I am often asked: What can I do myself on my website to improve my Google ranking? There is a lot that anyone can do themselves to optimise SEO. We will limit ourselves here to optimising on-page SEO, i.e. on your own website. I have a blog article on optimising off-page SEO with link building. I hope you gain a lot of new insights while reading.
High-quality texts are the most important factor for a good ranking on Google. This is especially true if you create SEO texts specifically for your online marketing. Make sure that the texts are free of errors and easy to read. Also, check the content on a mobile device to make sure it looks good there. Also, integrate valuable and functional links to other internal and external pages that offer added value for the user when reading.
The longer visitors stay on your website and the more pages they view, the better Google rates your website. These factors are considered to be the most influential ranking factors of all. So you should tailor the content to the needs of your users. The more valuable the information, the better your website will perform compared to other competitors. Also think about what elements you could use to further enhance the user experience. Blog articles, infographics and free explanatory videos are quite suitable here.
Each website should only be optimised for one keyword (key term). This can also be a combination of two to three words that are frequently searched for. To find out which keywords are optimal here, you can perform an SEO analysis of the words in question. Tools like Google Trends are helpful here.
It is less helpful to optimise a website for several good keywords. The only exception to this is when the terms are very close thematically, as Google also does semantic searches. In general, it is important to use the keyword in different variations in the text.
Once you have determined the optimal keyword for a page, it is important to place it in the right places. Ideally, the keyword appears in whole or in part in the URL of your website. If you don't yet have speaking URLs, this is an important to-do. The keyword should also appear in the page title of the website.
The meta description is the third place where the keyword belongs. It usually consists of two complete sentences. Google usually uses the meta description for display in the search engine's list of results.
That leaves the actual content to improve your Google ranking. The ideal is to have the keyword appear in both the headings and the text.
Important: Readability and user-friendliness must not suffer. The whole text should be easy to read and not appear as an innumerable accumulation of a particular word or phrase. If your keyword is included once in a heading, once at the beginning and end of the text, and two or three times in between, that's ideal.
You may have noticed in Google's list of results that there is a block with the heading “Related Searches”. This is a great opportunity for you to improve your Google ranking for your keyword. It doesn't have to rank in the list, but can also be listed here with the questions.
Many users use Google's voice search, especially on mobile devices. Questions are very popular here. How does... work? How do you do...? Since when has there been...? Where is...?
Make sure that these searches find your website by integrating the relevant terms for voice search into your website content. You can also formulate headlines as questions. And make sure that the sentences that follow are recognisable as easy-to-read answers.
If everything goes perfectly, Google will display your answer to the question at ‘Position Zero’. This refers to a special answer field above search result no. 1. This not only has very good traffic, but also positively contributes to the web authority of your company.
To ensure a consistently good Google ranking, you should also regularly update the content. If you do this well, you will improve your ranking. Google generally dislikes outdated content, so regular updates are viewed very positively. An update plan is particularly helpful if you have a lot of pages. It reminds you to check the page at fixed intervals (e.g. every six months). If necessary, you can then make updates or add current links. While you're at it, be sure to check whether all external links to other websites are still working properly. Broken links are rated negatively by Google because they are a disadvantage for the user.
You can create a content cluster for your most important keywords. This means that you optimise a central page for this keyword and use other pages to cover additional subtopics. Each of these additional pages contains a link to the main page. Google understands that this is the most important page for this topic and ranks it higher accordingly.
A good method for building a content cluster is to use a blog. As part of your search engine optimisation, you can write valuable posts here from time to time that are related to your most important keywords. This will help your content to rank better and better in Google.
Always use descriptive links. ‘Click here’ contains no added value for the user. Your internal links (and this applies even more to external links) should contain your keywords. Google then knows that the target page is the appropriate one for this keyword. This also helps people with disabilities or screen readers to use your website.
Every image and video should have an alt tag. Google can read headings and text, but images and videos need a description using alt tags. The Google crawler reads through the source code. If you provide Google with an alt tag for an image or video, Google knows what it is. On the one hand, this can lead to that image ranking well for your desired keyword. And you have also perfectly placed it on your page once again. Here, too, you are helping people with disabilities to use your website.
Google loves fast pages. And your users like that too. You can find out how fast your website currently is for free using PageSpeed Insights. This will also show you where the biggest problems are. It's worth taking a look at individual sub-pages as well. The results may vary greatly from the homepage in some cases.
There is also a lot of potential in optimising website images. Use a compression tool if your website provider's CMS (content management system) is not able to compress files on its own. This will further speed up your website's loading time.
If you want to improve your Google ranking, there are a number of things you can do yourself. You don't need a website programmer for the optimisations mentioned above. If you feel that the results could be even better or that your capacities are not sufficient for these SEO measures, I would be happy to support you.
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