7 Impactful Steps to Boost Your Ranking
Finding yourself on top of the Google search pages (SERPs) is like a puzzle.
It's intricate, the pieces have to line up, and it isn't completed until each snippet is put into place.
In this blog, I'll walk you through 7 steps you can take to improve your website's SEO and ultimately gain a higher ranking on Google.
1. Title Tags
Title tags are the titles of the pages that you see on SERPs and on social media.
These seem easy enough, right? Well. It takes a bit of creativity — you need to be writing for both the search engine and people.
Your title tag should include:
• What your website is about (copywriting)
• Your main focus keyword (medical copywriting)
• Eye-catching words (expert)
It's important to remember that your title tag represents your page.
If it isn't clear to the reader then it most certainly won't be clear to the engine bot scanning your page. And, if it isn't relevant (click bait), then you'll begin seeing high bounce rates — which, in turn, indicate to the bots that your page isn't what it claims to be. Both of these factors will result in a de-ranking of your page on SERPs.
One more factor to consider is your title tag's length. According to Moz, Google will begin cutting off your title tag at 60 characters. You can check out Moz's title tag tool by clicking the link.
2. Meta Description
Meta descriptions are the 1-2 sentences that appear under title tags.
Since your title tags should max out at 60 characters, this is your chance to describe a little more about what is on your page.
These should:
• Be relevant to your title tag (mine mentions copywriting and content marketing)
• Contain a keyword from your page (copywriting)
• Be persuasive enough to click (grow your clientele and increase your Google ranking)
This may seem redundant since most of this is already mentioned in the title tag itself — but it's important to show relation between the two for the bots.
For example:
Title: Expert Medical Copywriting and Content Marketing
Meta description: Hire me today
👆 Google isn't going to see the relation between those two. While a person may understand, the bot won't.
Get creative and swap around the words. Use your best copy to encourage people to click your link.
3. Meta Tags
Imagine meta tags as invisible hashtags.
Like your favorite social platforms, these are used to place your website in the right categories.
By looking at the screenshot of my meta tags, you should be able to easily tell that they are all related to both my title tag and meta description.
Not only did I use the same keywords from earlier, but I also added in some of my services (SEO) and results (conversions, leads) they can expect.
This is a HTML code and the method of "installing" it into your website looks different for every web host provider.
If you don't know where to place your meta tags, a quick search inside your host's help section should talk you through it. You can generate your meta tags inside a HTML code here.
4. Optimized URLs
This is quite possible the most overlooked aspect of SEO.
And, if I'm being honest — before I started working in the digital marketing industry, I would have never thought about it, either.
But knowing what you know now about everything we've discussed so far, can you see how a confusing URL would prevent the bot from understanding what is on the page?
Examples:
Good: example.com/news/how-to-write-a-good-url
Bad: news.example.com/localnews/article/8727492/howtowriteagoodurl
For a great SEO-optimized URL:
• Keep it short
• Keep it readable
• Use keywords
• Separate words with a hyphen
5. H1
Your Heading 1s (H1s) are your on-page titles.
Some examples of H1s include:
• The main heading on your homepage
• The titles on your blog posts
• The name of your subpages
The H1 on each of your pages should also work in accordance with everything else we've went over. Once engine bots finish reading the technical aspects, it's going to move on to everything inside your website. The bot expects to see a relation.
For example, I used the exact same thing for my title tag and H1.
Why?
Well, when you factor in the relevancy requirement and couple it with needing to use your focus keyword inside your H1, it just makes sense to reuse it.
This kills two birds with the same stone.
This doesn't mean you have to reuse it. You can get more creative with your H1, if you want.
Some other important things for you to consider:
• Having only one H1 per page
• Placing your H1 at the top of the page
• Keeping it short and to the point
6. H2
Once the bot reads your H1, it will scan your page and read all of your Heading 2s (H2s) next.
These are more or less your section headings.
For example, the title of each section you've read on this blog is a H2.
On my homepage — since I don't have sections — I used them to break up blocks of text.
However, I didn't use random words in my homepage's H2s. They contained words like, "doctors," "patients," and "waitlist." 👈 All of which are related to my focus keyword, which is "medical copywriting."
If able, you need to be using other SEO keywords inside of your H2s.
And, like H1s, keep them simple, clear, and short.
7. Formatting
One of the most important things you can do to round out your SEO campaign is to format your paragraph text so that it isn't overwhelming to read.
You need to get rid of the way you were taught to write in school — paragraphs are no longer 5 to 9 sentences long. They're 1 to 4.
But what exactly does that have to do with SEO?
When someone comes onto your page and they're greeted by a wall of text, what happens? They bolt!
2 of the analytics sent to Google are:
• Bounce rate
• Time spent on a page
When your bounce rate is high — meaning they leave without clicking on a link — or their time spent on your page is low, this tells Google that your page isn't what your readers expected.
Google can translate this to clickbait material and de-rank your content.
If you're unsure how to format, go back through this blog post and notice how easy it is to find my sections and how each of these sections are skimmable by way of my formatting.