A lot of site owners wonder why they’re not performing well on SERP (search engine results page). There are many contributing factors to this, and I’ll start with the basics:
A. THE BASICS:
Before we proceed, we assume that you have already prepared your site for optimization and indexing/visitation by Search Engines (SE), like Google, and that it has been around for a period of time (like 6 months and up), precisely why it made you think that you’re not doing well on SERP.
Let’s jump right in. Sometimes, you don’t really need an expert to figure it out for you. You can review your site, yourself, having the following in mind:
1. KEYWORDS/KEYPHRASES
When you talk about better results on SERP, you’re actually talking about keywords and/or keyphrases the visitor use to search. You’ll never know whether you’re doing good on SERP unless you know the keywords/keyphrases you wanted to excel on. And if you’re failing at that, go check and review the sites who’s doing good at those keywords. You’ll definitely pick-up something you can assimilate from their site. One extra note, it’s good to include the keywords/keyphrases as part of your page title, description, apart from your page content.
2. CONTENT
The more textual content you have on your pages (especially the home page), the better. However, people don’t find much pleasure in reading a lot of texts from a site. So, the tendency is to design the site with less text and more images (people love seeing pictures, it’s a fact). A disadvantage to that is that though you’re pleasing the human eye, you’re actually starving the BOTS (search engine bots or spiders) with information they can gather from you site. So, what is important is for you to maintain a balance between the two. You must satisfy both. If you lean towards providing more pictures than text, then do just that on primary pages, but be sure to do more of the talking on internal pages via call-to-action buttons, like “read more” buttons. This way, you satisfy not only your desire for aesthetically cleaner pages, but you also increase the volume of your site.
3. VOLUME
The more the page you have, the better. This allows SE (search engines) to index more content from your site’s pages. The question is, how would you increase your site pages when you only want to tell your audience about your company, the services/products you offer, and a way to contact you. There are ways to increase the number of pages. This will be discussed on another article. For now, keep in mind the influence of volume.
4. CHANGES TO SITE
Most of the time, people will have a site, and leave it just like that, for months, years. If an SE BOT sees that there’s nothing being changed in your site for along period of time, it becomes less and less relevant as it age over time. So, it’s important that you keep your site active and current. Make some changes, but don’t change those sections of your page that are providing good information to BOTS and human readers alike. Changes could range from aesthetics, content, and increased volume over time.
At this basic stage, you may already know where you might have failed. You site can only be as good as to how much you gave attention to it. It needs love and pampering, too. From here, you can already do a lot of improvement to your SERP.
On the next article, we’ll talk about the intermediates of getting better search engine results.