A solid SEO (search engine optimization) strategy helps you rank higher in search engines when potential customers look for the products and services you offer. Unfortunately, it’s becoming consistently more challenging to maintain a high rank above your competition. Here are five of the most critical factors to ranking higher in searches.
 
[Get a free on-page SEO analysis here.]
 

Tip 1: Activate an SSL Certificate

Adding an SSL certificate to your website is a must, both for your sake and the sake of your consumers. In fact, Google recently changed their security requirements for websites and has stopped ranking insecure sites as high as the ones with “HTTPS” in the URL. This means that it’s a critical step to boosting your search engine rank.

What exactly is an SSL certificate? This is an encryption you can purchase from your host for an additional monthly fee and it protects your website’s users’ information when they’re sending a message, making a purchase, etc. If you operate an online store, having an active SSL is required to protect your shoppers’ information.
 

How do you do it?

1.   Contact your host and ask them to add the SSL
 

Tip 2: Submit Your Site to Search Engines

Keep in mind that search engines won’t automatically know when you’ve just launched a new site. Yes, people will be able to manually search for your website if they already know the address, but if you want to start showing up organically through related searches, you need to submit your site to search engines. Now, there are tons of search engines out there, so don’t worry about submitting to every single one, but you should at least submit to the most popular ones like Google and Bing.

Submitting your site to Google Search Console is free and easy.

Remember Google is basically a robot that scours the internet for new sites to include in searches. Submitting your site map will help search engines find and crawl your site much sooner.
 

1. Access your website’s sitemap
2. Log in to Google Search Console
3. Follow the instructions here

Tip 3: Speed Up Your Website
 

The sites that work the best always rank better than slow, clunky sites. Google ranks faster sites higher than ones that take longer to load. The average website loads in about two seconds, so that is a great benchmark to keep in mind when testing your website’s load speed.

Your site’s load speed will also affect your bounce rates because people are more likely to leave your website if it’s taking too long to load. You can run a speed test on your website for free using Google’s speed tester. This is a fantastic free tool that will not only test your website speed, but also give you tips on how to speed things up.
 

How do you do it?

1. Contact your host to see if you can upgrade your server.
2. Compress image files.
3. Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
 

Tip 4: Get Content on Other Websites

One of Google’s ranking factors is your URL’s credibility. For example, if your website has links to credible websites, and credible websites link to your site, that will boost your search ranking. You might have heard the term backlink before, and that’s exactly what it means.

Try reaching out to others in your field or industry that would be interested in collaborating with content. Offer to write a few blogs for various websites and have them link back to your website. When Google sees these links to your site, it will see that your URL is important and move you up in searches.