Five year’s ago, everything was geared towards improving the pagerank of a website. This was a number, out of 10, that indicated how search engine friendly your website was, mainly for Google. However, pagerank in 2017 does not seem to have as much in 2017 mainly because, at the end of the day, it is just a number and doesn’t truly reflect the whole SEO of a website. Nevertheless, looking to improve your website’s ranking on search results is something you should be continually doing, considering that organic traffic is usually the life source of the vast majority of websites. With this, here are some ways you can increase your website’s ranking in 2017.

Reduce Site Load Speed

The time it takes for your website to load has a huge impact to the ranking of it on search engines. A massive reason why people leave websites is because the website takes too long to load – when this happens, the web user will simply click the ‘Back’ button on their website browser to find another website on the search engine results. When this happens, Google and other search engines will know that they visited your website and, near-on straight away, exited it too. To search engines, this illustrates that the website they ranked on their search engine did not satisfy the web user. When this happens, the search engine is more prone to ranking the result lower, since it is obviously not helping people.

Stay On Top Of Google Search Console

Google’s Webmasters search console can be considered the ‘holy grail’ for website owners, simply because it provides website owners an unparalleled amount of information about their website’s interaction with Google. It is a wise idea to always check back with your search console to see how your website is doing, both in the good areas and bad. For example, how has your average position changed this month compared to last month? If it has gone up, why? If it has gone down, why is that the case?

For major concerns with your website, you will be emailed directly by Google to address the concern they have with your website.

Niche Keyword Targeting Works Best

Although this is a controversial point to bring forward for improving a website’s ranking, from my past experience, I have found that aiming for niches will always provide the best results. This is due to the fact that the competition for such niche topics is low (hence why they are called niches). When this happens, it is much easier to rank higher for niche keywords and to gain traffic in the long term from them too, organically.

This kind of makes sense since Google and other search engines do not really want new websites to write about the same content that is already found online. They want the knowledge that is available to people online to increase. With this, niche content is praised by Google with high rankings whilst new ‘existing’ content struggles with ranking.