How to rank in search engines

June 20, 2019

Everyone knows the importance of a good website but it’s often harder to make yourself visible in those essential rankings. With most searches, people don’t often venture into the 4th or 5th page, so if your business isn’t up there in the top 3 pages, you are more than likely being bypassed by potential customers.

So what steps can you take to make sure you are visible to your target audience? Well first you need to find out exactly where you rank. Select a few important search terms that you know you need to incorporate into your website and simply search for them. Before you see how to improve your site, see exactly where you stand first.

Low rankings

If your website does show up but the rankings are poor, then you need to take a different route. Consider the words you are searching for, are they too generic? If your company has a certain word or unique selling point then maximise this. There are a lot of companies out there and a lot of standard search terms to compete with.

Consider the keywords you are using to optimise your site, are there search terms you might be missing out on? Take a look at “moz.com/products/pro/keyword-explorer”, this is a keyword explorer, designed to help and suggest terms that might help bump your site up in the rankings. Content marketing is vital for your online identity, so ensure you’ve covered all angles and all possible major search terms.

A word of warning; when checking your search rankings. Google often personalises the results it shows you based on your personal preferences. So when testing your results, use various browsers, try incognito searching and also get others to repeat the same searches and view the results they achieve.

Google crawl

Secondly find out if your website is being properly crawled by Google, if you have an error, meaning your site cannot be accessed, you stand no chance at all of being seen. Go to your search bar and type in “site:mywebsite.com” (replacing ‘my website’ with your url). This should bring up a list of your pages that Google has scanned and recognised. If you see your website listed, then you’re on the right track but if no documents can be found, then you have a problem and need to delve a bit further.

If your website isn’t showing up, you need to pay a fast visit to the Google search console and add the url of your website. Just visit “www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url” and enter the main url of your site. Then sit back and wait for Google to crawl it, adding your web pages to their search.