One of the biggest problems many website owners experience is that their site doesn’t rank in Seach engines, so they don’t get enough traffic. Many people only look on the first page of Google and Bing, so it is important that your page appears as a top result to get visitors and conversion.
But knowing how to rank a website can be very tricky.
How to rank a website?
You need to ensure your website is listed in search engines like Google and Bing before you can rank. A Google and Microsoft accounts are needed to integrate your website into the search engine result. For example, a WordPress plugin like Rankmath can make it easy to connect your site with Google and Bing.
Depending on how and where you build your website, you can find different solutions to appear in search engine rankings. This is essential before looking for other strategies to rank a small website.
1. Website Audit
A good start is to do an SEO website audit which shows you a full analysis of your website’s health. You can see your site’s strengths and weaknesses, what you do right and what you can improve.
To better understand the benefit of a web audit, you need to know how search engines work. It starts with a Google Bot that crawls every page of every website. Then it indexes your content based on an algorithm created by the search engine.
The audit process will check for issues that interfere with raking your website in search engines. These can be problems that don’t fit the ranking guidelines. You get a report and data to build an effective strategy on what you can change.
There are many different SEO Audits like the one from SEMrush or the integrated solution in the Rankmath Plugin
2. Optimizing Website Speed and Design
A big ranking factor is how fast your website is because most people don’t want to waste time waiting for a website to load fully. You can use a website speed tester like Googles Page insight or Gtmetrix to see your site speed.
These tools show you what slows down your website and what you can improve. The most common mistake is that you have many images and videos on your site that are not optimized. You find many services that can help you with image optimization.
Many big websites also use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) with a network of different servers that work together to provide faster delivery of your content. With a CDN like Cloudflare, you can drastically improve the loading of your internet content, including HTML pages, javascript files, stylesheets, images, and videos.
Also, look that your Web Design is easy to use and aesthetic. You should ensure that your site works on mobile devices because it is where Search engines focus when determining your website ranking.
3. SEO and Keywords
You probably heard about the word SEO which stands for Search engine Optimization. It is the strategy that helps you to rank your website higher and get more traffic. There are many different ranking factors you should keep in mind:
- Write unique, targeted, fresh, and valuable content
- Integrate external links and internal links that are relevant to your content.
- Use fitting graphics, images, videos, and audio in your article
- Search for relevant Keywords that have small competition but high enough searchers.
- Place these Keywords in your Heading and subheading, the first paragraph of your article, in the Meta description and Meta title. Also, integrate it in the image alt and article URL.
- Ensure that your website is fast and mobile-friendly.
SEO Cheatsheet:
4. Integrate Schemas
There are different types of schemas you can integrate into your website. The most common are FAQs, Infographics, Reviews, and a short summary of your article. These schemas can appear in the search result as short information about a specific topic.
If you create Schemas for your website article, you can, as an example, answer a question on your topic and link your site. Then these questions might be searched in Google, and your answer might appear at first. So if a user likes an answer and wants to know more, he can click on your link and get traffic.
Again there are many different tools like Rankmath that let you easily create such schemas
5. Quality Content
Write content on your website that is relevant to your niche. Ensure that it is unique and valuable for your audience. An article should at least have 1000 words. Use a tool like Grammarly to find grammar and spelling mistakes and overall improve your text.
Use the above-mentioned SEO and Keyword techniques to rank your article.
6. Use different Marketing strategies.
You can utilize different marketing strategies to improve your ranking and traffic. For instance, with Email Marketing, you can send your visitors messages about your newest content and offers. A giveaway can also drive new users to your site. Online press releases, guest posts, and reviews can help with traffic as well.
While these strategies do not directly help with ranking, they bring in visitors, and if they stay on your site longer, it improves the bounce rate. The bounce rate is a ranking factor that can help get a higher ranking in search engines.
7. Advertising
If you have a budget, you can create ad campaigns so you appear above normal search results. This is especially useful if you have a product or service to offer. It gets you more traffic and makes your brand more popular, which can help with overall ranking and discovery.
8. Social Media
With social media, you can attract and grow a very targeted audience. A good way is to share your website content and answer posts as well as provide new information on social profiles. Social media shares on your website can also improve your ranking. Integrate a share button where users can easily show your content to their friends.
9. Improve your Domain authority
Domain authority (DA) is a huge ranking factor. It is a metric used to rate websites from 1 to 100. A higher DA means you are more likely to appear on the first page of search engines. When your website has high-quality backlinks from other websites with a large DA score, it can also improve your own score.
You can use SEmrush domain authority or Linkgraph’s Free Bulk DA Checker to see your Domain Authority.
There are many strategies to get more DA, like having quality and updated content. Identifying your competition and finding your targeted audience so you can see what content works. Also, relevant backlinks can help with your DA score.
10. Analyze your data
No matter what strategies you use, keep track of the different methods. Analyze the result to see what you can improve and what you do right. Ranking search engines is a long-term process that is trial and error.
While there are many different algorithm changes almost weekly, your traffic will have ups and downs. But one thing is certain you need to be consistent in content posting and improvement to archive better rankings.
