How to rank a website on Google SERP

You know how to develop a decent website.

Moreover, you know how to write a blog. Your content writing please everyone who reads it. Still, you are not able to rank your website.

If you are looking for how to rank a website on Google, then you should learn to make an SEO optimized site

Learn SEO (Search Engine Optimization) 

If you question yourself “how to rank a website on Google” so the first thing you should know is SEO.

Even if you are new to SEO, and there is no doubt that it’s going to be a comprehensive topic the more you know about it, you can still learn the basics to get your website rank up. Briefly, SEO is a technique to get organic, or unpaid, traffic from the search engine results page. It’s a process through which you can rank your website on Google. 

A website optimized for SEO comprises these key factors:

• Top rank on a search engine: An SEO-friendly website will rank on the top of a search engine. Google results show your site on top of SERP(Search engine results page) if you have followed the SEO techniques to establish your website.
• Traffic: If you know how websites rank on Google SERP, you will get a lot more traffic.
• Organic results: Ads are used for a significant portion of many SERPs. Organic traffic is the traffic that you don’t have to pay for. Your SEO-friendly site will always end up on top of Google’s organic results.
• Better Performing Website: When you have a fast-loading website with no broken links or faulty images etc., your site performance gets better and becomes SEO-friendly.
• Quality Content: As they say, “content is king”. It is for a lot of reasons, but one of those is SEO. One of the most fundamental factors of SEO is onsite content. This includes page copy, page titles, and meta descriptions.

Basic steps of SEO for “how to rank a website on Google”

Conduct a Technical SEO health check of your website

Finding technical issues, specifically SEO issues, is the first step to follow a successful SEO hierarchy. The technical issues can badly affect the performance of your website and eventually will hurt your SEO ranking.

SEO health check means checking the faults of a website and finding out what fixes can be done to improve the website’s performance.

Many online tools can help you to conduct this technical audit. You can use:

• Ubersuggest
• SEMrush

These are available (FREE or PAID) according to your usage. These tools will also guide you if you want to know, ” how to rank a website on Google ?”

Keyword research

Keywords are the base of SEO. You have to find out what people are mostly searching for or you won’t get traffic from Google no matter how good your content is. These online SEO tools also suggest relevant keywords for your website. 

Keyword research is the process of understanding the words used by your target customers while searching for content. Analyzing, comparing, and prioritizing the best keywords for your website is a technique that creates a significant opportunity for SEO.

Keywords throughout your blog

After keyword research and finding the relevant keywords for your blog, you should know how to use them appropriately throughout your blog.

First, use your main keywords in the h1, h2, and h3 tags. Your main keywords should be part of the introduction section of your blog.

Use the main keywords within the first paragraph.

Next, use those keywords and related keywords, throughout the content.

Post Title

Your post title is different from your meta title. Your post title is meant for the people who have already entered your website. It’s one of the SEO factors that will affect your ranking. Post title tells your visitors what your post is about. Your targeted keywords should be included in this title.

Meta Title

The meta title of your website is shown to the people on the SERP. It will be the title of your snippet in Google – and that’s why it’s in the snippet preview. The purpose is to make people click on the snippet, come to your website and read your post or buy your product. The meta title should also be composed of your main keywords.

Meta Description

According to search engines, meta description has no direct advantage for SEO as it’s not included in their ranking algorithm. Although according to Google there is an indirect benefit for SEO. Google uses CTR(click-through-rate) to analyze whether you are a good result. The more your result gets clicked, the better it is considered by Google and consequently, it will move you up the rankings.

Headings and subheadings

Correct use of headings and subheadings with all the relevant keywords will impact your SEO rating. So, it also makes your content more readable.

SEO friendly URL

An SEO-friendly is a URL, that consists of:

• The targeted keywords 
• Is short in length
• Have hyphens instead of underscores.

Google itself states, “URLs with words that are relevant to your site’s content and structure are friendlier for visitors navigating your site”.

SSL certification

Most people believed that the cyber laws for protecting their rights were not good enough. Therefore, to make the internet having an advanced secure connection for users, Google declared SSL certification as an SEO factor. Since this declaration SSL certification has become a priority for every website.

