There are no tricks when you want to rank better in Google. Individuals and companies have researched trends long enough to know that the process of ranking well in Google takes time and it takes work. Whether you’re a new company in Kalamazoo looking to start building a reputation or a company in Portage that hasn’t tried to improve your ranking over the years, there are a variety of solutions that you can work on to help your site.
If you’ve never stepped into the world of SEO, that’s where companies like Creative Marketing Group come in. Dedicated to putting your business front and center for your customers, our team tackles SEO for your business through SEO best practices. From creating a plan to executing it with precision, a digital marketing and SEO team can help elevate your online presence in proven, effective ways.
How Do I Start to Rank Better in Google?
Those starting the journey into search engine optimization often wonder where the best place to begin is. Often, the position of your site’s pages are a good place to start. After all, you can’t tell where you need to go with ranking before seeing where you start. It may take a few pages of results to find yourself, or you could surprise yourself and have a decent starting position. But, in order to perform such a search, however, you need to know what keywords relate to your business.
Keyword Research
You may have heard the words “keyword” or “keyword research” thrown out in conversation or articles about SEO. But what do they really mean? Keywords refer to the search terms that those online use in search engines to try to find the products or services they need. This can be terms related to the products or services, or a direct verbiage relating to them.
For example, let’s say you run a plumbing business. When your potential customers search for your services, they will likely use terms such as “plumbing services,” “emergency plumbing,” or even a longer phrase such as “help with leaking pipes.” Each of these are what we would classify as keywords that your site can include to try to capture this audience. By including such keywords in the right places on the site, and writing unique, quality content that relates to these keywords, you can directly influence the organic rank of your website.
Local Keywords
Another way to think about your keywords for products or services may also include your local area. If your target audience is your local community, you can include the location as part of the keyword. We can use an example of SEO service for this. A keyword such as “SEO services in Kalamazoo” will not only help a site rank for “SEO,” but also the long-tail version of the keyword, which includes “in Kalamazoo.”
Where You Rank/Competitive Research
Once you compile a list of keywords, you can now see where you rank. You can also perform some competitive research utilizing these keywords. First, search in Google one of the keywords from your list. Google sorts results based on how relevant it determines each site is. Think of each result that you see as a position in the search engines, such as the top being position 1, the next being position 2, etc. It may take a moment to find your site, but you can record where your site currently sits as a baseline ranking to try to improve.
For your competitors who rank higher above you, you can also research what keywords they’re using and how they use them. This often provides some very crucial insight into what type of things your audience looks for with your products or services, and helps you to determine what content you may need to generate or alter for your own site to match a similar style.
Plan Your Site or Talk to a Web Developer
If you plan on working on your site yourself, you can now start to plan it alongside your target keywords. Or, if you need to run your business first and foremost, you can also reach out to a web developer like Creative Marketing Group. Our team takes all your ideas into consideration and formulates them into a plan of action for a website.
Content Helps a Site Rank Better in Google
Once you have your plan for a site established, the key to rank better in Google comes with content. When it comes to SEO, content is king. Google always looks for relevance and authority on topics, so content becomes the way that your site establishes both. By crafting content of various kinds that discusses the keywords you want to use and have customers find you for, you tell Google that you are a leading authority on the topic and that you are the most streamlined option to help customers find what they are looking for.
Written Content
Whether the content on your landing pages, blog posts, press releases, or any other way that you add written content to a site, you help your SEO when including your targeted keywords. Now, obviously there are some limits to the amount of times you want to include your keywords, what kind of phrasing you use, and more. That’s where working with an SEO expert in Kalamazoo and Portage who knows all of these details becomes an important resource. You can find these details through training or research, but an SEO team will reliably handle it for you.
You can also curate your written content toward those in your local area. Relating your services in a personal way to your target audience allows you to create content that not only provides the services or products they need, but ties them into the personal life of the customer and lets them know that you understand the unique problems that they deal with because of the environment they are within.
Photography
Photos do a great job of capturing an audience who doesn’t take the time to read all the content on your website’s pages. Although text will still aid toward ranking from Google crawling and interpreting it, imagery helps primarily with engagement. With relevant photographs, web users that pay more attention to visuals rather than written content have something on your site to engage more with and therefore spend more time on your site. This especially helps when you sell products or services on your site that a visitor can visually see when making their decision about buying.
