A few adjustments to your website can take you to the top of searches.
In SEO it is often the little things that can make a big difference to your rankings. Getting the simple stuff right has a knock-on effect and can help ensure that you improve your position. Here we look at some of the small changes that you can make to your site that will see the biggest change overall.
Regular blogs
It is amazing that something as simple as a short blog on a regular basis can make a huge difference to your rankings. A regularly updated blog is useful for your site for a wide variety of reasons. It means that you will have new, fresh content for Google to crawl – something that it always loves to see. On top of that, you can use the blog as a way to add extra internal links, building up a more powerful and natural site structure.
Additionally, the blog provides you with a natural space to target keywords in a natural way. Use your blog to provide interesting and relevant content for your audience, and potentially bring in new customers. These all add up to make your blog a fantastic resource that you can make use of to enjoy strong rankings.
Site speed
You might not be aware that page loading speed is such an important factor with Google but if you want to see improved rankings, refining the speed can make a world of difference. One of the most important ways to do this is through your image sizes. Large images can slow down page loading times immensely – and given that this is such an easy thing to fix, there really is no excuse for it.
There are many image compression tools that can reduce the file size drastically without affecting the quality to any noticeable degree. This is something you should look at, especially if your site is particularly image heavy.
Fix your 404s!
Undiscovered 404s can be the scourge of your SEO efforts, so it is important that you fix these as soon as possible. Pages can go missing for multiple reasons without you realizing it, and if this happens it can mean that customers experience a broken website, inevitably leading to a higher bounce rate and poor engagement. Google sees 404s as a major problem with a website, and they can be the cause of your losing position fast.
Thankfully, this is something that can be fixed quite easily and simply. It is a good idea to use a crawling tool like Screaming Frog which can help you to find all of the relevant pages showing 404 errors – these can then be easily fixed.
Improve existing pages
There can be a temptation for websites that are looking to improve their Google rankings to create a whole range of new pages in the hope of targeting specific keywords. But the reality is that this is unlikely to be effective. It is a much better idea to improve your existing pages rather than starting from scratch and trying to get something new ranked.
Populate your site with true high-quality content and make sure your current pages are as good as they can be. This SEO trick helps you improve your ranking position easily.
Turn unlinked mentions into links
Links are still the lifeblood of SEO. That means that one of the key ways to make a difference to your Google rankings is to get a large number of high-quality links. But this could hardly be described as a small change – earning links requires a lot of work, doesn’t it? In general, yes, but there are some things that you can do to potentially gain links quickly.
One of these is to look for current unlinked mentions – instances where your brand name has been mentioned on a site, but there is no link to you. Seek out these mentions and then contact the webmasters of the sites asking them to link out. In many cases this will lead to you getting a direct branded link from a genuine website.
Written by: Mike James, BOSS Contributor