On-page optimization

On-page SEO optimization refers to a technique where you optimize web pages of your site to improve a website’s SEO ranking and earn organic traffic. It includes everything that can be improved in terms of SEO for that page. 

Optimum length

Search engines like Google love large content. But this doesn’t mean the short content will not be valued. What I am saying is, if your blog post has more content, there are more chances of it to rank up. But, the content should be longer and interesting at the same time.

Creating links

Knowing how to rank a website on Google includes creating links smartly.

Creating links for your website includes:

• Backlinks/Inbound links: Getting other websites to link back to your website.
• Internal Links: Using the links within your website to make navigation easier.

Both Backlinks and Internal links are important SEO factors as they provide proper navigation to your site and gives a better user experience.

Mobile-Friendly Site

Since the web is getting wider and the devices to access this web are getting smaller, our websites should be well-designed for mobile as well.

With more visitors accessing your website on mobile devices, it is important to ensure that all of your visitors have a good experience, regardless of what type of device they’re using to access it. Having a mobile-friendly website brings with it several key advantages, including:

• Improves accessibility
• Improves user experience
• Increase leads
• Improves sharing of the content

Speedy website

If the loading speed of your website is not fast, it’s going to hurt the SEO ranking of your site, indirectly. If a site takes more than 3 seconds to load it’s not considered to be a speedy website. It may also lead to poor user experience and a decrease in traffic.

Stay updated with Google’s Algorithm

The only constant thing with Google’s Algorithm is that it keeps on updating. If you want to keep up with the algorithm then you should keep an online presence, and keep updating your website, no matter how the algorithm changes. 

How to rank a website on Google in India (or any specific country you want)?

 In India, many people have their ideas and creativity through which they can bring betterment to society. Some of these are bloggers. Bloggers who know how to create entertaining content and have a remarkable website to display that content, but usually unable to rank it on Google. 

If you want your website to rank up particularly in India, you should keep these factors in mind:

Know your Competitors

If you are looking to maintain your rank on Google SERP, you should study their work closely. Learn what kind of new things they are bringing to the audience and what are they lacking behind. Never replicate their information, as plagiarism is an implacable foe and could hurt your SEO ranking.

Create better content

When you have done the competitor analysis, you know what are the merits and demerits of their website. Learn the positive things from them and avoid the negatives. Bring all the inaccessible information to your site which was never provided by any of them.  

For instance: 

• Do a Google search for any topic you want to write on. 
• Open the top 5 results.
• Compare them with each other
• Jot down all the good strategies they have used that make them better.
• Jot down all the weaknesses that can give a bad user experience and might hurt SEO ranking.
• One thing that will always separate you from your competitor is using exclusive images, videos, and graphs.
• So if you know how to apply media appropriately, your website will be outstanding.

Correct use of images and screenshots

If you are seeking the answer to the question “how to rank a website on Google” in India, your content should be full of media. Using multimedia on your website makes it beautiful. Multimedia helps your visitors to understand the content easily. You can also use the latest memes and gifs, wherever relevant, to make it entertaining for the people of that country.

Do’s and Don’ts

Do’s

• Learn to design basic shapes and graphs for your data
• Use your animations/figures to represent the information.
• Use the small size of images so that it doesn’t affect the loading speed of your site.

Don’ts

• Don’t use the images of another website.
• Don’t only insert the images and screenshots to provide the written information. You have to explain/write along with the image you are providing on your site.

Country specific domain

When it comes to domain extension it is undeniable that you want people to recognize your brand, your business, or what your website is all about. A country-specific domain extension for example: “yourwebsite.in” for India tells people where the website belongs. Here, the domain stands out more in the Google SERP result listings and becomes more likely to be clicked. 

Multilingual and using Local citation

If you are targeting your website to grow in a particular region or a country like India, then multilingual SEO is a thing to focus on. You should know the language of that region along with English. Imagine you are a fitness blogger and you want to spread your techniques with Indian fitness enthusiasts. You decided to translate your content into Hindi as well. Now your site has two languages, and this will ultimately bring convenience to the readers who are comfortable in reading Hindi also. This will also increase the traffic of your website and eventually paramount to your SEO success.

