Three simple ways to improve your ranking on Google

SEO is paramount in improving your search engine ranking, however, you won't see results overnight.

The process of analysing and improving your website's SEO can be lengthy, and results depend on a number of factors, including but not limited to budget, skill, and the level of competition.

Although most websites will be built with SEO in mind, you’ll still need to monitor and improve your SEO regularly. You can pay to have a full audit on your website, in order to see how it is performing in search results, however this can be a pricey solution, and can still take months to help you climb up the Google rankings. Not all is lost though. There are things that you can do yourself (or with the help of the developers who look after your site) to improve your ranking at minimal cost. We've highlighted our top 3 tips below.

Regularly update your content

Quality content is an integral part of your search ranking. Publishing relevant content created specifically for your target market will improve your level of site traffic, which in turn improves the authority and relevance of your website. Ensuring that your content is relevant means that users who search for the services you offer, will be able to locate your website more quickly. By incorporating language and key phrases customers may search for, your website will become more relevant for these searches. Regular blog posts can also help with your SEO as sites like Google favour websites that are regularly updated over ones that have been left idle for too long.

Ensure your meta titles & descriptions are relevant

If you log into the CMS that your website is hosted on, you will more than likely find that each page contains a section for SEO. This is where you can update your meta data. The meta data of a webpage is one of the most important, and easy to update aspects of SEO. You’ll want to make sure that both the Meta Title, and the Meta Description both have content that is relevant to the page they are associated with. For example, for your 'About' page, it would make sense to include a description that incorporates a short amount of the content from that page (between 50-300 characters is sufficient). The meta title should also reflect the content on the page in order to be relevant, however, we’d recommend that you keep these to a maximum of 60 characters.

Remove anything that slows your site down

Page load speed is a vital component of a website, to both users and search engines. In April 2010, Google included site speed as one of their main ranking factors, meaning that if your page load is slow, you're not likely to improve your ranking regardless of your content relevance and regularity. In order to speed up your website, remove anything that isn't essential, or isn't relevant to the services you provide or the audience you are targeting, and make sure to optimise your images.

To summarise, SEO is an ongoing process and needs to be maintained regularly in order to move up the search engine rankings. If you would like more information, then please do get in touch.