7 Key SEO Areas to Improve Google Rankings

Getting to the top of the SERPs can be the holy grail for digital marketers. Every day we complete tasks to get into those elusive top spots. While we may never know Google’s secret recipe completely, there are several areas we know contribute to being successful at SEO.

Crawlability

It’s simple - if search engines cannot crawl your site, they cannot index your content. Ensure your site it structured well with a navigation menu that benefits the user and enables the spiders to reach your important products, services or content. Ensure you have submitted your xml sitemap to the search engines so they know where to find your pages and can index them.

Useful content

Your content is what enables you to answer the queries of the people you’re trying to target, which means it has to be useful and written for the human reader.

Optimised for keywords

Research the search terms people are using for your product, service or the subject of your article and ensure it’s in the page to attract searchers and search engines. Don’t go overboard, we don’t want to keyword stuff, but ensure it is in your title and occurs naturally in your copy so that the search engines know what the subject of the content is.

User experience

Make it quick, make it easy and make it responsive. People nor search engines want to wait around for pages to load, figure out a complicated site structure or have a bad experience on mobile devices.

Shareable content

Improve your backlinks and domain authority by creating content that people and publications want to share.

Useful title, URL and description

Your title, URL and meta descriptions should all describe the subject of your web page, including the keywords that you are targeting. Make it as clear to the search engine what your content is about whilst still being useful and readable to humans.

Snippet / schema markup

Have you googled a recipe lately, or looked up jobs in your field? When an extended result is shown in Google, such as step by step instructions or advertised jobs, those are rich snippets and are possible due to the schema mark up on a site. It’s not an absolute must, but they are proven to receive higher click through rates than competing results.

That concludes our 7 key areas to improve your search rankings, let me know if you have any questions in the comments!