July 3, 2023
9 Ways to Increase Your Website Visibility on Google Search
From e-commerce to content marketing, enterprise businesses across virtually all verticals depend on a strong web presence. Fashion, health and wellness, B2B, and many other types of brands are able to reach far larger audiences online than they would with a brick-and-mortar storefront alone.
Businesses focused on digital growth work to maximize their online market share by capturing the highest possible click-through rates from SERPs for relevant keywords. The better the CTR, the more qualified site traffic, conversions, and revenue these businesses will enjoy.
But that’s only true for businesses that can push their revenue-driving site pages into the top five, or even top three search rankings. If your search visibility is lacking, your digital channels won’t drive the exponential growth your brand needs to thrive.
Maximizing your website visibility across search engines like Google is a crucial goal, but the process can be challenging, especially if you’re up against more established brands in a competitive industry.
Fortunately, any brand can improve its site’s visibility on search engine result pages, and there’s more than one way to accomplish that goal. In our experience, these are the top nine strategies to increase visibility on Google and other search engines.
1: Publish High-Quality, User-Focused Content
The days of manipulative, “black hat” SEO tactics are well behind us. If you didn’t already know, there’s been no clearer sign than the takeaways from the Google algorithm leak.
The internet is a means for people to add value to their lives, whether through educational resources, communication platforms, or online shopping. Google’s Helpful Content update was geared toward evaluating whether a site’s content is truly helpful or simply designed to manipulate search engines. The ranking features detailed in the algorithm leak only support this methodology.
While you could go down the rabbit hole of Google signals, ultimately, Google’s crawlers are more than capable of accurately assessing the value of your page, even if there are a few minor flaws here and there.
If your brand needs to increase visibility on Google to climb SERPs and maximize CTRs, there’s no substitution for publishing high-quality content that follows Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines.
Along with technical on-page optimizations and other backend work, helpful content written for real people—not search engines—will go a long way in making your site more visible on Google.
2: Research And Identify The Right Target Keywords
Keyword research is a fundamental element of any digital marketing strategy. Whether you’re leveraging PPC for quick wins, investing in exponential growth with a robust SEO campaign, or a combination of the two, focusing on the right keywords is absolutely essential to maximize your website visibility.
Keywords reflect search intent, which search engines use (among other factors) to deliver relevant, helpful search results. By working to rank your priority pages for the right keywords, you can drive more traffic, which results in more conversions and revenue.
Expert keyword research incorporates a number of considerations, including:
- The keywords people use to search for products and services relevant to your industry or niche
- The volume of searches for each of those keywords
- The ranking difficulty of each of those keywords, or how many authoritative websites or pages are already performing well for those keywords
- For PPC campaigns, the CPC (cost per click) of your target keywords.
These details will help you identify the keywords best suited for your SEO efforts. From there, you’ll want to strategically place those keywords on your priority pages.
Start with your page titles since these are displayed in search results as clickable headlines. Next, add these keywords to your meta descriptions, headings, landing page content, and your website URLs.
This might seem like a lot of work, but it’s critical to creating a more visible website. Google uses all of these elements in different ways to index your content and determine whether it’s relevant to searchers for those specific keywords. Be selective with your keywords and be sure to incorporate them thoughtfully.
3: Optimize Your Website Speed
Page speed directly impacts the UX across your site, which means it’s a significant ranking factor for search engines and key to delivering a valuable and frustration-free browsing experience.
Users expect to navigate your site without interruption or delay. Slow loading times, cumbersome hierarchies, and other speedbumps can plug your conversion funnel. If your site doesn’t run smoothly and quickly, you could see a high bounce rate as the poor UX drives those potential customers—or missed conversions—into the arms of your competition.
If you’re in a competitive industry such as consumer electronics, health and wellness, or apparel, your optimization efforts must emphasize page speed. A fast website is a win-win for both website visibility and conversions, so it’s well worth the technical work.
4: Ensure Your Site Is Mobile-Friendly
If you could double your site traffic with a single optimization, would you?
More than half of all web traffic comes from mobile devices as people search for new products, services, and information on the go or even from the comfort of home.
While optimizing your site for mobile devices isn’t guaranteed to double your traffic, it will help ensure you aren’t missing out on traffic from mobile users. If you’re wondering how to increase visibility on Google, optimizing for mobile-friendliness is a significant piece of the puzzle.
Not convinced that your site needs mobile optimization to thrive? Consider this: Google’s mobile-first indexing prioritizes the mobile version of a given website. In addition, as a ranking factor, mobile-friendliness impacts how and where your pages surface on SERPs.
Even if you aren’t concerned about capturing foot traffic from mobile searchers, you’ll want your site to be optimized for mobile devices in order to maximize your competitiveness within search engine rankings.
