Improving your SEO generally means ranking higher on Google. Let’s face it: Google is the daddy of search engines, and securing your presence there sets you up for success. However, this is quite challenging for most people, which is why many seek tips.
So, how to improve your Google search ranking? Our SEO experts will tackle that question in this guide. We have profound knowledge of its complex algorithms and trend changes that greatly influence how you should “behave” to achieve this effect.
Consider this a definitive guide to improving your Google ranking in 2024. With the 14 tips we left for you, we have zero doubts you’ll overcome many obstacles and skyrocket your ranking. If you’re interested, here is a guide on how to improve overall SEO as well.
How to Rank Higher on Google in 14 Simple Steps
Let’s make haste and lose no time. Our SEO experts have tested multiple strategies, some with great success, and some with less. This experience allows us to develop tips to get higher search engine rankings and tackle your competition more effectively. They include:
1. Improve the Website’s On-Page SEO
SEO is a broad term for various quality-of-life improvements applied to the website. Simultaneously, it’s the #1 factor to rank higher on Google. Each page should have impeccable optimization, which means several things. First, the article structure.
Your blog posts and pages should follow a strict structure with H1 to H6 titles. We discovered that Google also recommends this for better readability. People often overlook the importance of their SEO titles, meta descriptions, and H1 titles.
They should all include the main keyword. Moreover, the main keyword should appear at the very start of the page. Look above and you’ll see that the first sentence of this Google ranking improvement guide contains the targeted keywords. Clever, huh?
If you need additional help, we recommend using some of the best SEO tools. Semrush and SE Ranking include an on-page SEO checker to better your Google ranking for each page individually.
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Simply provide the URL of the page and get valuable information.
Semrush and SE Ranking will inform you if you need to include an alt title, improve/change your SEO title, compress the images on the page, and so forth. Such a tool can perfect your page’s SEO, resulting in its Google ranking increase in a short period.
2. Increase the Level of Website Performance
The key feature of all high-ranking websites on Google is performance. They’re buttery-smooth and provide an exceptional experience.
So, how to rank higher on Google in this case? How to improve the website performance? Think about loading times.
Google HATES slow-loading sites and will almost always rank them lower. Understandably, if your site takes ages to load, the bounce rate will increase, and people will eventually give up on it. You can do a few things to improve loading times.
Using the Site Audit tool from SE Ranking or Semrush will provide insightful data. In particular, you’ll see your core web vitals that signify how the site is “behaving.” Improving these factors is all about focusing on the technical aspects of your site.
The Site Audit tool highlights the issues that need to be fixed. Optimizing images and videos on your site is one of the steps. Furthermore, you’ll likely need to decrease CSS and JS files on the page. Our team also found browser caching to be handy for ranking higher on Google.
To explain it better, it’s when the website’s static elements are stored on the user’s device. Next time the user visits the website, these elements are instantly loaded, ensuring the entire website boots up quicker and starts working right away.
The website should load in no more than 1-3 seconds. Researchers have shown that a loading time of above 4-5 seconds is detrimental and will likely cause a surge in bounce rate.
2.1 Use a Fast Hosting Provider
You can optimize your website as much as you want but if the base isn’t there, it’s all in vain. The base of every good-performing website is a reliable hosting provider. Besides, a hosting provider hosts your website and provides the required resources for it to work.
This, in turn, means you shouldn’t try to save on things like CPU resources, RAM, and fast storage. Our team assembled a list of the best web hosting services for you. We mentioned there that Hostinger is our #1 choice as the fastest and most reliable option in 2024.
It starts at just $2.99 a month. This plan (named “Premium”) lets you host up to 100 websites per account and provides 100 GB of SSD storage and unlimited bandwidth. If your website grows and you’re getting more traffic, you can also consider different types of hosting.
For example, VPS and cloud hosting are excellent for larger websites in need of more resources. Hostinger offers flexible hosting plans all of which have free website migration if you’re looking to boost the website performance and achieve a high Google ranking.
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3. Research Keywords Thoroughly
Keyword research is a mandatory feature of almost all SEO tools in the world.
Why is that?
Because Google ranking is directly influenced by your keyword optimization! Having a terrific keyword optimization is more important than tiny technical stuff people obsess with.
