If a tree falls in the forest but nobody’s around to hear it, does it make a noise? Perhaps not.
It may seem an odd analogy, but if your website doesn’t rank well for targeted search terms on the likes of Google, not many people will know your business or product exists. As a matter of fact, the number one spot on a Google search enjoys a massive 33% of the traffic – so boosting the ranking of your website and related pages is vital.
In the digital world, SEO is more important than ever, and one of the best ways to rank well on Google is by boosting your organic search rankings. PPC or paid adverts are effective methods of increasing the search ranking of your web page, but these won’t guarantee commercial success alone. To truly thrive, you must boost your search rankings organically.
Not sure where to start? Don’t worry, we’re here to help by telling you our top five tips to boost your page’s organic search rankings…
1. Look at your current search rankings
Before setting out on a quest to boost your website’s search ranking, you should know where you currently stand in Google’s search results for certain keywords or terms.
By understanding this information, you’ll be able to see where you need to improve and provide yourself with a solid base from which to work. To do so, you can use tools like SERPs.com to check where your site page ranks for certain keywords.
By gaining an insight into your website’s current rankings, you’ll be able to understand where you need to improve which will help form the foundations of your organic SEO efforts. To do this, tools like SERPs.com are great as they let you know where your site ranks for a particular search term.
Collect and store your data so you can use it as a practical reference when optimizing your web page for Google and other search engines like Bing! or Yahoo.
2. Focus on writing quality copy
Rich, engaging and well-written copy appeals to humans, and as a result, it will help improve your organic search rankings dramatically.
When crafting content for your web pages, blog posts or promotional campaigns, you should always write for your target audience and decide on the effect you want to produce in your reader.
To work well for search engines, you have to produce quality copy with solid anchor text and well-defined headlines. Since Google’s Panda algorithm update, it’s vital to focus on developing the best user experience you can to rank well. Strong copywriting that incorporates keywords both naturally and sparingly is the key to enhancing your organic rankings – humanizing your brand while creating a better consumer experience in the process.
Learn to write compelling digital copy or hire someone who can and you will be one step closer to search engine success.
3. Create a valuable keyword list
To boost your search authority and become visible to customers that might well be looking for what you have to offer, you need to decide on the keywords for which you want to rank.
By defining a well-targeted keyword list that you can base your website’s content around – you’ll be able to choose the most valuable keywords for your site to bring in related traffic and increase your page ranking.
To compile a successful keyword list, it’s important to use a targeted mix of both broad, exact and long tail keywords that are specific to what you’re offering and how your users search.
Before putting your list together, also ask yourself these questions…
- Which keywords will drive conversions?
- Which key topics can my keywords be grouped into?
- Which keywords could I generate content that will result in improved rankings and traffic?
To help analyse which keywords will be the best for your website, Google Trends is very handy for looking at which terms and topics people are searching for in your niche in regions the world over. You could also punch potential search queries relating to your page into Google’s search bar and look at what popular, relevant search queries pop up.
For accurate and analytic keyword research, our keyword tool, Ferzy, will yield positive results that will help you boost your search rankings. By typing in a potential key term on our platform, you’ll gain a world of insights including search volume, SEO difficulty score, domain age and authority and a host of other data that will help you define the most valuable keyword list possible.
Our platform is user-friendly, and we’ve just added four brand new features that offer even more insights, data and priceless keyword information.
4. Make sure your optimize your page titles
Title tags are a way of telling search engines and potential visitors what any given page on your website is about in a concise, accurate manner. And when it comes to organic search ranking factors, title tags are incredibly important.
For your title tags to perform well for search engines, they should include all of the main keywords you wish to rank for with the most important, or primary, keyword as close to the beginning as possible. For core web pages including your landing or about page, adding your brand name to the title tag will also help you boost your search rankings and increase commercial awareness.
Here’s a guide to help you arrange and optimize your title tags for SEO purposes:
Primary Keyword | Secondary Keyword | Brand Name
But, always remember (and as mentioned earlier), make sure your title tags read naturally and are written for humans. A poor reading experience may result in people overlooking your page or bouncing off which will only damage your search rankings.
5. Create cornerstone content
It’s likely that your website has multiple pages loosely based on the same subject or keyword.
One way of boosting your organic search rankings and increasing brand awareness is by creating a cornerstone page.
A cornerstone page basically consists of relevant content from your website’s other pages in one rich, informative and authoritative resource for search engine bots to crawl.
For instance, HubSpot compiled a free eBook called ‘How To Turn Facebook Fans Into Paying Customers’, pooling resources from a selection of their previous blog posts. This clever piece of cornerstone content helped them to grow by a whopping 50% in 2013. Not bad at all.
In this day and age, there’s no fast track cheat or cheap shortcut to increase your natural search rankings, but by following the above tips, trying to add value to the lives of your customers and using Ferzy’s keyword tool, you’ll be heading for that number one spot on Google in no time.