The world of Google rankings can be complex sometimes. You might have found a brilliant online shop builder with solid products and a great team blazing a path to success, but that doesn’t mean you can rest on your laurels.
For those unaware, Google works through a series of algorithms that rank websites depending on the user’s intent – the websites that are most relevant to what the user is looking for will be the websites that rank highest.
But as we all know, there are a lot of websites on the internet – around 1.15 billion, to be exact. Not all of these websites will be offering different products or content.
Even if your online store feels innovative or your products feel unique, there are likely thousands of other websites that are offering something identical or at least very similar.
So Google’s algorithm can’t just look at relevance; it has to go beyond that. Unfortunately, for many companies, Google doesn’t reveal what factors are the most critical when it comes to their search algorithms, but a lot of research and testing has gone into working it out.
Right now, there are several practices that your company can carry out organically, helping to boost your online store’s Google ranking and keep you as “Google-friendly” as possible. Here are six of the best for you to consider:
Keeping Things Simple
Although it might seem basic, we cannot overemphasise how important SEO is for your website. Before you do anything, you need to understand where your website ranks in Google’s search results right now and use the relevant tools to define where it will rank depending on keywords.
Once you know what keywords are useful for your company, you can target them for each page of your website and move yourself higher up the rankings organically.
Creating A High Quality Website
This might sound a little obvious, but a lot of the time, companies don’t really know what a good website means. Think of one massive high street full of companies looking to interact with customers.
The ones with the best real estate will be the ones that offer the best experience for the customer, and it’s this experience that Google’s algorithm will be analysing.
You need to create a secure and accessible website that works for any user – not just a select few. This means creating a website that will appear correctly across a variety of browsers, loads well for various internet connections, and is easy for a user to navigate and browse.
Being Mobile Friendly
When Google ranks websites, it does so through a Googlebot, which scans through each web page and ascertains its usability.
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There are two types of bots – a desktop crawler that simulates a desktop user and a mobile crawler that simulates a user on a smartphone. With this in mind, your mobile format needs to be just as accessible and secure as your desktop website.
Even if the majority of your users are going to interact with you from a desktop, 58% of Google searches are done through a smartphone, and your ranking will be affected by your mobile capabilities, which means just as much effort needs to go into optimising the website for smartphone use.
Creating Informative and Engaging Content
One mistake that a lot of online stores make is simply letting the products speak for themselves, meaning they have little to no useful or informative content on their website. Google has stated, however, that it ranks websites higher if they have useful, up-to-date content.
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By constantly updating your website with articles, you will also be ensuring the Google bots regularly visit your online store, giving you more opportunities to change your ranking position and potentially climb higher up the ladder.
Remember, this doesn’t mean unloading regular, useless content. The key word here is not “quantity”, but “quality”. Don’t use AI to write your content, as the quality will never be as good as a professional writer.
Google will be analysing your website, and if it finds low-quality articles, it is going to penalise you for it.
Trying To Be Concise
This might sound counter-intuitive, seeing as we’ve suggested you should create long-form, informative content, but more and more, Google is attempting to provide users with answers – rather than a long list of potential answers.
This is described by the term: “zero-click search”, which means users can attain the information on the results page of a search, without actually having to click on the website itself.
This isn’t so great for you, of course, as you want to drive website traffic and get people shopping on your online store. But if you are a source for Google to suggest an answer, then you’re going to rank higher, so it’s worth optimising your content to ensure this.
Including Visuals That Are Meaningful
Just as your content needs to be meaningful, so too do your website images.
Rather than slapping stock images on top of everything, make sure that your images mean something to the user – if they mean something, then the chances are, they illustrate the concept described in the piece and, crucially, the keyword.
Right now, Google is giving preference to screenshots of specific landing pages with relevant images, meaning this will boost you up and get you closer to a first page Google ranking.
Conclusion
As we mentioned before, all of these tips might seem simple, but simple is what Google likes.
The last thing you want is to be penalized by trying to work past Google’s algorithms, and you need to work with them and keep the user in mind at all times.
These are organic, easy ways to climb the ladder and remain in Google’s good books, so get practicing!
