3 Easy Ways to Kickstart Your SERP Ranking

“Auditing your website isn’t optional. It’s a necessity.” – Neil Patel

If you have a website, you want to increase your rankings on search engines. Period. Without traffic and unique visitors, your site (and potentially your business) floats dead in the water. It’s just common sense: if your site is invisible, nobody buys what you have to sell or digests your content.

This is nothing new to you. All your efforts are worth squat if nobody clicks. In today’s age: genuine content that helps people is attractive to search engines. There’s more than creating phenomenally-useful content, too. Have you poured every waking hour (and dollar) into building authority? Optimising your UX? Making sure your personal brand name info helps? An SEO audit, although undoubtedly more time-consuming (and potentially costing you more) is an easier route at the end of the day.

How easier?

SEO audits are like a scorecard for your site – and you’re given a grade. We’ll go in-depth about the specifics later, but for now, we’ll say that you will learn what the weaknesses in your site are, where they are, and how to fix them so your site moves up in the search engine rankings.

There are a few SEO principles you can execute, starting now, that will naturally entice people to visit your site and transform them from visitors into buyers. Then you can proceed on with the audit. The entire process then will run much more smoothly. Let’s talk about a few of those principles.

1.Define Your SEO Strategy

First off: your traffic rankings for the rest of 2018 obviously depend on which SEO strategy you use. For example…

• Are you concentrating on your site’s mobile-first index?
• Are you using voice search?
• Do you develop progressive web apps?
• Do you have a limit for your crawl budget?
• How much time (and effort) do you put into building backlinks?

Going all out and pushing yourself to the limit on each strategy is a useless waste of energy and time. They don’t call “the jack of all trades” a cliché for nothing. Pick a strategy, master that strategy, utilise techniques you learned, then track the results. Always track the results when you make changes to your website. Without recording, tracking or analysing results… you simply won’t know what works and what doesn’t.

2.Test Your Social Media Presence

According to Comscore, there are over 2 billion global social media users. Statista revealed that Facebook has the most active users in 2018 so far. YouTube ranked second, and WhatsApp ranked third. What this means for you is: social media platforms are a goldmine for boosting your SEO rankings.

How? Your (in)activity level helps search engines determine whether you care only about your website updated. The level of human engagement affects your Google ranking.

Indexes judge their rankings based on how much time you spend all over the internet. So developing your Facebook content is a huge step towards moving up in the ranking list. (An even bigger step involves sharing your blog content—you do have a blog, right?—on your social media accounts. Who knows, you just might become an influencer.)

3.Long Loading Times = Death

Do you know how many seconds it takes for your site to load? Be honest with yourself. Vague terms like “my site loads fast” or “my site loads a bit slow” doesn’t help you. Savvy marketers instantly know—to the millisecond—how long it takes their site to load.

Why?

Because the faster a site loads, the better. Better how? Google directly ranks you in its search engine based on your site’s loading speed. We both know that people loathe waiting for something. (I threw my laptop out the window when a 3-minute YouTube video took 10 seconds to buffer. Kidding.)

Your visitors aren’t going to wait for your site. Not when there are more important things to do. Luckily, testing your site’s speeds is easy. Pingdom is a free tool you can use to do so. Just type your URL in the box and click the “START TEST” button.I tested Moz.com to see how the site performs. It received an overall C grade (76 out of 100). It’s faster than 54% of tested sites. And boasting a 1.7MB page size, Moz loads in 2.88 s. Pingdom even shows you performance insights – and grades various aspects of your site.

At day’s end, people must buy from you. Plain as that. If they don’t, your business will tank – no matter how many unique visitors you have. Give yourself a chance to turn those visitors into buyers by keeping them on your site. (This could potentially improve your conversion numbers.)

Having a slow website is a sure-fire way to test peoples’ patience. Then your site—plus your brand—will be seen as an irresponsible, undependable slow-poke that doesn’t know how to do business.

(At least, that’s what I think when pages take aeons to load. You can bet that your visitors and consumers do too. How do I know this? Because you most likely do. Am I wrong?)

Conclusion

After you’ve optimised your site, you can perform an audit. When all is said and done, performing a local SEO audit yourself shouldn’t take more than a day. (If you know what to do.)  On the other hand, there are tons of helpful companies that perform SEO citation audits for you. Remember: if you have a site have a site, you need an SEO audit. Here’s a recap of the benefits of them:

• Compare your site to your competitors – and how to use that data to get a leg over them.
• Plan (and execute) future expectations for your brand to stay relevant
• Double-check to make sure your links, resources, sources and citation notes are accurate and up to date
• Discover your site’s weaknesses – and promptly fix them (how’s your link quality? Sources and information? Inaccurate information hurts your rank placement – citation audits can fix those easily)

Assess dead links (inbound and outbound)