Collect quality backlinks from the respective country based sites

What is a quality backlink?

A quality backlink is an inbound link from a high authority website that is trusted by search engines and readers as well.

Collect good quality links from other competitive websites of (India) that country. Backlinks are links that navigate the visitors from another website to your website. The main sources of backlinks are social media posts, sharing links, and mostly from the blog post or content of the other websites. These websites are generally from the other relevant websites that are within your niche and industry.

The more trustworthy the website is the better quality of the link and the higher the chance of your site ranking up for SEO.

Google my business

Google My Business is a free and easy-to-use tool provided by Google.

With this tool, you can manage your online presence across Google, including Search and Maps. This helps the customers to easily find your business, and keep them updated by regularly providing them your business information.

On average, businesses receive around 900 Search views and 320 Maps views each month. Growing your business locally is the first step to reach out to a large number of people in your country. Google my business contributes to SEO in many ways. 

• It brings the targeted traffic to your site and helps Google to recognize your site and its relevance
• Google prioritizes introducing your website to the searchers when it is registered with “Google my business”
• Increases the goodwill of your business.

Register your business in Online Directories

Register your website/business in online directories like Justdial and Yellow Pages. Since these are the high authority domain websites, these will help in both promoting your SEO ranking and reach your targeted customers.

Doing some CSR activities and supporting the NGOs

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a business model that helps a company to self-regulate itself by being socially accountable to its stakeholders, and the public. By practicing CSR, companies can be conscious of the kind of impact they are having on all aspects of society, including economic, social, and environmental. 

How does CSR affect the SEO of your website?

If you or your business is engaged in CSR, you are operating in such a way that it benefits society and the environment, instead of giving a negative impact. If you have followed a good CSR policy for a long time, your reputation will get better not only locally but countrywide. This will

lead to improving your site’s search rankings.

Supporting the local NGOs will also have the same effect on your business.

Organizing events for that location

If you want to be known by your local customers first, organize some events in your area. Provide some schemes and advantages for the attendees and the volunteers. Once you will be popular amongst your local customers offline, they will surely help you promote you online as well. They will share the images and links of the events on social media, which is a good medium to get inbound links.

Social Media accounts

Having a social media account is necessary for your website/business nowadays, both for your online presence and SEO. It’s one of the external sources where you can share your ideas and product to reach your website. This will get you the targeted traffic for your site and improve your SEO ranking. Top social media sites where you can set up your account are:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• Twitter
• Youtube
• Pinterest
• Medium
• Github (for developers)

Regularly blogging including targeted geographical context

By writing blogs regularly for your website and including the information related to the area you are targeting you will be able to establish your site’s reputation locally. Once the local area is covered, you can then easily go for a larger area or a country to target your visitors.

Optimizing for local search

Optimizing your website for local search first is a good option if you are ultimately targeting a larger area or a specific country like India. The process for local optimization is the same as it is for international optimization. But you need to focus on a smaller area and chose the keywords and other SEO factors accordingly.

Answer on Quora

If you think you are an expert in some topic, You can solve the related queries of people on Quora. You will find a lot of Indians there who are searching for the answers you might know. Underneath every answer of yours, provide a link to the related blog post of your website. These answers are also part of Google’s SERP and indirectly will increase your targeted audience.

Comment on other related blogs

When you have created many blog posts for a single topic, you can go and verify your data from other websites of the same topic. Give an appreciable comment below that blog, if you find the information useful.

Or you comment about your blog for the people who are interested in knowing more facts.

Analyze backlinks of your competitors

Check out the top-ranking sites and the backlinks they are including in their site. You will get the idea of quality backlinks they are including to improve the SEO of their site.

Reach out to your competitors for including your site links

You can email the site owner and appreciate their work. Show them your website and content and ask them if they include your site’s link within their website. If they find your work is significant, they might agree to collaborate.

In Conclusion

There are many strategies and solutions to the question “how to rank a website on Google ?” in India. It depends on what your website targets are and the options are chosen accordingly.