A Beginner's Guide to SEO Ranking

More than 90% of online experiences start from a search engine. SEO is essential for businesses who wants to establish an online presence. Improving your SEO ranking drives traffic to your site and generates more leads for your business. Here’s 5 simple steps on how you can improve on your SEO ranking.

Publish Relevant content

When you have relevant content, visitors are more likely to spend longer time on your website, increasing the overall dwell time. Dwell time is the average amount of time visitors spend on your website, and is an important contributor to your SEO ranking. Longer quality content pieces tend to retain visitors for longer periods of time, as well as include more keywords and outbound links that send signals to search engines to increase your SEO ranking. So, invest some time and effort to improve and make sure that the content on your website stays relevant.

In line with keeping your content relevant, it is also paramount that your website is frequently updated. Fresh and newsworthy content increases your relevancy and gives your visitors a reason to visit again.

Page loading speed

There are plenty of reasons for a slow loading page, and one common mistake is having multiple large-sized images residing on your page. Page speed is one of the main and most important SEO factors. Slow page loading time decreases the overall dwell time of users and increase your bounce rate. You’d want to avoid these for they will hurt your SEO ranking. Thankfully that’s not the end of the world. There are many ways to increase your page loading speed, and thankfully, there’s us!

Mobile optimization

With a population of 5.62million, Singapore has a high mobile penetration rate of over 150%. Each person owns an average of 3.3 devices, with smartphones being the most popular. In 2017, more than 3.55 million people are active mobile internet users, and this is projected to increase to 4.21 million in 2022. These are just statistics in Singapore alone. Globally, more customer interactions are taking place on smartphones and tablets. We are moving towards a mobile-first era, and businesses and digital marketers should adopt mobile-friendly strategies to improve consumer experiences and for businesses to better target their consumers.

In terms of SEO, it should also mean emphasizing on mobile-first optimizations. Mobile-friendliness is another major factor in the SEO ranking algorithm in many search engines. Google is now drawing up indexes first from mobile-optimized sites before those optimized for desktops. Check: is your website mobile-friendly yet?

Links

The internet is built upon links, and thus building on inbound, outbound and internal links for your website will naturally improve your SEO ranking.

Inbound links are a signal to how trustworthy your site is. The more inbound links there are to your website, the more your website will be deemed as trustworthy and thus rank up higher on the search engine. Of course, inbound links coming from low-quality sites can also negatively affect your ranking.

Outbound links to relevant and quality sites on the other hand, show users the quality of your content. This affects your SEO in that it increases user satisfaction, increases dwell time and thus lesser bounce rates and higher ranking.

Internal links also help to increase SEO ranking. Imagine you have a high SEO rank for a particular page on your website. Linking that page to a weaker ranking page can increase the reliability of that page, and in turn, improve its ranking.

Site navigation

When a user is unable to find the content they are looking for on a site, higher bounce rates and lower dwell times occur. Having clear navigation and site architecture will allow users to find things easily, leave a site satisfied and come back for more. Repeated visits from users will boost your SEO ranking as well.

As it seems, user experience seem to be the key takeaway on how you can improve your SEO ranking. Design and manage your site with your users in mind. Focus on building that user experience. It will guarantee you higher conversions in the long run.

Need help on getting started? Chat with us.