The internet is a big place, with more websites being created every single second. So if you’re a small business and you’re trying to make a name for yourself, how do you stand out amongst the crowd? How do you differentiate yourself from your competitors and get potential customers to view your website? The answer is a simple: search engine optimization.
What is SEO in a nutshell?
Search engine optimization (SEO) can seem incredibly complex. But once it is broken down, it’s actually quite simple.
SEO is the method of boosting your business’s online visibility, with the overall objective of driving potential customers to your webpage. For many businesses, their goal is to bring their website to the first page of Google’s search results, as most consumers never scroll past the first ten results. After all, what better way is there to advertise your business than to put your name right in front of possible customers?
This is done by increasing a website’s page authority, which is the score given to a website’s page that predicts where it will rank in search engine results. It is important to understand that a website’s page authority differs from their domain authority; the page authority ranks one specific page and the domain authority ranks the entire website. Both calculations are determined via a one to 100 logarithmic scales with 100 being the highest and most coveted spot.
5 Factors to Consider to Appear in the first page of Google Search
Search engine crawlers, also known as bots, search the internet multiple times a day to find new websites to outrank the old ones. There are many different factors that go into building a website so it appears in the first page of a Google search. They include the following:
1. Content
Relevant onsite content, which is content that speaks about your brand and the services you provide, and provides contact information.
2. Appropriate Use of Relevant Keywords
Keywords are words that you write on your blog that match a customer’s search engine query results. For example, if your company is a heating or cooling company, some relevant keywords to include on your website include HVAC, heating and cooling services in [city location], or furnace repair. Simply put, you want to think about what your customers are searching for and add those to your website in an easy to read manner. This means no overusing one keyword multiple times on a page.
3. Low Bounce Rate
A bounce rate records how long a person stays on a specific page on your website. If most viewers click on your website and immediately leave, you have a high bounce rate. Conversely, if the average consumer spends about ten minutes on your website, then you have a low bounce rate.
4. A Diverse Backlink Profile
You will want to have other websites relevant to your niche link back to you (called external links) to show the search engine bots that you can be a trusted source in your industry. A true backlink profile also includes links that your website posts of other websites in your industry as well, known as internal links. For both internal and external links, it is recommended to have these websites be from a variety of different page authorities, from one to 100.
5. Page Authority
A page’s page authority can be affected by a multitude of different things, including:
- If the specific page has been crawled by a Googlebot yet.
- If the websites linking to you have been ranked.
- If high authority websites in your niche have grown, widening the competition and the scaling of everyone’s page authority.
- If you have a low domain rating, which means your website is at the lower end of the SEO spectrum.
Fortunately, there are many ways to check the status of your website pages, with one of the most popular being a domain authority checker. This is a tool that lists out each of your pages so you can see what page, if any, needs any specific work.
Don’t get caught being a small fish in the big pond of Google, and focus on your page and domain authority. The sooner you do so, you will see results and those customers will come flooding to your website.
