The most crucial factor for making sales online and growing your business is the amount of traffic that you get to your website. There are many different ways to get new visitors to your site, including paid ads, social media, and links in emails, blog posts, and forums. But the king of all traffic sources is Google.
Getting search traffic from Google is great for a couple of reasons. First, it's free. You can't beat free. But second, and most importantly, search traffic from Google tends to convert better than traffic from social media and other sources.
Since Google traffic is so profitable for your business, increasing your Google rankings for a variety of keywords should be a big priority. So here are four powerful ways to raise your Google ranking.
1. Always Publish High-Quality Content
You no doubt, have heard the phrase, "Content is king." It's been around for years, and internet marketers say it so often that it's become cliche. But it is the truth.
The key to building your brand online and staying relevant and profitable for the long term is to provide real value to real people, and high-quality content is the primary way of doing this on the internet.
If you ever find yourself working with a digital marketer or SEO "expert" who tells you that content no longer matters, and all you need is more links and SEO hacks - turn around and run away. Content is still king. It always has been, and it always will be. Why? Your content is the reason why people are even coming to your website. Seth Winterer from
Digital Logic says that the content on your website needs to be high quality and have a strategy behind it to increase your Google rankings.
Whereas in the past it was possible for marketers to bump up their ad spend to build their brand reputation, Winterer notes that today you must become a trusted advisor in your industry by providing content that meets people's needs and establishes you as an expert.
2. Use Keywords Effectively
While high-quality, informative content will be the cornerstone of your online marketing strategy, it's not the only thing that matters. You will also need your content to use terms and phrases - keywords - that real people are using to find websites like yours.
But it's important that you target the right keywords and that you do so in a way that is effective in increasing your Google rank over the long term. This means that you should target longtail keywords - particular keyword phrases that are searched for fewer times per month but have less other sites competing for them. You should also target keywords that imply a buyer's intent - keywords that include terms like these:
- Best
- For sale
- Review
- Coupon
- Bestsellers
- [City name]
And when you use keywords in your blog content, you need to avoid stuffing those keywords into the text in strange ways. Keyword stuffing can bring short-term gains in traffic, but this practice almost always leads to Google penalties and permanent drops in traffic.
3. Improve On-Page Optimization
Many on-page factors will also affect your Google ranking. These can include the types of media you have on the page, the internal linking structure, and the page-loading speed. Including video, audio, text, and pictures is a great way to get a little boost in traffic.
But one of the most overlooked ways to boost your ranking and get more traffic is optimizing your page for the keywords for which you are already ranking. So if you have a page that ranks reasonably well for a specific keyword, analyze the page and see if you can tweak it a little to optimize it for that keyword further and get a quick ranking boost.
4. Build Backlinks by Guest Posting
Lastly, no discussion of Google rankings would be complete without talking about backlinks. Despite all the drama and hype - and the naysayers who come along every other year and insist that links are dead - the truth is that backlinks are one of the most important factors that Google looks at when determining your rank.
But all backlinks are not created equal.
To get the best results, you should focus on getting links from authoritative sites, especially those from within your industry or related industries. When it comes to links, relevance is king. To optimize your results, try to get links from popular sites where the site itself is relevant to your page.
The topic of the page linking to you should also be pertinent to your page. And even the anchor text used in the hyperlink should be relevant to the topic that you are talking about on your website page. If you can get all of these factors into alignment, then you've got a backlink that can seriously help you get more traffic, both through referrals and through search.
Ranking higher in Google results is a lot easier when you follow proven strategies like the ones above. So if you aren't already, start following these tips to optimize your site for search engines and watch the traffic start pouring in.
