Where does your business appear on Google when potential customers search for the keywords you've chosen? If you're not at the top – or near the top – it can be frustrating. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that very few users go beyond the first page of results when performing a Google search. In fact, they are more likely to refine their search rather than navigate to the next page. Fortunately, there are plenty of things you can do to ensure your website appears on the first page in 2016.
Here are the five most important ones.
#1: Focus more on authority than on keywords
While using keywords in your web content remains important, the days of high keyword density being the key to ranking on Google are long gone. In fact, where you place your keywords is nowhere near as important as the overall authority of your website. Google's algorithms are very sophisticated and no longer rely on keywords in a title or H1 tag to decide if a page is worth a visit. Instead, they focus on contextual meaning, looking for expected words to evaluate pages.
If, for example, you wanted to rank for a keyword like „Best Legal Advice“, you had to use that keyword three or four times in strategic places to have a chance of ranking. Now, when you talk about competent legal advice, Google can recognise that your page is relevant to the keyword even if you don't use it more than a couple of times in your article.
#2: Keep an eye on bounce rates and the time spent on your site
Another surprising SEO development for 2016 has to do with assessing whether your site provides visitors with what they need. Google is not only searching your site for keywords and context, but it's also looking at what visitors do after they leave your site to determine if your page is relevant or just a waste of time. For example, if a visitor searches for one of your keywords and clicks on your page, Google will look at how long they stay.
A dwell time of several minutes could indicate that a user is engaging with the content on your page and has found what they are looking for. However, if they spend several minutes on your page, return to their list of search results via the dreaded back button and click on another page instead, that's a good sign your page wasn't what they needed. If you have a high bounce rate, a good way to improve your search ranking in 2016 is to ensure that your website delivers the answers to the questions implied by the keywords you have chosen.
#3: Optimise your website for mobile users
In 2015, mobile searches on Google surpassed desktop searches – and this trend is likely to continue. Google has placed a high priority on mobile search, as evidenced by the Mobilegeddon update for mobile-friendliness in early 2015. If your website isn't mobile-friendly, now is the time to change that. Fortunately, most businesses can switch to mobile-friendly or (ideally) mobile-responsive websites with little effort.
Sometimes it's as simple as changing the template you use for your website. If you have a WordPress website, for example, you have a huge library of templates available, many of which are mobile-responsive. You may need to tweak your website a bit for a new template to work, but the effort is worth it. The beauty of mobile-responsive websites is that they adapt to the specific mobile device.
Mobile customers are generally very impatient and will rarely wait for a slow-loading page or scroll horizontally to read your content. Taking the time to optimise your website for mobile users can do more than anything else to improve your search ranking in 2016.
#4: Avoid content that is too short
It wasn't that long ago that blog posts of 250 to 500 words were considered the norm. Short and sweet was the rule of the day, and the assumption that people wanted short content led to a flood of brief articles that held little value and meaning. That has all changed. To be honest, the trend towards longer web content has been around for a while, but this year it has become more of the rule than the exception. Research shows that internet users are much more likely to engage with content between 1,000 and 1,500 words than with short articles.
And why? Because they want valuable information, and – with rare exceptions – it’s difficult to convey that in just a few hundred words. Of course, you can offer a top-10 list that’s only 500 words long, but you won’t be able to explain why the points on the list are there as well as you would if you wrote a longer article or blog post. The reason Google values length so much is that it wants to ensure visitors are directed to pages that are designed for humans, not for search algorithms. If you have concerns about publishing long content, you should remember that you can break it up with subheadings and images to make it more readable.
#5: Ensure that user-friendliness is a priority
In a way, this last point is a summary of all that has been said before. Each of the points above leads back to one thing: user-friendliness. Old-school SEO focused on tricking Google's algorithms – to the point where many websites were much friendlier to computers than to people. Google is increasingly keen on ensuring its search results lead users to websites that answer their questions.
You want users to feel comfortable when they search. This is unlikely if they land on a website that isn't mobile-friendly or that is stuffed with keywords but provides no real value. You can do many things to test your website's usability, including split-testing individual components of your page. However, the best thing you can do is to do everything you can to answer the key questions that arise from the keywords you've chosen, and ensure that your website is easy to read for every user and on every device.
Achieving a first-page ranking on Google is always a challenge. Regardless of your niche, you will face stiff competition. It may sound strange, but the best way to get a good ranking is to forget about trying to rank. Don't worry about algorithms and SEO tricks. Instead, focus on making your website a place where potential customers can find exactly what they need. If you do that, search rankings will follow.
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