If you’re serious about ranking your website higher on Google search, then you cannot ignore or underestimate the impact of a proper SEO process.
However, given that there is such a variety of things that need to be worked on when it comes to search engine optimization, how do you know which ones should you prioritise to achieve maximum results?
So here I’m going to share with you the top 5 best SEO fixes that you can implement for your website in 2020, that will help you move the needle on ranking performance and get you the desired results in a shorter time.
Make your website mobile-friendly
We live in a mobile world; there’s no denying it.
Regardless for work or leisure, it is a forgone conclusion that most of the population worldwide get around using their smartphones more than laptops or tablets.
Therefore, it is no surprise that Google has moved towards a mobile-first indexing principle when it comes to displaying search results. More than 75% of all the websites in Google’s index are evaluated on mobile-first indexing.
It won’t be long before the engine Google search database is mobile-first.
What you must do right now, is to ensure that your website is designed and coded to be mobile friendly. You can check if your website is good for it by using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool.
Optimizing your website for mobile is more than just having a mobile responsive design or template for your website but really thinking about how the typical user would want to retrieve information on your website when they’re on the go.
Improve your website’s loading speed
There was a time when websites with slow loading speed can still rank high on Google, but those days are definitely behind us.
Google has officially announced that page speed will be one of the ranking factors going forward.
To make sure you don’t get on the wrong side of Google’s preference, aim to have your website load in 2.2 seconds or less.
When it comes to speed optimization, the server that your website is hosted on plays a critical role, as does the extent of onpage optimization performed on the site’s assets, such as the javascripts and graphical elements.
You can check in detail how good your site’s speed performance is, and what needs to be improved upon, by using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix.
Use rich snippets on your website
Technically known as structured data, rich snippets are pieces of code that helps Google understand better what the page is about.
And when Google understands what the page is about, your page will have a better chance of getting a higher rank position on the search results.
Rich snippets are called so because they enhance how your SERPs are being displayed, ratings and additional lines for FAQ are common examples of rich snippets showing up in your SERPs to make it more prominent.
Most websites are still not adding rich snippets to their webpages, or they are using them incorrectly.
So, to gain an unfair advantage in your SEO process, make sure to add rich snippet code into your webpages.
Publish high quality content
Content is the meat on your webpages that Google looks for to determine if your webpages should be ranked higher on search results.
It is not an overstatement to say that without content, there’s no way you can get your website to rank.
Therefore, one of the most important fixes that you can perform on your website, is to improve the quality of the content published on it.
What I mean by high-quality content, is how precise and relevant it is to answering the questions that your target audience has.
At the end of the day, what Google really wants is to present the most relevant answers to the questions that people ask when searching on Google.
And if the content on your website is deemed to be the most relevant and useful to the searchers, your website is naturally going to be favoured by Google and rank higher over time.
Stridec, A top SEO agency in Singapore, advocates using content tuning as the main strategy for any website’s SEO process. It has achieved great results for a number of the sites that they’ve worked on, sometimes getting pages to rank within the top 10 search positions simply by producing solid pieces of content.
Optimize your titles and headings
The title and H1 heading tags are the 2 most important elements on a webpage that directly affects search engine performance.
You just cannot be lazy about this. Spend the time and effort to go through all the title and H1 heading tags on your website to make sure they are optimized in the proper manner.
This means that each of them should not be repeated and has to be unique.
To optimize further, your target keyword should be found in the title tag as well as the H1 heading. Also, where applicable, move the keyword to as close as possible to the beginning of the title or heading.
This goes without saying, but those titles and H1 headings have to be completely relevant and related to the content of the page. Clickbaiting visitors to come to the page only to find out that the content is totally not what they’re looking for, makes for a bad user experience, and will impact your SEO in a bad way.
Conclusion
SEO can sometimes feel daunting when you consider that there are a multitude of things to work on.
However, not all things are created equal and there are definitely a handful of them that disproportionately drive most of the impact for your search engine optimization efforts, such as the 5 mentioned in this article.
Do these properly and you’ll find your SEO success soon enough.
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