These days, establishing an online presence for your business is vital. You can have an app, e-commerce store, or website to ensure your clients can find your business online. And because of the advent of technology, many entrepreneurs can easily create apps and websites for their brands. However, this may be overwhelming since you must compete with hundreds of competitors to rank high on Google’s search engine results page (SERP). To learn more about this, keep reading this beginner’s guide.
What Is Google SERP?
Google SERP is the page that appears after you enter a query or search into Google. Google has over 80% of the market share on different search engines like Yahoo and Bing. For that reason, you must ensure that you rank high on Google SERPs since consumers mainly check the first page results.
When you appear on the first page of SERPs, you’re most likely to generate more traffic to your website since most consumers trust the ones appearing on the first page. Furthermore, you may also appear on the first pages of SERPs by using the ‘People Also Ask’ tool or use some of the following features, as digital eagles explains:
- Reviews: Also known as star rankings, can show after a transactional query—a search that Google users search when thinking about buying a service, item, or product. And consumers are more likely to click on results with 5 or 4 stars. Thus, it’s best to have a star rating system for your business where clients can leave their ratings.
- Featured Snippet: This feature is eye-catching since it shows in a box with the applicable search keywords the consumer wants that may be contained in your site. However, you need to reach the first page of search results to be considered as a featured snippet. So that when searchers see it, they’re more likely to click on it, mainly if it contains their desired keywords and relevant data.
- Google Ads: This feature can appear at the bottom or the top of the SERP. You can let your target audience see your ad before the organic results. But you must use competitive keywords or have a high-quality site to reach the top of the SERP.
What Are The Factors Affecting Your SERP Ranking?
As mentioned, people searching for things on Google usually rely on the first page of the SERP. If people can’t find the answers on the first page, they’ll revise their queries instead of clicking the next page of the SERP. Therefore, you must ensure that you rank high or be on the first page of the SERP. You can do so by considering the following factors:
1. Optimized Site
You need to consider search engine optimization (SEO), especially in the technical aspect. When your site has technical SEO issues, search engine crawlers are less likely to access your site correctly. This makes search engines unable to rank your site.
That’s because before you get ranked, the search engines will find all publicly available web pages during the discovery stage. The next step is crawling, wherein they add extracted information to their index. Such a process will help ranking algorithms rank websites.
During all those processes, you need to assist these search engine crawlers so they can complete the process without any blocking. Keep in mind that they may be unable to crawl and index your site if they can’t access it. Therefore, it would be best to do the following if you want to optimize your site for search engine crawlers:
- Fix Crawl Errors: Make indexing faster and more efficient by fixing crawl errors via the Google Search Console.
- Optimize Extensible Markup Language (XML) Sitemap: You must ensure that your sitemap has all your site’s pages so the search engine bots can discover them.
- Optimize robots.txt: You may also want to specify and instruct what page search engine bots can crawl using the file robots.txt.
2. Mobile-First Site
Google also indexes your site according to its mobile-friendliness. Instead of the desktop version of your site, Google will index the URL of your mobile site. This means that Google ranks and indexes your content from the site’s mobile version. Consequently, it would help if you prioritized the mobile-friendliness of your site.
3. Content Quality
Most importantly, you should create content that covers a broad spectrum of your niche. It should also be in-depth, engaging, and provides relevance to your readers. These qualities of quality content can help your site rank higher on SERP.
Conclusion
If you want your target audience to discover your business, you need your site to rank well in Google’s SERP. However, it’s also essential to consider things that can improve your site’s position on search engine results pages. Make the necessary adjustments right now and see the difference.
