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How to increase the rank of individual web pages
Monitoring the rank and performance of your domain and web pages will help you to identify new opportunities for increased visibility and traffic in Google Search.
Generally the home page is the page which naturally has the highest rank, visibility and traffic, but you will want other pages to have rank as well so your brand achieves higher visibility for a greater variety of keywords.
These keywords could be high search volume single words, but a better approach would be to optimise your content with one of two of these, along with long tail keywords that contain 2, 3 or even 4 words. This is a much more effective strategy as although these keywords are likely to have lower search volumes, they will be more specific to your content, and this makes it much more likely that Google will match your content to the user search query and return your web page in search results.
How to choose the best keywords
Undertaking keyword research is crucial if you want to make sure your investment in SEO achieves the desired results. To begin with, you need to identify what keywords your target audience are using to search for the products/services you offer.
This data is available through the Google Keyword Planner however you do need a Google Ads account running to be able to access this tool. Other tools that can provide insight on search traffic for certain keywords include Google Trends, Google Correlate and Google Search Console.
Once you have compiled a short-list of highly targeted keywords, the next step will be to establish how effective they are likely to be in helping to achieve more traffic and greater visibility in Google. This requires SEO software which analyses each keyword and generates a Keyword Effectiveness Indicator Score. The score takes into account search volume and the level of competition on each keyword. If you elect to go for highly competitive keywords, it is going to be more difficult to achieve a high rank. You will need lots and lots of content to increase the keyword relevance through the site for high volume, competitive keywords, so depending on the size of your site, it may be better to go for niche keywords that have lower search volume, but which are actually less competitive, making it easier to achieve the desired results.
Where to use the keywords
Once you have compiled your keyword list, you will be ready to implement your keyword strategy.
To increase the rank of individual web pages it is important to optimise the page using the most relevant keyword to the content on that page.
The keyword will need to be used in the meta title and description, the html title tags and used a few times in the body text ensuring a good reader experience is maintained and the content is natural with no keyword stuffing. The keyword can also be used on image titles, alt text and image file names, in video structured data markup, and as anchor text on internal links.
What else can help a web page to gain rank?
So the keywords are in, the web page is optimised. What else can be done to help the page gain rank? The structure of the page, the page download speed and how easily it can be reached by users navigating the site is really important.
Firstly, check it can be reached within 2-3 clicks from the homepage. For ecommerce sites with extensive product catalogues, you can achieve this using breadcrumbs, tag clouds or with an internal search engine.
You will also need to run a pagespeed test to check the page downloads quickly. Page speed is a ranking factor, so if your web page takes longer than 2 seconds to load, you will need to do some speed optimisation work to get it downloading more quickly.
Make sure all your most important pages are linked to the main navigation. If you have any pages on your site that aren’t accessible through the main navigation, it is best to remove them or link to them from other pages on your site.
Keep your internal and external links on a web page at a reasonable level. Too many links will reduce the amount of link juice each link sends, but it is however important to have some links, especially in the main content of the page, as well as using your target keywords in the anchor text.
If you have a page that has a high rank, linking it using your target keyword in the anchor text and pointing it to a low ranking page will pass some link juice and help the low ranking page to increase its rank.
Whizz Marketing is an accredited SEO Google Partner Agency in Hampshire, with advanced certification in WordPress SEO. If you want more traffic and greater brand visibility in Google, please get in touch.
We offer free website audits for sites with less than 20 pages. For further information please contact Louise on 01252 622129 or visit whizzmarketing.co.uk
Telephone No.01252622129
