If you didn’t just crawl out from under a rock where you had been living for the past 30 years or so, you’ve probably Googled something before. Search engines play a pivotal role in how we obtain information on just about everything. This is especially true when it comes to searching for a product or service.
While people do a lot of Googling (Google.com remains the world’s most popular website), most people never look past the first few results let alone go past the first page. Getting your organization’s website to show up in the top positions on search engine result pages (SERPs) can have a drastic impact on your ability to earn new leads.
Improving SERP placement is no simple task as there really isn’t a magic bullet that will catapult you to the front page of Google. However, there are some key practices you can leverage to drastically improve your website’s reach and performance.
1. Be Faster…Optimize Your Website’s Speed
Speed, how quickly your web pages load, plays a huge role in improving both your SERP placement and your bounce rate. In fact, a study by Google showed that visitors are 106% more likely to bounce (leave your site) if your page takes 6 seconds to load.
A high bounce rate cuts you twice because it means you are losing visitors too early, and the bounce rate itself is factored into Google’s ranking of your pages. This means website optimization is massively important for improving your search engine performance.
Optimizing the backend to provide a smooth, consistent experience is important but might be out of your hands for the most part if you’re using turnkey web hosting solutions. However, the content on your site can also be optimized for load times. Compressing the images on your pages is one of the quickest and cheapest fixes for improving load times.
2. Be Friendly…as in Mobile Friendly
As of July 1, 2019, Google has been using “mobile-first indexing”. This change allows Google to rank website pages by analyzing the mobile version of that page instead of the desktop version. This means designing web pages for mobile is now more important than ever.
Ensuring that your content is the same across mobile and desktop versions of your site is vital for improving your website’s search engine optimization (SEO). Virtually all indexing of your site is derived from the mobile version–so embrace it, don’t neglect it.
3. Pump Up The Volume…aka Write More Content
As Bill Gates famously penned, “Content is King.” Content is the driving force behind your website’s performance in search engine results. A single article isn’t going to rocket your site to the front page, but a steady stream of quality work that revolves around target keywords for your business will help your site climb out of the bottomless pit of SERPs.
Real World Example:
A few years ago one of our clients asked us to start writing content for their fitness apparel brand. We began writing high quality blog posts to add value to their customers and they are now consistently in the Top 3 search results for a whole host of important keywords to them…and they are beating out some very well funded, big budget competitors everyday…including Amazon!
The better your SERP placement, the larger the audience you can reach with your content marketing efforts. Cardinal can help improve your SERP performance and bring your business the audience it deserves. Contact us to learn more about our digital marketing and content creation services.
-Cardinal Marketing is a digital marketing agency located in Baton Rouge, Louisiana – All Rights Reserved –
