How to Increase Your Website Visibility and Ranking in Google Search
Have you ever wondered how you can increase your website visibility in Google search? Maybe your site is way back, buried in dozens of the result pages, or maybe it’s not even there. Don’t worry, you’re not the only one facing this issue.
Website visibility is the most important step to gain traffic and ultimately, sales. Those are hard to happen when users can’t find your website unless they know about the existence of your website in the first place.
Fret not, this article will equip you with the knowledge and strategies to help you boost, or get your site ranked in Google searches.
Understanding Google’s Ranking Factor
Google ranking factor, also known as Google algorithm, changes once every few months. In this ranking factor, Google set a few criteria for them to prioritize when ranking a website. Keeping up with the changes are important to get your website ahead of the game and avoid being buried in the result pages.
The latest Google update [2024] has changed some criteria in ranking factors. Here are some of the latest ranking factors includes:
- Content : The quality and relevancy of your content plays a huge role in ranking your site. Ensuring your content provides the right info to what the users are searching for is crucial.
- Mobile-friendliness: Aside from affecting the ranking, having a responsive website design that adapts to all screen sizes is an utmost essential in today’s world where a huge portion of searches are being made on mobile devices.
- Loading speed: A slow website frustrates visitors and increases your bounce rate. It would also affect the Google crawling process. You can find out how to improve your website speed through one of our articles here.
- Security: Google prioritizes secure websites (HTTPS) to better protect the users data.
- UI/UX : A good website UI/UX would not only be beneficial for the user’s experience, it will also contribute to your website’s ranking factor.
- Backlink : Backlink are links from other websites that point to your website. A high number of quality backlinks shows that your website content is high quality and is being referred to by other parties, showing its authority in the subject.
- Domain Authority : Domain authority is an indicator metric that helps you assess the performance of your website in relation to competitors using data such as number and quality of backlinks, referring domains, and search traffic among others to decide the score.
Why Is My Page Not Ranking On Google?
There might be a few causes, but it generally is because your website does not fit the criteria of what Google sees as a good website. It could also be caused by bad website structure, causing Google to not be able to efficiently crawl your website and find every existing page. Here are some causes for your website not being ranked on Google:
1. Bad Website SEO
SEO involves many aspects, such as keywords, content quality, and content format. A bad website SEO might cause your website to not be ranked. Some examples of bad website SEO are targeting the wrong keywords, low content quality and confusing content format. This would not only affect your website ranking, but also confuses the users.
2. Poor UI/UX
UI/UX plays a role in website ranking and user’s satisfaction while browsing your site. A poor UI/UX can confuse users and search engine crawlers, which causes them to not be able to fully understand your content and hurts your ranking.
3. Does not have sitemap and indexing
Sitemap is like your website map, showing each page and connecting pages. A sitemap is uploaded to Google Search Console, helping them to fully discover your website’s content and index it.
4. Robots.txt Blocking
Robots.txt is a text file that is placed inside the website’s directory. It acts as instructions for search engine crawlers that indicate which parts of the website they can and cannot access. Having this text file accidentally block an integral part of your website will affect your indexability, which causes your website to not appear in search engines at all.
5. Technical error
Technical errors might cause crawlers to not actually be able to properly access your website, if they can access it at all. Technical errors are errors in aspects like broken internal linking, inexistent pages or websites that are not usable on mobile.
But fret not, here are 5 ways you can get your site ranked
1. Get Indexed:
For Google to rank your website, it will need to be indexed first. Indexed is what refers to being placed inside Google search result page when you search for specific queries related to the site content. This would mean that the search engine crawler needs to find and understand your website’s content. You can submit your sitemap to Google Search Console to help with the process.
2. Remove Duplicated Content
Sometimes, there might be content in your site that is similar with other websites that are already indexed by Google. Those content are called plagiarized content, which can cause Google to see your website as having low quality content and decide not to index it. You can check your website content using plagiarism checker tools and paraphrase the content to make it unique.
3. Improve Your Website :
Having a website which is user-friendly and has a great UX ( user experience ) is important for good search visibility. You can achieve this by improving factors like:
- Mobile-friendliness
Ensure that your website is able to be displayed well on all devices, especially mobile phones. This is because Google has implemented mobile first indexing in which they would crawl the mobile version of the site first instead of desktop. A proper mobile website would help Google access and understand the content better.
- Website Loading Speed
A slow website would not only frustrate users, it will also affect Google’s effort in indexing your site. This happens because Google has a set limit in time and resources to spend crawling each website, called crawl budget. A needlessly slow website would waste this limited resources, causing it to not crawl every page on your website.
- Clear Navigation
A clear website navigation would make it easy for new users and search engines to navigate your website’s structure and content. A clear navigation includes proper internal linkage, clear navigation button that leads to each page, and proper website structure. This also includes ensuring there are no orphan pages on the site.
4. Generate Sitemap:
You can generate a sitemap for your website using a wide array of tools. Here is how:
- Choose a Tool: There are many free and paid sitemap generator tools that you can use. Some popular options include XML-Sitemaps.com, and Yoast SEO (integrated into the site and automatically create the sitemap for you).
- Enter Your Website URL: An external tool will require you to enter your website URL.
- Generate and Download: The tool will crawl your website and generate an XML sitemap file. You can then download the file.
- Submit the Sitemap: Upload the sitemap file to your website’s root directory and submit its URL location to Google Search Console.
5. Rectify Technical Issues:
Identifying and rectifying technical issues on your website can help you improve its overall health, making it friendly to search engines. This can include something as simple as robot.txt blocking Google crawler from indexing the site, or issues with the server. Rectifying these aspects can help with crawling, indexing, and lead to better ranking in search results.
How to Increase Google Search Visibility and Ranking for Your Site
Now that your website is ranked, it is time to increase the ranking. Here are some way you can achieve that:
1. Include more high quality content
High quality content would not only help the audience but also your ranking and visibility. One of the factors Google put into ranking websites are the E-A-T ( Expertiness, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness ). This content can be in the forms of landing pages or articles like blog posting. You don’t necessarily have to post new content to improve in ranking, instead you can improve on your current content to push the ranking higher.
2. Implement SEO
Implementing SEO is one sure-fire way to improve your website visibility and ranking. SEO is a collective strategy aimed at optimizing your website for the search engine, targeting elements like the website content, structure, and backlink from other sites. There are many ways you can implement SEO on your website, and it is highly advised to always stick to using white hat SEO.
3. Improve Website Usability
Website usability affects not only users but also the search engine crawler. Getting your website usability improved would allow the search engine to fully discover and understand the content and intent of your website.
4. Improve Website Technical
Improving website technical aspects like the loading time and structure would not only improve users experience but help in visibility and ranking. Loading speed is one of the main factors for ranking by Google, and a slow loading website would not only affect ranking but also turn users away.
5. Proper Internal linking
Internal linking is how your pages link to each other, creating a proper structure and website hierarchy. This would not only improve search engine crawler’s access but also users, which would allow them to fully discover and understand your website content.
Conclusion
By following this method, you will have a better control of your site’s visibility and ranking in Google search engine. Remember, SEO is a long-term strategy which requires continuous effort, so stay consistent and be patient.