From The California Business Journal Newswires
Your website ranking plays a huge role in determining the overall traffic influx to your website. There are a couple of strategies you could utilize to boost your site’s search engine ranking.
Most folks are already familiar with the basic SEO tactics. Think along the lines of quality content, fast loading time, and simple user interface. While you may have all these on lock, your search engine ranking may not improve or not quite significantly, for that matter.
Even if your site improves its ranking, maintaining its positioning is the next great challenge. Search engine positioning criteria are ever-changing.
With newer sites emerging every day, you really need to bring your “A” game to get and remain on Google’s page 1 of results.
This explainer piece will highlight ten of the best search engine positioning strategies you need in 2020. That way, you’ll always remain on top of this cyber game called search engine ranking.
What Is Search Engine Positioning?
Search engine positioning is collectively the strategies and tactics you use to improve your websites’ position on a search engine’s results page (SERP). Sounds just like SEO, right? Well, we can’t blame you for thinking so.
Search engine positioning is pretty similar to SEO, only that it is more straight to the point. Think of SEO as something everyone with a website does to improve page ranking.
Positioning, on the other hand, is more straightforward and less of a gamble when compared to SEO. These tactics are meant to not only improve search engine ranking but also maintain the position for a long time.
Amazing Search Engine Positioning Strategies for the New Decade
As of now, we have over 1.5 billion websites, but only 200 million are active. 200 million is way lesser than 1.5 billion but is a huge number nonetheless.
Making your website stand out from these 200 million websites is the tricky part. While all 200 million aren’t in your niche, your niche must certainly have a fair share of this huge number.
All in all, search engine ranking is pretty competitive. Only the crème de la crème of webpages make it to the first and second pages. However, that doesn’t mean you need to be a huge company to improve your search engine position.
Here are some of the best positioning strategies you should pick up to better your chances of creeping into the first search engine page.
1. Voice Search Is Your Friend
Think of how almost everyone has Alexa these days, or how many times you call on Siri for assistance. About 66.4 million Americans own a smart speaker.
If you can’t catch the drift, then yes, voice searches are the future of searches. Soon, keying in your search queries will be a thing of the past.
You need to optimize your site for voice search and here’s how you do so:-
- Include a FAQ page for answers to commonly voiced questions
- Adopt more conversational phrase in your site
- Consider using structured data markup
2. Optimize for Mobile Friendliness
We overlook just how much we love our phones. Most folks can’t stay a cool two minutes without picking up their phones.
You could leverage this phone dependence to your advantage. All you have to do is optimize for mobile-friendliness.
Try having a simplified mobile user interface for your mobile site. Remember, symmetry and organization are key. You need large text and images that are visible for the smaller phone screens.
Note that you have to optimize your site separately for mobile-friendliness. Google indexes computer and mobile sites very differently. Always keep that in mind.
3. Use Schema Markup
A well-kept secret is the schema markup. Not a lot of website owners know about this pretty useful tool.
You add the schema markup to a webpage, and it creates a concise description dubbed a rich snippet. This snippet highlights your page on the SERP with relevant, concise descriptions and thus attracts more clicks
4. Adapt to Your Local Traffic
If you have a local business, then your site should be geared towards the local population. Let’s say you own a local restaurant. Your site should scream “local restaurant in address X,” but not in those exact words.
Involve stuff like the menu, or the day’s special and information about deliveries on your website. Your website should be aligned with what the locals want for your business.
Chances are after visiting your site, the web visitors will also come to your restaurant in no time.
5. Focus on the Upper Portion of Your Site
A website visitor tends to concentrate more on the upper part before scrolling for more stuff below. This is because this part is like the site’s summary or table of contents.
This upper part of your webpage should be enticing enough to make the user scroll down or go for a second click.
6. Don’t Neglect the SEO
Your website still needs effective SEO to make it to the top pages. However, remember, don’t do what everyone does, because you won’t stand out from the crowd.
If you need professional SEO services tailored for your site, you can always visit this website . That way, you can focus on other search engine positioning strategies knowing your SEO is on lock
7. Ask and Answer a Question
If your content answers a nagging question the masses ask, then let your content be both answer and question. In doing so, what you define as the answer will be in the answer box on the SERP page.
8. Have a FAQ Page
Never underestimate the power of a FAQ page. After all, it contains answers to the most frequently asked questions, which is highly relevant information to the web user.
9. Speed up Your Website
No one likes a slow web page. The slower your webpage, the less traffic you’re likely to attract. Also, people are more likely to press the back button, which increases your site’s bounce rate.
10. Have a Couple of Images
You can use images but not too many that your site slows down. Images increase the number of shares your site gets. They also enhance your site’s user-friendliness.
However, make sure your images are relevant to the site’s content. You may have to spend a bit to get good quality images for your website. Pennypinchers, however, can always get fairly good images on Shutterstock
Improving Search Engine Positioning Is Not Rocket Science
Hopefully, you now firmly understand how to bolster your search engine positioning. All these strategies seem easy on the surface. However, it takes a lot of commitment and consistency to maintain a site’s positioning on a SERP.
Creating your website with website builders like Wix or Squarespace is easy, but making your website stand out from these 200 million websites is the tricky part.
