Getting a website to appear on the first page of Google is one of the most coveted achievements for any small business owner—and for good reason. Over 90% of people never view past the first page of Google’s search results. In other words, if your website isn’t on the first page, you’re missing out on the majority of potential customers.

In addition, you are missing out on thousands upon thousands of targeted visitors that are looking for your product or service.

Below is a Google Ranking Improvement Guide to help you better understand a few of the key elements to solid SEO.

How to Improve Google Ranking

1 . Optimize Your Website for Search Engines

The first step in getting your business to the first page of Google is to have your website designed and structured to be search engine friendly. Search engines work when a user enters in a search query (a word or phrase in the search box), the search engine sends out ‘crawlers’ to find websites that are most relevant to the query.

Many industry-specific marketing companies claim to have the answers, but if you’re going to invest in outside help for marketing, you better make sure they have the results to back up their claims.

A few of the biggest Google ranking factors The Woo Company will help you with are:

Emphasizing Location: To improve your business website’s Google ranking, your website needs to list your city and/or geographic region. So when people search: “Your industry” + ”Your city” Google will pick up that information and show your business as a search result.

An Outstanding and Optimized Website: One of the biggest factors that Google loves is fast and well designed mobile website. Consumers use phones and tablets to access the internet and search engines more than computers and laptops. In response, Google ranks mobile responsive websites higher than non-mobile responsive ones.

Being mobile friendly isn’t enough for a website—it must also be well designed and user-friendly. A well-designed website is essential for increasing overall traffic by keeping visitors on the site. This translates into more traffic over the long run as Google gives more attention to your site.

2. Use Effective Keywords

The keywords you use on your site are one of the biggest factors that will determine your place in search engine results pages. The most effective and affordable small business SEO method for boosting traffic and getting you on the first page of Google is effectively researching and implementing keywords into your site.

Many people have tried to take advantage of this by excessively using keywords within their content. This is called keyword stuffing and is not a good practice. Google is aware of this and will not rank websites favorably who stuff their websites with keywords.

There are many ways to have keywords placed throughout your website that will help improve your ranking in Google. For example, using keywords in the following places can have an impact on your SEO:

Alt Tags: Alt tags are tags on photos that you use to describe photos. Alt Tags are a factor that will increase the SEO of your post and get your photos ranking on the first page of a Google Image search.

Meta Content: This appears along with the title in the search results, and serves as a brief snippet of the content found in the link. Your meta content is the information that describes your page to search engines. It is also the verbiage that shows up under your clickable website address on search engine results pages.

Title Tags: Title tags are on each website page and post. Title tags are the primary text that defines the content of a document. Search engines read title tags to determine what each website page is about when indexing them for search results.

URL links: Google reads URLs when ranking websites. Make sure your keywords or the words that you want to rank for are included in your URL.

In addition, we take care off all off-page optimization work as well.

These are some of the biggest factors in a search engine’s formula for determining website ranking. It’s critical that these pieces of content contain the same keyword you’re trying to target in a natural and organic way.

3. Set up a Google My Business Page

Although Google My Business does not have as much popularity as Facebook or Twitter, it is very powerful for small business owners for Search Engine Rankings. “Profiles that do well on Google My Business get indexed quicker on Google“.

Not only will this get your business indexed faster by Google, reviews enable potential customers to see what other customers say about your product or service.