Many of our clients are curious as to how to make their sites rank on Google. The most important thing to remember is it does take time and effort. When we provide a website, we provide many tools for you to track how traffic is getting to your site and to ensure your site pages are optimized for search engines trying to read your content. However, the question remains, what can you do to make your site rank on Google?
Let’s talk about a few free options and a few paid options you can improve your rankings on Google. Some of these ways we’ve seen work with our own clients! It’s always suggested to start with the free options and move on to the paid options later. This can save you some money for services you may not need. However, sometimes time is of the essence, and this is where professional services can come in handy.
Free Methods To Make Your Site Rank on Google
The free methods may seem like no-brainers to some, but for those unfamiliar with how the web works this is the best place to start. Even if you go a paid route, you’ll need to do these steps to make your site rank on Google. All of our packages come with basic SEO and assistance in creating a Google Business Profile. All of our packages include the blog posting functionality. Let’s discuss the value of each of these.
Search Engine Optimization – (SEO)
Search engine optimization has to do with constructing your webpages, and website to showcase the content so it’s attractive to both human and computer readers. When you’re writing you need to ensure the content is relevant to what the user wants. However, Google is also paying attention to the content.
Search engines will pay attention to how long a user stays on the page. If they are bouncing off quickly, the search engine will assume the content isn’t meeting a need. So there are a few things you’ll want to pay attention to with your content.
It’s all About Trust
Google likes seeing something is trusted. Websites with an SSL (Secure Socket Layer) are ranked more highly than sites without one. SSL is a means of keeping your visitors safe. If you’re on Chrome, simply click the icon to the left of the web address in the address bar. It will tell you if the website is properly encrypted. Look for that little “Padlock” icon. Don’t worry, if you got a site with us, you have a valid SSL certificate!
Backlinks
However, something that shows trust more than anything is when other trustworthy sites link back to yours. These are called “Backlinks”. Consider for a moment your website has a killer recipe for banana bread. Now, let’s pretend a major mom cooking blog with lots of traffic sees it and links to it. Google has trust for that cooking blog and is now seeing an influx of traffic from that site to yours. What does that tell Google? It tells Google that you must also be somewhat trustworthy! As a side effect, you now have people sitting on your site. Now you’ve gotten increased trust all around.
Is it organized?
Google likes to pay attention to the headers and notice if they are properly cascading down. Headers are categorized by numbers. An H1 followed by H2s with nested H3s / H4s etc will show Google how the content is organized. The headers will also allow your human readers to quickly skim to get the information they actually want.
Are you including Meta tags on your site? Meta tags are behind-the-scenes informational tags that help Google catalog your website. These tags have no immediate information presented to the user, but Google uses them to see if what they are presenting matches the content on the page. Specifically are you including keywords and descriptions for each page?
We include Yoast SEO for most of our clients if you have a package with us. This powerful WordPress plugin will allow you to set the needed data to ensure Google can properly categorize your page. Along with allowing you to edit the Meta tags, it also gives you several suggestions for things to fix on the page to make Google happier. And we want to keep Google happy.
Is it Cohesive?
Everyone hates going to a recipe page and reading everything but the recipe. That’s why they have created the button , “Jump to Recipe”. However, for some reason, the writers feel it is their moral obligation to explain the meaning, origins, and controversies of Christmas before giving the recipe for Aunt Jenny’s Christmas Cookies. (This is due to trying to get you to click affiliate links, but I digress). There’s nothing that makes me bounce off a page faster than pointless content hiding what I really want.
Instead, ensure the content you want to present is easily accessed, but sprinkle in relevant tidbits along the way. To continue with the recipe analogy, look no further than Alton Brown. The famed Good Eats / Food Network cook always delivers a solid recipe. Yet, you often learn the reasoning for why we let dough rest, the reaction of sugars and yeast, and maybe even the history of why something is baked a certain way.
This is a solid example of keeping things relevant, and cohesive, while still delivering the content I want. Each extra tidbit doesn’t detract from what I want, but ensures I will get exactly what I need. In the end, we’re causing the end user to stay on the page, and Google is watching. The end user stays longer, and Google sees the time on the page is longer and says this page deserves good ranking. Yay!
Google Business Profile
A Google Business Profile is a free but essential way to make your business stand out. It will allow you to come up in more localized searches. You can specify the areas you service, your hours, and even answer some FAQs. Think of it as a very watered-down website. It will have very basic contact information, pictures, reviews, and more. You can also link to your website, Facebook, Instagram, and other social media presence.