Thankfully, researching keywords is dead simple and everyone can do it. Semrush, SE Ranking, or even Mangools offer this tool. Mangools KWFinder is the simplest. Type in the keyword, select the language and country you want to rank in, and press Search.
This software immediately displays data like keyword difficulty, search volume, trends, CPC, and so forth. We also found that SE Ranking and Semrush work well, displaying even more information and keyword suggestions to help you get going.
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All this information is important for keyword optimization. If it’s too difficult to rank for, you’ll need more options to improve your Google ranking. These tools also let you discover long-tail keywords. These are more specific and easier to rank for, which helps newer websites.
Once you “conquer” the lower-ranking portion, you can aim for bigger players and try to take them down. When researching keywords, it’s good to take note of search volume. If it’s high, great. If it’s extremely low, then it’s likely not worth putting effort in.
Mangools and Semrush also show the keyword trend, which explains how the keyword’s popularity altered over time. Finally, we must recommend Semrush Keyword Magic Tool as the #1 option for this purpose. It’s an all-around tool for in-depth keyword analysis.
With a wealth of suggestions and keyword information, it’ll help you rank higher on Google simply by including more valuable keywords in your posts. Find out more about it in our Semrush review.
4. Optimize Your Website for Mobile Devices
Google’s recent algorithm update started prioritizing mobile performance among many other factors. It’s not strange given these somewhat shocking statistics from Explodingtopics.com. Namely, over 60% of all website traffic originates from mobile devices.
What’s more, 92.3% of all internet users access the internet from their mobile phones!
We should also point out another thing – there are over 4.32 billion active mobile internet users. That’s pretty much about 50% of the entire world’s population. Google has the right to request extraordinary mobile optimization and you, as a website owner, must comply.
Thankfully, your website’s mobile optimization isn’t too hard to work on. You can use Semrush and analyze your website’s technical aspects to see which needs to be improved. We use a simple trick, however. We simply grab our phones and go to the website.
By doing that, we can evaluate our website and see how it performs first-hand. If we’re dissatisfied, we’ll improve the things that plague the experience. Another method is to check if your website is mobile-friendly using Google’s proprietary platform.
It’ll tell you if you need to reduce/increase font size, improve loading times, alter the UI, and so forth. Improving this factor alone will boost your search rankings tremendously.
5. Improve Your Writing Quality
Quality over quantity should be your motto when discussing how to rank higher on Google. Google appreciates well-written content that’s easy to read and grasp. This means removing fluff and confusing or irrelevant sentences that artificially extend the article.
To get a better overview of what you should do, you can refer to Semrush’s SEO Writing Assistant. Analyze your page with it and it’ll tell you what you did good and wrong. It’s like Grammarly but with more insights regarding optimization and article structure.
For instance, it’ll display the readability rate, advise the keywords to use, and even highlight the tone of voice that might need to be improved. Writing quality also has to do with keyword optimization, which must be natural. Keyword stuffing is a big no-no for Google.
We also recommend shortening your sentences. They’re easier to read and provide more direct information about the subject. Semrush also includes the SEO Content Template tool that we found helpful in many cases when preparing to write new content.
It comes up with semantically related keywords and text lengths you need to aim for. This tool also displays the average readability score of your competitors for the target keyword. As a result, it lets you improve your readability score and stick out from the average.
SEO Content Template and SEO Writing Assistant from Semrush are handy for improving your writing quality, and therefore, getting higher search engine rankings. If you’re interested, check out SE Ranking which also offers its AI Writer to help you in the same way.
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6. Decrease the Bounce Rate
A high bounce rate is one of the worst things you can do for your Google ranking. As explained, the bounce rate refers to the percentage of your website visitors that bounce back to the search results quickly after visiting your site.
Why does this happen?
There are many factors, one of which we discussed – loading times. Improving them will directly improve the bounce rate because users won’t wait for an eternity to access the website. Another, maybe even greater factor is that people don’t find what they want.
In today’s times, it’s all about finding what you need FAST. That said, your pages need to be, as they say, “skimmable.” Check out our page about getting a UK IP address. As you can see, we explained this simple process right away and gave our readers a direct answer.
