If your website has consistently continued to rank poorly and no amount of SEO auditing seems to help salvage the situation, don’t start to panic. There is virtually an infinite list of strategies that you can do to improve its SEO performance, but some are costly or time-consuming. Lucky for you, the following techniques are simple, practical and guaranteed to work wonders on your website.
- Why don’t you migrate to HTTPS?
Maybe you don’t know this interesting fact – Google offers a FREE ranking incentive to websites with secure HTTPS (not HTTP!). If you don’t believe this, just check out and determine if the sites on Google’s first page are encrypted.
Google has never really admitted this, and often recommend HTTPS for the security of those who visit a given website. However, following the anecdotal evidence peddled around in the SEO community, with some even posting photos that show a ranking improvement, maybe you should follow suit.
If reports of improved search rankings don’t convince you the maybe web browsers will undoubtedly do. Apparently, major browsers are starting a crackdown on unsecured websites. Google Chrome is at the fore of this discrimination, straightly giving the user a warning that since it is a non-secure HTTP site, the visitor ought not to visit.
Of course, nobody would dare not to heed such a glaring warning!
- Make your website mobile-friendly
Just because your website is accessible via mobile don’t insinuate that it’s mobile-friendly. Ever since Google updated its algorithm to favor mobile-friendly websites, non-compliant sites have had to suffer the giant search engine’s unforgiving whip. And no amount of SEO, digital marketing or traffic sourced from social media has helped repel the penalties.
Over 60% of the traffic Google receives daily is from mobile phones. Also, mobile-optimized websites seemingly deliver an impressive browsing experience, unlike the cluttered display of an ordinary browser. And that’s why Google had to make the change and rank mobile-friendly websites higher than the ordinary ones.
So, if you haven’t done it, hastily seek a web developer to design a mobile-friendly website for you.
- Audit the speed of your website
Site speed as a ranking factor has never changed, and its essence right now is even more critical. Google ranks websites with faster load speed better than the slower ones simply because a speedier load speed means a better browsing experience. This, however, should not mean that you should rely on the speed of your website alone Instead, let it complement the effect of other fine-tuned practices like back linking, SEO and digital marketing.
- Finally, audit your backlinks
You may have diligently created backlinks from authority websites, social media or even your internal back links. But, how sure are you that the unpleasant “404 error” is wreaking havoc behind your back?
Penalties as a result of broken links are somehow harder to identify, and you might have to go back to your how to build backlinks tutorial. Regardless of what you do, ensure that it removes or replaces links that could be hurting your good SEO practices. Remove all ‘toxic’ links and replace them with ‘Google-friendly’ ones.
