May 4, 2022

8 Ways to Increase Your Website’s Visibility in Google Search

Maximizing your website’s search engine visibility is a crucial goal, but it can be challenging, especially if you’re up against more established brands in a competitive industry. Thankfully, there are several proven methods to help any brand improve its visibility. In this article, we’ll go over what those are and dive into what makes them so effective.

1: Register Your Website with Google Search Console

Google Search Console (GSC) is an invaluable tool for all website owners, which is why you should register your site and set up GSC if you haven’t already. As a free service from Google, GSC 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. Best of all, registering your website with GSC allows you to do the following:

See who is linking to your site: The more high-quality links pointing back to your website, the better your website can perform in search results.
View any indexing issues: This would likely fall under the category of technical issues.
Inform Google of any different versions of your website: For instance, if your website has different versions based on country or language.
View key traffic search queries: In other words, a bird’s eye view of which search queries deliver the most qualified traffic.
Request Google to reindex updated pieces of content: This is important when you want the freshest version of your content to be displayed in search results.

2: Register Your Website with Google Business

Registering your website with Google Business should also be one of your top priorities. By doing so, you 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.

Once you register your website with Google Business, Google will send a postcard containing a 5-digit verification code to your company’s physical address, which you’ll then use to verify your business. This verification tells Google that your business genuinely operates at this location, giving it a better chance of being highlighted in search results and on Google Maps when users search for businesses like yours in the area.

That being said, you should only use Google Business if your business has a physical location that customers can visit. Alternatively, you can use Google Business if your staff members can visit customers near the business. All in all, Google Business is a major part of optimizing your business 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 improve your site’s click-through rate.

3: Optimize Your Website for Page Speed

You’ll want to take to increase your search visibility is to optimize your website’s page speed. Page speed can affect SEO success, as Google has stated that speed is now a landing page factor for search and ads. This means that as you work to fill your site with SEO content and elements to draw in new visitors, you must ensure those users can find your products and services quickly. Not only will this grant your business more opportunities for success, but it’ll also reduce the likelihood of missed conversions.

Think about it: When you visit a website, whether to learn something or make a purchase, how likely are you to stick around if the page takes longer than a few seconds to load? Do you think you’ll wait 6, 7, or even 10 seconds for it to finish? Chances are you won’t, possibly costing that business a potential customer. This is precisely why page speed is so important because most of your potential customers expect pages and websites to load quickly. If you’re in a competitive industry, optimizing your consumer electronics, health and wellness, or fashion digital marketing efforts to include page speed is crucial.

4: Ensure Your Site Is Mobile-Friendly

At the same time, every business should do what they can to optimize their website for mobile-friendliness. With mobile devices (excluding tablets) generating 54.4% of global website traffic as of the fourth quarter of 2021, it’s become the dominant way that people search Google for new products, services, and information. Suffice to say, Google loves websites that are mobile-friendly, and their mobile-first indexing has been an ongoing effort for several years. As a confirmed ranking factor, this means that businesses looking to remain competitive (especially in saturated markets) need to ensure their website’s mobile experience is top-notch.

Mobile eCommerce (or M-commerce for short) has also been steadily rising in recent years, largely due to shifts in consumer behavior following the COVID-19 pandemic. As more shoppers search for frictionless or contactless ways of shopping, these numbers will only continue to grow, and recent reports predict that mobile commerce sales should nearly double by 2025. If your business 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 help offer your users a better experience, improve your SEO results, and enhance your site’s search engine visibility.

5: Research and Identify the Right Target Keywords

No digital marketing strategy is complete without mentioning the importance of proper keywords and keyword research. Not only do they help communicate user intent, but that data can be leveraged by SEO professionals and businesses to drive more traffic, conversions, and ultimately revenue if implemented properly. As you work to increase your website’s visibility in Google SERPs, this means that you’ll be on the lookout for the following key pieces of information:

The keywords/phrases people use to search for products and services relevant to your industry or niche
The volume of searches for each of those keywords/phrases
The ranking difficulty of each of those keywords/phrases, or how many authoritative websites or pages are already performing well for those keywords. This data can be found via special keyword research tools such as Google Search Console and Google Ads Keyword Planner.
For PPC strategies, the CPC (cost per click) of your target keywords.

Armed with this information, you should be able to narrow down the keywords/phrases best suited for your SEO efforts. From there, you’ll want to add those keywords to various important parts of your website. Start with your page titles, since these are displayed in search results as clickable headlines. Afterward, add these keywords to your meta descriptions, headings, landing page content, and your website URLs.

While this might seem like a lot of work, it’s important because 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. That being said, be sure to avoid keyword stuffing at all costs. Not only is this considered “spammy,” but it goes against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. In other words, it can potentially damage your organic search rankings (and your visibility) if Google feels you’re trying to be manipulative with your keyword placement.

6: Build a Better Backlink Profile

Even if your page titles, meta descriptions, and URLs are perfectly constructed, they can’t do enough to help your organic search rankings and search visibility without quality, authoritative backlinks pointing to your website. These are links from other websites directly to yours, and they essentially act as upvotes for your content, especially if sites linking back to you have already established themselves as authoritative and trustworthy sources in your industry.

Thankfully, generating quality backlinks to your site is relatively easy, and there are two main ways to do so, including:

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 are likely to attract a relevant audience, making them exceptional vehicles for backlinks.

Remember, however, to avoid using any companies or methods that create thousands of low-quality backlinks. Similar to keyword stuffing above, any participation in spammy activity or link schemes can have a negative impact on your organic search rankings, as Google considers these practices manipulative and against their core guidelines.

Just as well, you’ll want to keep in mind that links from higher-quality websites will count more towards rankings and search visibility than lower-quality sites. In other words, a link from the New York Times will have a much greater impact than one from a random blog site.

7: Follow Google’s SEO Advice

Given all this talk about what Google likes and dislikes, it only makes sense to follow their advice whenever possible. It turns out they’re pretty good at suggesting how you can improve your site’s performance in SERPs, and their free 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.

8: Work with the Search Visibility Experts at VELOX Media

All in all, the above tips should give your business a good foundation to build a more cohesive SEO strategy, which can help increase your website’s visibility and search rankings in the process. That being said, there are more steps you can take to make that process more efficient. By working with the digital marketing experts at VELOX Media, you can enhance your existing SEO strategy and improve search engine visibility, all while you focus on other areas of your business.

Our team has achieved countless successes across multiple industries with over 10 years of experience in SEO, paid advertising, link-building, and website development. These efforts have established us as a Google Premier Partner among the top 3% of digital marketing agencies globally. Whether you’re a smaller business looking to make your mark or an established brand wanting to boost your advertising efforts, reach out to the digital marketing experts at VELOX Media today.