Simple Changes You Can Make to Improve Your Website’s Search Ranking

A lot of business owners and online marketers mistakenly believe that the key to maintaining and updating a successful website is to constantly make big sweeping changes all at once. The reality, however, is that the devil is often in the minor details of website building and maintenance. By making small changes and focusing on pages or concepts that are ranking well but not quite at the top of Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) can help you vastly improve your search engine rankings and create more well-rounded and effective SEO campaigns.

Here are some routine search engine optimization changes you should make to your website and content.

Take Advantage of the “People Also Ask” Feature

Google officially launched the “People Also Ask” (PAA) feature that appears at or near the top of some SERPs back in 2015. In the beginning, most users were only presented with two questions that were related to their original search query.

Since then, Google has expanded the feature to provide much more informative and in-depth answers to online users. But it also works as a double-edged sword that benefits online marketers as well. While the small snippets of text or images provided give answers to user queries, the questions that are presented give online marketers an idea of what their target audiences are searching for.

This information can then strategically be used to create relevant content that provides the information that users are seeking out. You can use PAA to find out what your existing and prospective customers are looking for online and then actively become their top source of information by creating relevant content that directly answers their questions. Be careful, though, when answering questions because sometimes providing an answer that’s too informative may negate the need for a user to actually click onto your website.

The key is to give just enough information to keep them interested and compel them to click the link to get more information without giving it all away in the brief snippet. Since the initial launch, Google has vastly expanded PAA to include an endless foray of potential questions.
Each time a user clicks on a specific question to get an answer five or six more related questions automatically appear beneath it. The questions that appear depend on the original question that was clicked on.

The idea behind this concept and feature is to help Google gain a clearer understanding of what the search intent is, so that the search engine can provide the most relevant and accurate answer.

The best part is that it’s completely free for anyone to use, which means it saves online marketers, such as yourself, thousands of dollars in conducting market research because you can just do it yourself.

Include FAQ Pages on Your Website

In the same vein as PAA, FAQ structured data is a great way to obtain and retain the visibility on your website through relevant short- and long-tail keyword usage. Recently, Google has been focusing on a how-to or a question and instruction-based structure to answer questions.

For instance, if someone enters a search query like “how to reverse park a car”, then they’ll most likely be presented with instructional videos, text snippets, or images that show them that style of parking so they can teach themselves.

Once again, PAA marketing research provides a wealth of valuable information in regards to which searches are most relevant to your organization and how you can use them to boost SEO. Use these questions as a basis to help you determine what FAQ to include on your website.

Work on Improving Pages That Are Ranking

This also applies to pages that have the potential to rank higher, but just need a little extra boost. Pages that can benefit from a little extra work are ones that appear either at the bottom of the first results page or the top of the second results page.

You can improve the rankings of these pages by:

• Expanding the word count from 500 to 1,000 words
• Adding in more relevant short- and long-tail keywords
• Updating the content or outdated information (i.e. statistical data, adding new information, etc.)
• Adding more bullet points, images, or videos to improve readability

Making these changes makes it easier for search engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo to crawl your website and find relevant information faster. The faster and easier it is for search engines to crawl your website, the more likely certain pages are to rank higher in SERPs and help you gain greater visibility.

Remove or Fix 301 Redirects

301 redirect chains are a result of failing to ensure that all existing URLs on your website end in HTTPS before migrating them to SSL. Essentially, what happens is that multiple redirect pages are created and linked in a single multifaceted chain and this can slow down the website or page crawling process, which can subsequently lower your ranking because it makes the search engine think your website isn’t secure.

To the user, it simply looks like the web page isn’t loading. After a few seconds, they’ll probably get frustrated and leave. Your best bet is to eliminate as many of the redirects as possible to help increase your web page loading speed and boost SERP rankings.

Focus on Internal Linking

Internal linking is a vital and effective SEO tactic because it provides users with additional information on any given topic of interest without causing them to navigate away from your website. Internal links are hyperlinks that users can click on to get to another article on your website that provides more information about specific topics. This is useful because it establishes your organization as a bona fide authority on that specific subject.

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