How to rank on Google: 8 SEO tips to attract more visitors to your website

The competition for attention on the Internet is fierce. Of this you should already know. We all want our websites on the first page of Google and for our customers to find us easily. But then, how to appear on Google, standing out from the crowd?

First of all, it is important that you understand that there are no quick fixes. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a work to be developed with medium and long term strategies. Being noticed by Google’s search algorithm involves optimizations and hard work, done consistently.

From this premise, you need to familiarize yourself with Google’s Search Console, as it provides us with many tools to let you know that your site is relevant. When Google crawls your site, it checks that you meet a few requirements:

• That the technical components of your site are optimized for best user usability;
• That you follow content marketing best practices;
• That you follow SEO best practices for reputation building.

Check out, below, 8 SEO tips to attract more visitors to your site!

1. Upload a sitemap

An XML sitemap is a smart tool that shows Google what is on your site. It is important for Google to identify all the pages on your site and know when they are updated.

Many platforms, such as WordPress, automatically update your site’s page information with Google whenever you make changes, so you don’t have to do this manually.

But since not every website is built through these platforms, Google still offers its own Sitemaps Generator. And you can add it by going to Google Search Console > Crawl > Sitemaps.

2. Make sure your site loads quickly

If your site is slow, it will lose points with Google’s algorithm. Analyze your site’s speed and find out what the problem is. One way to do this is by using Google’s own PageSpeed Insights. The loading speed of your pages has a direct impact on the user experience, a factor that Google is making more and more relevant and that has proven to be an SEO trend for the coming years.

Another key factor for SEO, and one that is gaining even more momentum as of this year, is the mobile version of websites. Mobile responsive sites adapt to the main way internet users search. It is probably on a cell phone that a potential customer will visit your website. Keep an eye on this, as it is one of the key points in solving the question of how to show up in google in 2021.

3. Know your keywords

What are the search keywords you need to explore? How does your potential audience usually perform searches on Google to find for your services or products?

To understand which are the most searched words, you can use some tools like Google Keyword Planner (Google Ads), SemRush or Ubersuggest. There you can enter a word that you believe your audience uses in searches and receive an estimate of how many searches the term gets per month, as well as related words. Some of these tools also allow you to analyze which keywords a site is ranking for, a great way to analyze your competition.

4. Use your keywords wisely

Optimizing your site by incorporating relevant keywords into your content is an easy way to make your site more visible to search engines. Once you have selected which keywords will be worked on each page, it is time to apply them. They will need to be inserted into:

• URLS
• Titles and subtitles of posts (called Headings – H1, H2, H3 etc.)
• Alternative image texts
• Texts on the page
• Meta Titles
• Meta Descriptions

But beware: search engines will penalize your site if you fill it to the brim with keywords. Use common sense and keep your content natural.

If you are in doubt about what meta titles and meta descriptions are, they are the content about the pages on your site that will appear as Google search results. Here is an example:

In this example, the title “Vision Comunicação | Integrated Communication Agency” is the meta title, while the text that comes right below “Your company with the best strategy…” is the Meta description.

5. Adopt content marketing best practices

Usually, you have about three seconds to attract someone’s attention in the online environment or the user will leave your site. So make sure your content is relevant to them. To do this, understand who your ideal customer is and what they want to learn from you. All Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques start with good content creation.

What are the customer’s pain points? What do they need to solve? These are good starting points for developing content for both your website pages and for a blog. A blog is a great practice in content marketing, both to generate relevance to a brand, showing its expertise in the market in which it operates, and for the internal linking strategy, about which we will discuss later in this text.

Search engines value new content. If you do not update your site frequently, they will not visit your site often. And the easiest way to update the contents of your site is to build a blog with periodic posts.

One point to take into consideration when building the content of your site is that for any page, the minimum amount of words for good SEO is 300. For content pages (blog posts, for example), longer content is recommended. When companies publish content with 2,000 words or more, they tend to rank better in Google’s algorithm. Studies show that to reach the first 10 pages of Google’s search ranking, you will need to regularly post content that exceeds 1100 words.

But there are also analyses that scrutinize this question, about the ideal amount of words for a blog post according to each market and how to appear in Google. One of them is by SEO expert Neil Patel.

6. Pay attention to internal links.

Remember to build links that lead from one page of your site to another. After the initial work of building this internal link network, how do you keep it growing? As we said before, this is one of the reasons why it is important to build a blog with constant updates.

An important point to remember is the adequacy between the anchor text of the link and the destination page. Try to work keywords as anchor text and links as seamlessly and naturally as possible.

7. Start link building

The rule is: links to your site, especially from more established sites than yours, will help increase your visibility in search engines. This is how Google analyzes your site’s reputation and relevance.

Some practices for getting backlinks include credits on client sites, content partnerships (e.g. blog posts with partner companies), and redirects from content you’ve built in the past that can link to your current page.

8. Don’t forget Google Image Search

Did you know that images can also boost your site’s SEO and increase the number of users accessing your page? Images account for at least a third of all Google searches. But how to appear in Google Images? We consider three important points to work on:

The Alternative Text (Alt Text)

The alternative text is displayed when an image cannot be loaded, describing it. It also serves to help visually impaired users know which images are included in articles.

It is important to remember to use keywords in the image alts.

The file name

Don’t use random, automated names for image files. Rename them with words that relate to your content. This is how Google will use these keywords and improve your search results in ‘Google Images’.

The file size

We have already touched on the importance of having a fast website that loads all its elements quickly for the user. One of the factors that can make a site load slowly is how images are being used. By reducing the image file size, you can have a faster loading time and can help boost SEO results. Of course, losing image quality by reducing it is something you want to avoid, but there are ways to resize or compress them without causing them to lose quality in the eyes of the user.

To learn more about how to appear in Google and put in place an SEO strategy for your company’s website, contact us, an integrated communication agency ready to solve your challenges.