6 Simple Steps to Improve Your Page Rank and Drive Traffic to Your Site

Have you ever searched for your product or brand and stared longingly at that #1 spot on the search engine result page hoping it was yours?

Are you driven to make it to the first page and surpass your competitors?

Then your first priority should definitely be looking to boost your Google PageRank.

What Is Google PageRank?

According to Wikipedia,” PageRank is the algorithm used by Google Search engine to rank web pages in their results page. PageRank is named after Larry Page, one of the founders of Google. PageRank is a way of measuring the importance of website pages.”

It works to help determine how relevant or important a page is to a specific topic or search query in order to justify offering it as a result on the SERPs.

Why Ranking on Google Matters 

It can be easy for you to dismiss the idea of getting a higher ranking spot on the SERPs. What's the point of all this extra effort? Will it really make that big of a difference for your business’s growth?

Sites that get placed on the first page or ranked highly often tend to:

Get Higher Traffic

Websites that are listed at the top are guaranteed to receive the first clicks and, therefore, more traffic than anyone under the fold on a SERP. 

Receive Greater Credibility

Search engines offer up results based on how relevant, valuable, or informative it calculates a page is. Users generally tend to trust the higher ranking pages more than others because they believe that the important and accurate results show up first.

Earn Better Opportunities

If you're using the correct keywords and writing content to target the right audiences, Search engines have an easier time serving your site up as a result to ideal customers for your business.

If you are able to rank high for the relevant keywords, you'll be able to pull in more of these ideal customers and have better chances to win opportunities for your business.

How Long Does It Take to Improve Your PageRank?

Honestly, it all depends on your goals and efforts.

We know that’s not quite the answer you want to hear, but it's hard to put a timeline on a process that's so subjective to the type of business you run. It all depends on your unique situation and where your current search engine optimization (SEO) stands. You can use our online SEO tool to audit your website and find ways to implement the data or better SEO.

Improving your ranking can be influenced by:

• Your Budget
• Competitive landscape
• Website development and performance
• SEO skill and knowledge

Still, many studies have been performed to help give people a rough sketch of what they can expect. Ahrefs found, on average, that:

• Pages ranked in the top 10 were over two years old.
• Pages that ranked first were nearly three years old.
• Only 22% of pages ranking in the top 10 were found to be less than one year old.
• Only 6% of pages in the top 10 ranked for at least one keyword within one year.
• About 94% of the pages used in the study never made it to the top 10 within a year.

So, if these numbers are to be believed, you can pretty much assume that you'll have to work on  your Google rank for at least a year, if not longer.

6 Guaranteed Ways to Raise Your SERP Ranking in 2020

You shouldn't let that timing scare you away from doing everything you can to get your business in a better position on Google or other search engines.

Here are some great tried and tested techniques that you can implement today to help boost your ranking this year:

1. Update Your On-Page SEO.

If you haven’t already gotten up to speed on the changes in Google Algorithm updates, now is the time to start updating your website to reflect these improvements and changes.

Common on-page SEO processes include optimizing your site’s title tags, content, internal links and URL structure.

You can do things like including word or phrase in your page titles to have long tail keywords that describe your products or services better, or provide more context to an existing blog.

In addition, character limits for meta description has increased significantly over the last few updates, letting websites include more detail.

You can use this higher character limit to your advantage by updating your meta descriptions to have a call to action or relevant keywords to encourage consumers to intereact on your page.

Furthermore, if you are someone who has not updated your page content in a while, renovate your page to include more educational information, current facts, images, and infographics among other helpful and relevant content.

Create link structures within your site so the search engines can crawl your website effectively and decode your pages for displaying in SERPs.

2. Put More Time into Outreach and Link Building.

You can spend plenty of time and resources on creating your content, but the time you put into getting your content out and about into the world is more important to increase your number of links and social media shares.

Create a Content Marketing Strategy for amplifying your outreach and link building process.

This can include amping up your daily or weekly social media posts, signing up for PR websites, or reaching out to new media or blog partners for the purposes of guest posting.

By having more resources geared towards content outreach, you're more likely to bring in traffic from other websites and grow the quality and number of external links to your site.

3. Renovate Your Website Based on Mobile and Local Search needs.

Whether you have a physical location for your business or dabble in e-commerce, optimizing your site for mobile users is one of the most crucial elements in 2020.

Almost all consumers today search for solutions with the help of their smartphones, which is why Google and other search engines have taken a mobile-first approach to how they serve their users.

When refurbishing websites, marketers should look to creating responsive designs as well as adding mobile-friendly search features, like interactable maps and business information (Name, Address, Phone number) to aid in local search.

4. Answer User Queries.

When users are searching for information, they naturally tend to phrase it in the form of a question. Google and other search engines have picked up on this fact by putting greater emphasis on its Quick Answers Box or snippet previews.

Pages that answer user questions in a detailed and helpful way are more likely to be featured this way and have greater visibility.

5. Pay Attention to Your Links.

There are a lot of mixed feelings in the digital marketing world over the value of link building, but one thing's for sure: The quantity and quality of internal and external links on websites truly make a difference in the eyes of search engines like Google and Bing.

If you have a large number of broken links or links to pages that aren't valuable or relevant, you'll lose a few points.

Google and other search engines crawl to see the value a webpage will provide for a user, including who and what the page links out to.

An external link is like a vote of confidence that displays your support of the other webpage or website. 

Check the links on your important pages, especially landing pages or the contact page, and make the necessary fixes.

6. Practice Keyword Research.

Keywords are important because they are the bridge between what people are searching for and the content you can provide to fill that gap in the market. Most marketers are constantly diving into their keyword research tools to hunt for ways to better optimize their pages.

It's a simple process, but it's probably the most important one if you're trying to rank better in the results pages.

Keyword research will fill you in exactly what your target audience is looking for. You'll get a quick glimpse of what they need, how far along in the sales funnel they have reached, and which buyer personality fits them best.

By leveraging the right mixture of short-tail and long-tail keywords on relevant pages, you can show up in their field of view and become exactly the right thing that can deliver what they need.

It's important to remember that getting into the top 10 is only half the battle. Holding your ground takes just as much effort.

But by putting the time and resources into boosting your PageRank, the effort is well worth it in the long run when it comes to organic traffic and lead generation.

Use our tool to analyze your website and the competitive landscape so you can start working on getting to the front lines of SERPs for providing services to your audience.