For those who are interested in improving your website’s organic ranking and getting found online...
...you probably already know that a major factor to improving your ranking is the consistent updating of your site with quality content. The following will help you better understand what content you should be focusing on and how to get it ranking.
What content should I be focused on?
Start by thinking about you, your business and what you want to convey to your audience/customer/future customer. You can go by all the data round-ups in the world about where to focus your attention, but at the end of the day it’s about your goals, your data and your strategy end-game. High quality relevant content should be focused on specific topics that you and your business would like to be recognised for. Take this up a level with blog writing directed right at your intended audience’s pain points, offer them solutions with your content, and great content will be achieved by default, helping position you as an expert or authority in your field.
How do I get my content to rank?
The next step can be challenging, however it is important for you to start building authority for your website. The way to do this with Google is to start to get high-quality links back to your website. This means having a backlink to your website or piece of content. These links are indicators to Google that your site has authority and rankings will start to improve as more quality links are built. Ideally these links will happen organically, however in most cases you might need to source these other sites and request for them to link to you.
Remember, getting discovered by Google is just the first phase and this happens through a process of Google crawling, indexing and then ranking your site.
Search engines like Google have bots that crawl the internet to discover and understand content. To be clear, these bots can only read text, so while imagery is important you should always add relevant descriptions to your images to help search engines understand what your website is about.
Relevance is high on Google’s agenda, their job is to provide the end user with the most relevant search results. They do this by indexing the content using signals such as keywords.
These bots also decide on your search authority and rank your pages accordingly.
How does Google determine authority?
Content that is considered to have authority by Google has referrals or citations (backlinks) from other sites that have authority. Essentially, the more backlinks you have from these other sites with authority the more authority your own website will have.
Discovery, relevance and authority are dependent on one another. If your content isn't relevant, then it has little chance of ranking, no matter how authoritative it is. If your website isn't authoritative, then it has little chance of ranking, no matter how relevant it is.
To get your content ranking in search results, you need to keep these two aspects of SEO in mind:
Build relevance so you rank higher for more search queries
Build authority so you rank higher in search engines
Are you ready to make your content the avenue to ruling your industry?
