In the competitive digitized world that we are living in today, the most important factor for a website is its Google keyword ranking. Keyword rankings are so crucial that when a website cannot rank well in search results, it’s like a book in a library that nobody ever picks up to read. All your website development and maintenance effort can go to waste if you do not put in effort in identifying and placing the relevant keywords on its web pages.
Working on your website’s Google keyword ranking is not so difficult these days. If you use a website building platform to create your site, it will probably have features that facilitate you to implement on-site SEO strategies. Such features are very helpful because they rid you of the need to hire a full-time web developer to ensure your website is well maintained and optimized for the relevant keywords on Google.
Today we are going to discuss some tips and tricks that you can apply to your website for enhancing its Google keyword ranking for your target keywords.
5 On-Site Tips to Improve Your Site’s Google Keyword Ranking
Let’s first talk about techniques that you need to apply on your website’s pages and through the site’s editor. These are simpler to implement than the off-site SEO strategies, which take longer to take effect.
Your on-site SEO is so important that these tactics need to be put in place as and when you build your website. Delaying to take these actions can delay your website to show up in Google search results for the target keyword.
1. Write a Clear and Catchy Site Description
Your site description tells your visitors in a short sentence what your website is about. It needs to be precise, yet appealing. It should be as clear as possible. There is no point in keeping your site visitors confused about what you’re offering on your website.
The worst case would be for you to leave your site description field blank. That is terrible for your Google keyword ranking. The best thing to do is use your target keyword in your site description, and also try to use as many other relevant keywords as possible. Google will rank your website for the keywords used in your site description. If your core keyword position is high in Google search results, your website will compete with a lot of other websites to rank high for that target keyword. That’s why you would need to combine this tactic with other on-site and off-site SEO to maximize the effect.
If you build a website on Strikingly, you can insert your site description in the website settings in the box shown in the screenshot below.
Image taken from Strikingly
2. Choose a Responsive and User-Friendly Website Design
Your website should be responsive to the range of devices available for visitors to browse it from. If your website text gets scribbly or the images get blurry when someone opens the site from their mobile phone, it will hurt your site’s SEO and negatively impact its Google keyword ranking. Choosing the right design for your website is important.
A good and appealing web design not only makes your website look attractive but also makes it easy to navigate, which enhances its Google search ranking for the relevant keywords. If your website is untidy or difficult to browse through, visitors will give bad reviews for it. Google bots would start noticing the high bounce rate and reduce its visibility in Google search results. We all know that websites that only appear on the second or third page of Google search results barely have a chance to be opened. Thus, you need to target your website to have such good Google keyword ranking that it always appears on the first page of search results.
If you use Strikingly to build your site, you would notice that we offer plenty of catchy website templates that are both feature-rich and simple to navigate.
Image taken from Strikingly
3. Produce Good Quality Content
The quality of your website content also has an impact on its Google keyword ranking. Your target keyword should be used a good number of times in the text on all your web pages. All the relevant keywords must be mentioned as many times as possible. Add the relevant keywords to all your headings and make sure all the headings make sense with regards to the content that follows each of them.
Producing good quality content also means that it should be free from plagiarism. Copied content cannot make it to the top of Google search results. If Google bots detect your content as being copied from another site, Google can even ban your site from appearing in search results.
Bloggers who run a successful blog are usually good at producing high quality content. Observe how successful blog owners position keywords and make use of the tags on their articles.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
4. Add Meta Descriptions to the Website and All its Pages
Some say that meta descriptions have become outdated. But the truth is they still influence your website’s Google keyword ranking and should be part of your SEO checklist. Make sure you add relevant meta descriptions to all your web pages. Be sure to only add relevant descriptions. If you write something in the description of a page that does not accurately describe what the page is about, Google might detect that and lower your rankings instead of enhancing them.
5. Verify Your Website With Google Search Console
This is an important step for improving your site’s Google keyword ranking. It might sound technical, but with the use of website builders, it is actually quite simple. All you need to do, especially if your website is built on Strikingly, is get your Google HTML tag code and key it into the field in the screenshot shown below. That’s all you need to do to verify your Strikingly website with Google Search Console.
Image taken from Strikingly
3 Off-Site Tips to Improve Your Site’s Google Keyword Ranking
The off-site SEO techniques are as important as the on-site tactics, except that these take a bit more effort to implement and slightly longer to show results. They are nonetheless crucial for maintaining a high Google keyword ranking for your site.
1. Do Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is the most influential and effective form of marketing these days. A great benefit of using social media to promote your brand and your website is that when someone likes a social media post, they start sharing it with others. This sharing feature on social media increases the chances of your website going viral, without you having to pay for all the marketing.
If you have social media pages for your brand, it is best to integrate them with your website. You can add social media icons to a section on your landing page, or simply insert them on the site’s footer. When your site visitors click on these icons, they should be redirected to your brand’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and/or LinkedIn accounts.
Social media sites help in improving your website’s Google keyword ranking to a great extent. Traffic can move back and forth between your social media pages and your website, building more traction and engagement for your brand.
2. Build an Online Community
Having an online community to represent your brand can serve multiple purposes.
- It increases engagement of your customers with your brand.
- It helps resolve queries among customers via discussions held on the forum.
- It increases traffic to your brand website.
- It improves your website’s Google keyword ranking.
You can create an online community on a social media site, such as a Facebook Group, or can make it into a separate section on your website itself. On Strikingly, we have a community called our Idea Forum, where we encourage our users to share ideas and opinions about website development and other relevant topics.
Image taken from Strikingly
3. Do Content Marketing
Content marketing is an organic marketing strategy whereby you publish content as blog articles, social media posts, forum comments, YouTube videos and more, in order to build your brand awareness and establish yourself as an expert in your field. Content marketing greatly helps in enhancing your website’s traffic and Google keyword ranking.
Guest posting is also a form of content marketing, whereby you make blog posts and write articles for other people’s blogs. When you make guest posts, you insert backlinks to your website in your articles. This brings the traffic of that blog to your blog or website.
You can either do content marketing yourself (if you are into writing) or hire professional content writers to do the job for you. Either way, it is an effective and modern strategy for improving your site’s SEO for your core and target keywords.
Many businesses run a blog of their own to do content marketing for their brand. Strikingly allows you to add a blog section to your website and post as many articles on it as you like.
You can try out these SEO strategies and see how well they work. If your website is on Strikingly, we are here to support you in your pursuits as well. We have many features available in our editor that enable you to improve your Google keyword ranking. As you use our platform more, you’ll see that we keep coming up with more and more new features to help you increase your site’s traffic and improve its search rankings for the relevant keywords.
