How to Rank your Website in Google Search

Impact of not ranking on the first page

Top Factors to Rank Your Website on Google

Conclusion

Most people tend to click the first few results on Google search and rarely go to the second page. This means, just by showing on the first page of Google Search you can significantly boost traffic and visibility. But to rank your website higher in Google search just having good content is not enough. It is also very important to have a well-structured, easy-to-use website.  Read this article, to understand how to structure your website well so that it encourages visitors to stay and also encourages Google to like your website. (Also see: how to create a high-performance WordPress website).

Impact of Ranking on the First Page

Here are some statistics about the impact of ranking on the first page:

  • According to a study by Backlinko, the first result on Google’s search results page gets 27.6% of all clicks, while the second result gets 15.8%. The third result receives 11.0%, and the click-through rates (CTR) keep decreasing for the subsequent results.
  • In the same study, Backlinko found that the average CTR for the first page of Google search results is close to 8%, while the CTR for the second page is only .63%. This means that websites on the second page of search results receive significantly less traffic than those on the first page.
  • Another study by Advanced Web Ranking found that 67.6% of all clicks on search engine results pages (SERPs) go to the first five organic results. This further emphasizes the importance of ranking in the top five results.
  • Following graph is based on a study by Advanced Web Ranking that analyzed CTR for different positions on Google’s search results page and gives a clear visual representation of the importance of ranking in the top positions of search results.

So let’s directly dive into how to achieve this.

Top Factors: How to Rank Your Website in Google Search

We are going to cover the top factors to rank your website higher on Google but it is not limited to just this. After you have followed the steps given below, (which act like a skeleton that needs to be enhanced further), keep adding relevant content to show your authority and expertise in your niche to improve your Google rankings. Have patience, invest time and be consistent with your efforts to see a positive result. These are the essentials to follow and to keep in mind while designing the website and later. Each factor is an important task on its own and is easily achievable with the right approach.

Website Structure and Information Architecture

It is a common mistake that people start thinking about “how to rank your website in Google Search” only when they already have a website in place which was often unplanned and was never taken care of earlier in the lines of SEO. They fail to realize the importance of building an SEO-friendly website from the beginning. Avoid doing that mistake, as it may take more time to resolve SEO issues.

Even before you start adding blogs and looking for How to rank your website higher in Google searches, have a solid foundation in place. What I mean is when you decide to first make your website pay attention to having a good website structure and information architecture. Look for common mistakes in website structure and information architecture to avoid them. It’s not that it can’t be resolved later but it will take more resources to fix it if it is not planned properly from the beginning. 

Information Architecture is the intersection of Context, Content, and Users. It means delivering your content (the right content presented in an easy-to-read way), to the user (who is looking for something on your website), based on the context(purpose of the website). In other words, there should be a balance between the needs of the user and the needs of the business.

Here is a list of features to take care of for a good Website Structure:

  • Navigation Menu Bar that helps to find things easily on your website.
  • Clear, actionable call-to-action button.
  • Typography, i.e. right combination of background color, font size, and style, paragraphs, and images.
  • Purposeful visuals that are relevant to the page and tell the story.
  • Responsive Web design, which works well on all kinds of devices (desktop, mobile and tab).
  • Well-organised pages About us, contact, pricing, etc
  • Add and optimise useful content on your website to help visitors and build trust.

A Great Page Experience 

A great page experience is not just the content on the page. It is much wider in scope. A visitor to your website should be able to read, understand, navigate and feel good about being on your page. It should not just provide the information that he is looking for but rather make him enjoy the ease of using the site and acquiring the desired information. After all a good experience leads to more retention, recommendation and conversion. 

He should be able to 

  • Navigate through your website easily
  • Find related information through internal linking
  • Click the links (They should be functional and clickable) 
  • Load images quickly
  • Read the content on mobile (it should be large enough to read) 
  • View the content/ images in one go (fit the frame without the need to scroll horizontally).

To achieve a great wegpage experience take care of the following key elements: 

Core Web Vitals

Core web Vitals are part of a series of metrics devised by Google which are considered to be most important for a good user experience. It gives insights based on CruX (real-world) data about the user experience of the webpage. This involves 

  • Loading (FCP & LCP- First Contentful Paint & Largest Contentful Paint; Good page experience score FCP <1.8 seconds, LCP< 2.5 secs, )
  • Interactivity (FID- First Input Delay < 100 milliseconds, )
  • Visual stability (CLS- Cumulative Layout Shift < 0.1  )

Underlying metrics for these include Time to Interactive, Total Blocking Time, Speed Index, etc.

Google often categorizes pages based on experience as “Good”, “Needs Improvement” and “Poor”. To be considered “Good” your website experience should fall into the top 75th percentile. However, you should always try to exceed these metrics as it is a relative score and not just a number that you need to achieve.

Tools for CWV Optimisation:

Popular tools for measuring these are Google Search Console (GSC), Page Speed Insights(PSI), and GTMetrix. See more about CWV here.

Page Speed 

A research by Google suggests that 53% of visits to mobile sites are abandoned after 3 secs. Check your page load speed using Google’s Page Speed Insights. Also, focus on mobile-first indexing.