This is another way Google will look at your website, and build trust. Because of the strict requirements to get a business profile, they can validate your linked website as being connected to a valid entity.
To check out yours go to https://business.google.com/locations. If you don’t have one set up, feel free to reach out and we’ll get you set up! If you’ve had a website set up with us, you likely have a Google business profile setup already. However, in some cases, you may not qualify for one. Your business/organization may be required to have a DBA, LLC, or S-Corp. We can walk through these requirements with you.
Blog Postings Make Your Site Rank on Google
Another great way to ensure you are making your site rank on Google is by using blogging. Google will pay attention to how often content on your website is updated. It regularly crawls through your site and looks to see if anything has changed. Using a generated sitemap it looks to see if there is new content, removed content, and changed content.
If you posted a popular article in 2020, but your site hasn’t changed since then, Google may continue to serve up the article. However, over time other similar articles will find favor with Google, and rank higher. It will assume that your article and website have become outdated, or worse, that no one is connected to it anymore.
If you’re regularly posting to a blog, Google will see your website is updated, and therefore, not dead. It will assume you are doing an overall good job of maintaining content. This means it will continue to push your site up in ranking, as it has a higher trust in you.
Personal Experience That Made My Site Rank on Google
We’ve seen a client rank more highly than a big box store competitor’s website from using their blog. Their simple usage was to post weekly specials, low effort, and it got their message out. However, when sharing these weekly posts using Jetpack’s ability to post to your social media you create a number of backlinks to your website. These backlinks drew traffic to the website, the users then spent increased time on the site browsing older posts. Google sees this, and recognized the quality and useful content on the website!
I was told by an “SEO expert” that Google only ranks websites with 10+ pages. So if you bought one of our 2 page packages, you may initially struggle to rank on Google. The thing is, (about to share some secret sauce and screw some web designers out of upselling…) every blog post you make is considered a page by Google! So go ahead and make a ton of posts, and this will help with that threshold.
Sharing is Caring
Do not neglect sharing your website/blog post on your social media! Social media has a very specific job and is important to your business and organization. But your end goal should be traffic to your website to help with informing potential clients, having interested folks sign up for your email list, and help with overall traffic to your site which helps your Google ranking.
You can write a Facebook post and reach a small audience. Or you can write a blog post and then share that across social media with a link to your blog post. When people want to read the whole thing – guess where they’re going? Yup, your website.
Paid Ways to Make My Site Rank on Google
Google Ads
One of the easiest ways to get your website to show up on Google is to pay to advertise your website. You can get one of their sponsored ad spaces to show off your good or service.
Essentially you will link what you are attempting to share with the world with some keywords, possibly linking it to general regions or audiences. Once you have done this, Google will serve up your ad to their many daily users.
Google ads don’t come cheaply though! You can expect to pay at least $200 a month. However, you may need to pay $400 – $500 a month to break through and see a return on investment. Google will do its best to throttle your spend throughout the month, so you don’t see your ad budget blown in the first hour of your campaign.
Paid Backlinks
Paid backlinks are another method that many people use to get their sites ranked. This method has some ethical concerns to it in some people’s minds. However, this is the bread and butter of how many SEO firms get you ranked quickly.
There are many less-than-savory players in this field, however, there are many players who are quite reputable. Working with an SEO expert can get you placed quickly, and get your ranking up with ease. Consider you’re both paying for backlinks and for a professional to tweak and manage your content. This means the monthly expense is something to consider. Many SEO experts are at least $150 a month on the lowest end. Generally, you are likely going to be paying $400 a month for an expert for basic services.
So What Now?
We’ve covered a few basic pieces here. We’ve started with the free and basic:
- Have an SSL certificate (Free on most reputable web hosts!)
- Use Meta keywords and descriptions
- Put out good and cohesive content
- Maintain your website. Don’t set it and forget it.
- Get a Google Business Profile
If you have these pieces in place, in as few as 3 months you can start to see a great flow of traffic to your website. This is when Google starts to see the content built and gains trust in your website!
However, sometimes you need a bit of a boost a little sooner. This is where paid tools come in, such as SEO experts, paid backlinks, and Google Ads. I would never say to neglect these, but when possible, try the free routes first!
We’ve covered a lot of information and follow-up blogs will be written to expand on many of these points. Remember, this is as much an art as a science. However, to quote Alton Brown, “But that’s another show”.
But in the meantime, if you have questions if you’re spending your money wisely on your website or need help with some of these free options, please reach out to us! Our goal is to help business owners gain control of their website!