Video Content
Alongside the written word or photos, video content often works as a great method to drive engagement. Engagement consistently ranks as one of the best ways to improve your ranking in Google. And, this makes sense if you look at it from their perspective. Always focused on giving users the most relevant, helpful results, they are more likely to recommend one that has a proven record of capturing and holding a user, attributing that engagement to relevance. Companies often don’t have the videography equipment or know-how to handle such projects on their own, but an SEO team can help you develop such content. Creative Marketing Group works with professional videographers in Kalamazoo and Portage that we can connect you with to create exceptional, quality content.
Rank Better in Google with Consistent Updates
Whenever you make changes to your website, bots for search engines like Google notice. This causes them to crawl the website again, leading Google to find the new content. When this content contains metadata that includes keywords, or keywords directly in the content of the page, it will recognize that the page speaks to the keyword in question, and will start ranking the page for that keyword. If the content, over time, gets enough engagement and discusses a topic relevant to the keyword used, it will start to rank the page higher. So, new content works as a way to consistently improve rankings for various keywords in your specific industry.
Helpful Connections for Websites
Simply building a website is just the first step toward ranking in search results. Much like traditional marketing, SEO often involves looking at data to determine what works and what doesn’t. Through the right connections to Google’s resources, you can have a better idea of your audience engagement and interaction. This can guide you on what content/keywords work and which don’t, allowing you to focus on your target audience more effectively.
Rank Better in Google with Google Search Console
When building your website or looking for ways to help an existing site rank better, making the proper connections can help. Rather than create a website and hope that Google finds all the pages on the site on its own for indexing, you can instead submit your site directly to Google. Google Search Console is Google’s tool that allows site owners to submit their sitemap for crawling. By manually submitting your site to Google, you guarantee that their bots immediately crawl your site. This can help to determine any problem areas that lie within the site, any optimization details that might have been missed, and more.
A site’s ranking suffers when it provides a poor user experience. From Search Console itself, Google states: “Google’s core ranking systems look to reward content that provides a good page experience.” From their Page Experience function that looks at the user experience on both desktop and mobile devices to assess performance of your site to the Pages reports that let you know which pages of your site are actually indexed by Google or not, there are a variety of functions that can help you to optimize your site and make sure potential customers using Google can find your site.
Gather and Analyze Data with Google Analytics
Google Analytics provides another great option for connecting your site with a resource to help your business grow. Google Analytics helps you better track visitors to your site and see where they spend time. This helps to optimize your site’s content by making updates to pages performing less well than others. It also provides insight into the sources of your traffic. This helps show you where your marketing efforts work best. Data always provides the best guidance for marketing. And, Google Analytics provides more data than you will probably ever need. Rather than sit on this data, digital marketing and SEO companies like Creative Marketing Group help you to leverage it. We help you analyze data for your local market in Kalamazoo and Portage. Or, you can analyze on a broader scale of your choosing. This helps improve your site, increase conversions, and develop better strategies for future marketing campaigns.
Claim and Edit Your Local Listings
After crawling a site, Google often creates a local listing for your business. This is the map location that shows up in Google Maps. However, if you’re a new business without a map location, you can manually create this location for your business as well. Whether you create the listing or take management of a pre-existing listing generated by Google, it’s important to ensure accurate information about your company is reflected in it. Accurate information helps the user experience as it relates to your business. This, plus reviews that you generate through Google, help in another way to improve your local SEO, as your listing will have a higher chance of showing at the top of map results as well.
Backlinks Help to Reach a Wider Audience
Some of the best connections for your business come from backlinks. A backlink is an incoming hyperlink from one web page to another website, in this case, your site. When other web pages link to your business, this gives you one of the most powerful tools in the toolbelt of SEO. Google recognizes backlinks as a way that sites attribute authority on a topic to another website. So, how do you get backlinks? Online directories are one easy way to have your site listed elsewhere. Otherwise, when you establish quality content that others find useful, they are more likely to link to your site, as they want to provide their users with quality information. Between this high-level content and other sites linking to a page you have created, you can quickly boost the page’s ranking for all main keywords used within the page.
Get Help to Rank Better in Google
At Creative Marketing Group, we understand the struggle that business owners face. We have helped owners in almost every industry find a better way to represent their brand online. Using the discussed methods for improving SEO and more, we help you better reach your target audience. Whether you’re a startup or a company with a long history, find help for your online search results and online presence with CMG.
