure to fix them!
How to Choose SEO Keywords
Everyone tries to complicate keyword research for search engine optimization.
There’s really no magic to it. Choosing the best SEO keywords comes down to this:
That’s it!
In order to understand this, you need to know who your target audience is. I won’t dive into that here but you can read my article about How to Find the Best Niche Market for your Blog.
If you aren’t doing keyword research, then how would you know if anyone has an interest in your content?
Don’t skip this. It’s important and it’s how I got first page Google results over and over!
What can you do?
First, brainstorm on a list of topics that are related to your target audience.
Now take those topics and dig deeper into phrases and questions that your audience is looking for in search.
There are a number of online tools you can use to search for the best keywords.
You’ll love reading my post about Keyword Research: 3 Simple Steps to Find the Best Ones. I break down the process and give you a list of great tools to use.
How to Write High Quality Content
Writing high quality, relevant content is your ticket to organic search results. Many people don’t think about this as search engine optimization related but it’s the most important element!
Your job as a blog writer is to create the most relevant content that is the best possible match for a user search query. People ask questions all day on Google search. Do you have the answers?
Google is smart and it’s algorithms assess content quality. You can’t fool Google and try to convince the search engine that you have the best content if it’s not.
I read tons of blog posts and I am sad to say that many of them are poor quality at best. They skim the surface of a topic with information that is not near being comprehensive and obviously rehashed from other content.
Years ago, people used to use “keyword stuffing” for SEO purposes. Once they found a great keyword, they would use it over and over in content.
That does NOT work in 2018.
Sure you do the keyword research but your content does not need to have that phrase repeated a hundred times.
Your content should be comprehensive and relevant with respect to the keywords that you are aiming for.
What can you do?
Write original content that contains YOUR perspective or opinion about something. The truth is that when you rehash the same exact thing as a million other bloggers, Google looks at that and doesn’t see a need to rank another of the same.
Writing a post for the sake of writing is a waste and you won’t get anywhere.
Instead, write the most comprehensive content possible. This has nothing to do with length. It has to do with being well-written and robust.
Make your post so good and so complete that a person need not look elsewhere.
Put the time in. I see so many bloggers with courses about “the secret to writing a blog post in 15 minutes.”
Forget it. Put the time into writing excellent content to increase your search engine optimization. Nothing else will do.
You get out what you put in.
Final Thoughts
Today I showed you 4 ways that you can increase your search engine optimization in Google search results.
Build these best practices into your online marketing checklist. This will help you stand out from the crowd. No matter what, give it all you’ve got to create killer content!
Which of these are you already doing and which will you be starting?
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