If your site isn’t optimized for mobile users or mobile shopping, you could be losing out on valuable sales and revenue. Make this a priority, and you can offer your users a better experience, improve your SEO results, and enhance your website visibility.
5: Increase Visibility on Google with a Robust Backlink Profile
Even if your page titles, meta descriptions, and URLs are perfectly constructed, you can’t maximize search engine visibility without quality, authoritative backlinks pointing to your website.
Backlinks are links from other websites directly to yours, and they essentially act as upvotes for your pages, especially if sites linking back to you have already established themselves as authoritative and trustworthy sources in your industry. In essence, a greater volume of quality backlinks will boost your site’s overall visibility and help your revenue-driving pages rank higher on SERPs.
Fortunately, generating quality backlinks to your site is fairly straightforward. There are two primary methods for getting other sites to link back to your priority pages:
- Direct Outreach: Asking other websites and blog owners to feature links to your content on their websites
- High-Quality/Keyword-Rich Blog Posts: Keyword-rich, industry-related blog posts will likely attract a relevant audience, making them exceptional vehicles for backlinks.
Remember, it’s best to avoid using any companies or methods that create thousands of low-quality backlinks. Similar to keyword stuffing, participating in spammy activity or link schemes can harm your organic search rankings. Google considers these “black hat” practices manipulative and against its core guidelines.
6: Register Your Website With Google Search Console
Google Search Console is an invaluable tool for all website owners, which is why you should register your site and set up Google Search Console if you haven’t already.
As a free service, Google Search Console allows you to submit your website for indexing, thus helping you measure and optimize website performance, gain a clear understanding of your website’s relationship with Google, and leverage key ranking information for better site visibility.
Best of all, registering your website with Google Search Console allows you to do the following:
- Submit a sitemap: While not mandatory, submitting a sitemap to GSC can help Google index your site more efficiently and ensure that users can discover your priority pages.
- Evaluate site traffic: Search Console provides detailed breakdowns of your Google Search traffic, as well as trends that can inform your site management.
- Address issues quickly with automatic alerts: One of the best things about Search Console is that you don’t need to log in daily. If there are indexing or usability issues, you’ll automatically receive an email alert.
- Streamline updates: Whether you’re adding content or changing your domain, Search Console helps ease the process so you can avoid missing crucial steps.
- Ensure the right pages appear in SERPs: In addition to ensuring your most valuable pages are indexed for discovery, there are a variety of ways you can use Search Console to remove certain pages from search results.
The versatile utility of Google Search Console empowers site owners to focus on some of the most vital site optimization tasks with the best payoff in terms of website visibility.
Not only can you work to ensure your site is well-positioned from an SEO perspective—even if you have no prior SEO experience—but Google Search Console also lets you stay on top of the data and trends that should inform crucial site management decisions such as content creation, page prioritization, and much more.
Thanks to the tools and data offered by Google Search Console, even SEO novices can create websites that offer the utmost value to searchers, and you can bet search engines like Google will reward these user-focused sites with superior visibility.
7: Claim Your Google Business Profile
Signing up for a Google Business Profile should also be one of your top priorities. Doing so can give your business a quick boost in SEO, as this helps it appear in relevant geographic search results. Best of all, this can happen within a couple of weeks of setting up your profile.
You don’t need a physical storefront to use Google Business, but you must at least make in-person contact with customers.
Overall, Google Business is a major part of optimizing your website for local SEO, making registration with the service an absolute necessity.
Similarly, once you’ve finished registration, do your best to encourage happy customers to review your business on Google. After all, having a healthy number of stars next to your name is great for boosting the confidence of potential customers, and it can also help boost your site’s CTR by improving website visibility.
8: Follow Google’s SEO Advice
Given all this talk about what Google likes and dislikes, it only makes sense to follow its advice whenever possible.
Unsurprisingly, Google knows what it takes to boost your brand’s online visibility and push your pages higher on SERPs—its website optimization guide is definitely worth a read.
If video guides are more your thing, then the Google Search Central YouTube channel is an equally great resource for anyone looking to brush up on their SEO knowledge.
Don’t expect Google to give you granular, step-by-step instructions. Its guidance is quite valuable, but it’s overarching, big-picture stuff—how you implement it is up to you. At the very least, when Google tells you to avoid something, such as the black hat SEO practices mentioned above, take its advice.
9: Work With The Search Visibility Experts At VELOX Media
The above tips should give your business a good foundation to build a more cohesive SEO strategy, which can help increase your website visibility and search rankings. But everyone, including your competition, has access to this information. If you truly want an edge, you can’t afford to stop here.
The digital marketing experts at VELOX will enhance your existing SEO strategy and improve search engine visibility, all while you focus on other areas of your business. Using the latest research and proven techniques, VELOX will customize a strategy to deliver exponential revenue results for your brand.
Contact VELOX today and see how our award-winning digital marketing team can take your business to the next level.