This is one way of reducing the bounce rate. We think you should focus on answering the reader’s questions as soon as possible on your page. At the very least, try to include the table of contents for easier navigation so that the user can quickly get what he/she wants.
7. Use LSI Keywords
LSI keywords aren’t paramount to get higher Google search rankings but they’re pretty important. LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. To better describe them, we’ll say these keywords are closely related to the main keyword you’re trying to cover.
They are semantically related to the main key phrase.
If this sounds familiar, you’ve likely read one of our previous Google ranking improvement steps where we mentioned SEO Content Template from Semrush. Exactly. This tool discovers semantically related keywords based on the provided main keyword.
These keywords better describe what the topic is about and help Google understand what you’re trying to cover more effectively. Semantically related keywords to “SEO tools” are:
- SEO audits
- Search engine
- Keyword difficulty
- Organic search
- Link building, and so on…
Do you see the connection? SEO tools help with all that! LSI keywords will usually be included naturally as you write but most people tend to overlook them and focus only on the main keyword with little to no variety. Well, that’s not what Google wants.
Google wants LSI keywords and thorough explanations of your topics. With LSI keywords, you’ll tell Google that you’re an expert in your field and that you’ve covered the subject properly, allowing it to skyrocket your page in SERPs and rank it higher.
8. Build a Quality Backlink Profile
Building your backlinks is easier said than done. It’s one of those things that come over time and is why many fail to rank better on Google. Worse yet, Google deems the backlink profile quality one of the most important factors for better ranking.
What can you do?
The best thing, in the long run, is to provide quality and informational content. You also need decent SEO and plenty of organic visitors to make your website eligible for a backlink. Now, you can implement additional tools like the link-building tool from Semrush.
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It allows you to directly get in touch with other websites and request a backlink, guest post, or product review. It’s indeed great to rank a site on Google more efficiently but as said, you must ensure your website is worthy of a backlink or guest post.
That’s because low-quality backlinks negatively influence your Google ranking and no one wants a backlink from pesky websites. The more backlinks you have from respectable sites, the more your ranking goes up. We advise using the backlink gap tool, as well.
It’s found in Semrush and SE Ranking and displays which websites link to your competitors but not to your website. You can then use the link-building tool above to get in touch with them and try to get these backlinks. This is the step that requires the most time, sadly.
However, if you’re persistent and do everything in your power to make your website worthy of backlinks, progress is unavoidable.
9. Diversify Your Pages With Visuals
Reading a wall of text already makes us feel the tedium. Whether it’s your home page or a blog post, we think adding visuals is a great way to attract your readers, keep their attention, and prevent the bounce rate from increasing. In a way, they also influence the site’s feeling.
Great visuals like tables, graphs, and charts will enrich every page. Coupled with images and possibly videos to complement your posts, visuals will surely make your website more professional. This is handy to build trust among your readers and get better Google rankings.
Another perk is information delivery. Neatly placed visuals can highlight the most important information from the article. A simple comparison chart will display all the information the reader needs, making him or her satisfied with his or her visit to your website.
Our experience shows that implementing visuals can make the reader explore your site further. If the article the reader stumbled upon looks this great, how amazing are the other articles and pages?
Well, the reader would surely be prompted to explore further.
10. Update Your Pages As Needed
A cardinal mistake when working on your Google search ranking is not keeping your pages fresh. Pages with outdated information tend to rank worse because they’re obsolete. We want you to go to Google and type in the search query. Check out the best-ranking pages.
You’ll see the dates next to each page. They have one thing in common – all dates are pretty close to today’s date. This tells us that all of the highest-ranking pages saw frequent updates to keep their information accurate at the time of searching.
We found that updating our reviews and analyses of VPNs, hosting providers, and SEO tools was quite beneficial. If a VPN offers 10,000 servers but your review still says it has 6,500 of them, guess what? Your review is inaccurate and Google will immediately notice it.
When updating your pages, make sure you set the according date in WordPress. If the update is done on the 15th of July, for example, select the exact date and time in WordPress and apply it to let Google know the page is updated.
11. Use Plenty of Internal Links
Internal links lead to other pages on your site compared to external links that lead to other websites. Having an excellent internal link profile comes in handy when boosting your ranking in Google Search results. There’s the known PageRank algorithm.