A faster page load leads to less server work, & less bandwidth and also aid in the following:

  • A better user experience
  • Lower “bounce” rates / higher conversion rates
  • Higher ranking by search engines
  • Cost savings
  • Environment friendly

Methods to speed up page load times include:

  • Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network)
  • Optimise and serve images in easy to load format 
  • Remove unnecessary assets (E.g. JS, CSS)
  • Use compression techniques.

Tools For Page Speed Optimisation 

  • Use tools like PSI, GSC, Screaming Frog and GTMetrix to find Loopholes in these aspects of Page Speed Metrics.
  • Optimize the size of the images with apps like Optimizilla,
  • Use the Cache plugin in WordPress
  • Use website carbon calculator tools like BeaconWebsiteCarbon, etc to check carbon footprint

Mobile Usability 

In today’s times, it is very important for your website to be mobile-friendly. One can use Google Search Console to check mobile usability issues. It gives the list of all the affected URLs with the details about what is the issue. GSC shows it in the form of a graph including how long the issue has persisted.

Common error reported by GSC are:

  • Incompatible plugins
  • Viewport not set
  • Viewport not set to “device-width” which means the image is too big for the mobile screen
  • Content wider than the screen
  • Text too small to read
  • Clickable elements too close together, i.e it is difficult to click a particular button

The easiest way to fix these is to follow the GSC summary of issues and fix them in that order because Google Search Console also tries to present them in the order of priority.

Pro tip: After fixing errors, remember to request Google to recrawl your site by clicking the “Validate fix” button.

Security

Security is an essential element for increasing organic traffic to rank your website higher on Google Search, be it clicking around or making a purchase. Google always issues a warning to the visitor if the website is not secure with HTTPS.

  • Make the visitor feel safe to be on your site and to share personal details for making a purchase. 
  • Make google see your site as an authorised and genuine website, by securing it through HTTPS.
  • SSL and TLS are the two technologies used to secure HTTP (i.e. HTTPS)
  • TLS is preferable over all versions of SSL
  • TLS 1.3 is the most recent

On-Page SEO

In order to rank your website higher on Google search, it is extremely important to have optimized pages for both Google bots and users. Make sure your website follows SEO Best practices and recommendations:

  • Optimise metadata with keyword-rich useful title tags and meta description
  • Use H1–H6 tags 
  • Optimize your images, add alt tags, and reduce image size
  • Optimise URL
  • Avoid thin content 
  • Make sure you add canonical tags to avoid any duplicate content

Crawl and Index friendly

Some of the points for quick & easy crawling and indexing have already been covered like site structure, information architecture, page load speed, Canonicalisation etc. Here are some more things to take care of: 

  • Internal link structure to direct bots easily to related pages.
  • Submit Your Sitemap To Google.
  • Update Robots.txt
  • Eliminate Redirect Chains And Internal Redirects.
  • Eliminate low-quality (thin) content and duplicate content.

For more details check these guidelines.

Content Optimisation and Intent Optimisation

As much as it is important to take care of all the technical aspects of SEO, it is also important to have relevant and useful content on the website.

Content Optimisation means creating content in a way that reaches the largest possible target audience. To achieve this it is important to use the keywords that your target audience uses to search your type of business. That’s where keyword optimization comes in. If your content/website has keywords that your audience is using then Google will present your website to them.

Another important aspect of content is that it should add value to the user’s intent.  The user’s intent can be of four types:

  • Informational intent: To present the information about something when a certain keyword is used. For eg. When you search for how to bake a cake, you don’t want to know about buying/cost of a cake or how to reach a specific bakery but a recipe, a step-by-step guide, or a video instruction.
  • Navigational intent: People with this intent want to visit a specific website. For example, people who search for [Facebook] online are usually on their way to the Facebook website.  
  • Transactional intent: When people are searching to buy something they are doing so with transactional intent. Generally, they already know what to buy and are just looking to make purchase, they dont want more information any more. For ex., if you type buy king size bed, you don’t want to know about the different types of beds. You just want to reach a page where you can buy that size.
  • Commercial Intent: This intent is for those who are not yet ready to buy but may buy in the near future. So the example could be which is the best place to eat Chinese food, or which is the best SEO plugin, etc.

However, be aware that some searches may have overlapping intent. And therefore it is important to direct the visitor to different pages on your website based on intent, which leads our discussion to link building (Internal links in this case).

Link Building (Internal and External)

Internal linking help user and crawlers to find pages within a website. It provides a good site architecture and builds authority around a certain topic. And helps to guide the user based on his need and intent.

Whereas links from high-authority websites serve as a vote of confidence for your website. This help improves ranking because Google views the quality and quantity of these links as authoritativeness.

Some of the commonly used internal linking tools are InLinksLink WhisperTwylu, etc.

Conclusion

No matter how much you want your website to rank fast, SEO and Google ranking is a slow process. It needs a lot of effort and time, and many iterations of trial and error to be on top. Make sure when you reach there you don’t stop working on and improving your website. As everyone is trying to rank on the first page it is an ongoing process to maintain your ranking. So once you are able to rank your website on Google search you have to keep monitoring it and improving it every now and then to stay on the first page.

All the Best.

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