The internet offers countless opportunities for businesses. It enables businesses to gain exposure and drive revenue growth. To gain exposure it’s important that a business‘s website is found on the first page of search engine results. When searching for products and services, people rarely go beyond the first page. Just think about this, when was the last time you visited a website that wasn’t on the first page of search results?
If you are like most people, you pay attention to the websites on the first page. In fact the second page is notorious for condemning websites to obscurity. There is a popular saying that humorously depicts this; the best place to hide a dead body is page two of Google. To get the most from their web presence, businesses should ensure that their websites are optimised for search results and are ranking on the first page, with the ultimate goal being among the top three on the first page.
Here are the four steps you can take to rank your website on the first page of Google (or all search engines) results:
- Ensure Your Website Is Mobile-Friendly
Mobile devices account for more than 60% of a website’s traffic. To rank on the first page of Google results ensure that your website is accessible on all three screen sizes (desktop computer, tablet and mobile phone). This is popularly known as mobile responsiveness. It ensures that your website ‘responds’ well and give all visitors a similar user-experience regardless of their screen sizes. Gone are the days when developers only made websites and platforms optimized for desktop computers. But having a mobile-friendly website isn’t only about enhancing user-experience. It has a great impact on Google results ranking.
2. Enhance Your Website’s Loading Speed
How long does it take to load your website? Visitors don’t linger for long on websites that take a lot of time to load. They shun them. Slow loading speed negatively impact user-experience and work against traffic to your website. When ranking websites, search engines pay attention to the websites’ loading speed. Those with a fast loading speed are pushed to the top, while the slower ones are further pushed to the second page and beyond.
3. Add engaging and relevant content
Do you regularly add engaging, educative content to your website? Most businesses with websites make the mistake of not investing in content marketing. If you don’t have a well-maintained and updated blog, you are missing the opportunity to drive more traffic to your website and keep your visitors engaged. Great content is so important that some have labelled it the ‘holy-grail’ of search engine ranking. It’s impossible to rank on the first page without relevant content. Relevant content signals to search engines that the website is worth visiting and spending time on. Not surprisingly, the quickest and surest way to be on the first page of search engine results is investing time and money in creating engaging content. Content is not just limited to text. It can be podcasts, vlogs or webinars. Content is indeed king. An effective content strategy will drive traffic to your website. In addition to not regularly adding content, check out the other common web design mistakes businesses make.
4. Make it easy for Google’s crawlers to index your content (Information Architecture)
Does the structure of your website make it easy for Google crawlers to index and categorize your web pages? Does each page have dominant and appropriate meta-descriptions, title tags and keywords to help search engines and visitors know what it is all about? Having a proper structure with key headings, titles and keywords will go a long way in ensuring that your website is found on the first page of search engine results.
You don’t have the time or know-how to do all this by yourself and need expert help? Our team will be happy to offer you a free report to help you see where you are in terms of Google results ranking, mobile responsiveness, loading speed and overall performance. If you don’t have a website yet, we will design a responsive one for you and guide you every step of the way to rank it on the first page of Google results.
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