It uses the number of quality links to the page to rank it in SERPs. Simply put, you’ll need plenty of links to the page to rank it higher on Google. We prefer linking the most to our most important pages to boost them and make them appear in higher search results.
If your website is about VPNs, the most important pages will likely be VPN reviews, the best VPNs for different purposes, free VPNs, and so forth. Linking to these pages predominantly can rank them on Google higher and ensure higher authority scores.
Internal linking is also about using proper anchors. You can use the Keyword Magic Tool from Semrush to get information about competitive keywords that can be used in internal linking. We also want to state the importance of broken links and their removal.
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Semrush and SE Ranking can detect them and let you get rid of them promptly. A link that leads to nowhere is of no use to Google. It’s another factor decreasing your ranking because you weren’t diligent enough to remove it and it just plagues the website experience.
12. Track Your Google Ranking Frequently
How would you know if you’re getting higher search engine rankings without tracking them somehow?
You can’t do this manually and it’s always smart to use a dedicated SEO tool for rank tracking, such as SE Ranking or Semrush. The question is how they work.
Simply. You provide a few or more keywords and get information on how your ranking changes daily. SE Ranking and Semrush can track 500 keywords with their cheapest plans, making them excellent to keep in touch with ranking fluctuations.
Unlike Ahrefs, these tools update your ranking info daily and even inform you by email about changes. A higher ranking means you’re doing something well and vice versa. If it’s the opposite, you can still capitalize on other tools from Semrush or SE Ranking to improve it.
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Other tools like backlink audit, site audit, keyword research, and on-page SEO checker can help identify pressing issues and resolve them in minutes.
13. Focus on Long-Form Content
Long-form content is better for obtaining backlinks and including internal links than short-form content. Now, long-form content won’t be suitable for every situation, especially when the topic is simple and doesn’t require thousands of words to explain it.
However, some subjects, like buyer’s guides, top lists, and sometimes definitions and explanations indeed require longer pages and posts. According to Backlinko, long-form content gets 77.2% more links than short articles, making it great to get backlinks.
Generally speaking, long-form content is usually more than 3,000 words but no definition would perfectly describe it. Our experience shows that blog posts with over 3,000 words indeed do better as long as they’re written sensically and without fluff.
This article, for instance, is well over 3,000 words but it’s filled with information on how to rank higher on Google. Such a complex and broad subject must be covered thoroughly.
14. Prevent Keyword Cannibalization
Keyword cannibalization is when multiple pages on your website rank for the same keyword. The definition alone tells you that something isn’t right because such an occurrence would harm the Google ranking of these pages. You want every page to rank for a different keyword.
Now, the question is how to avoid and prevent keyword cannibalization. Well, you can use Google Search Console to analyze your website and see if multiple URLs rank for the same search query. You can also do it manually by searching for a query on Google.
Just type in your domain and then the keyword you’re looking for. If multiple pages align with the same search intent, it could be an issue of cannibalization. After all, you can do it much more easily by using Semrush and its bespoke cannibalization reports.
Once you open a cannibalization report, find the issues, and resolve them. Cannibalization can be fixed in many ways but the most important is to improve your keyword optimization and replace the keywords you mention throughout one or more articles.
Summary
This guide taught us that increasing your Google ranking in 2024 is easy with our 14 insightful tips. We can’t say which tip is the most important because all of them combined are necessary to produce the best results. However, some stick out.
Keyword research, quality backlinks, and top-tier content are some of them. We also shouldn’t forget about technical SEO, mobile optimization, and impeccable internal linking. We must stress that ranking your site on Google will be time-consuming.
However, a perfect implementation of our tested strategies and tactics will greatly reduce the time it takes to see improvements. You can also use our recommended free SEO tools for this purpose but we recommend their premium counterparts to get the best results.
This article isn’t about pushing SEO tools, though. But at least 95% of all the SEO analyses can’t be done without them. Using Semrush, SE Ranking, or Mangools will help you with this cause with accurate information needed to beat your competition in search results ranking.
Best of all, they’re completely free for 14 days, thanks to a free trial. Test them and follow the 14 great tips our team crafted for you.
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