Canonical tags prevent duplicate content issues, especially for businesses with multiple locations. Each location page should have a canonical tag pointing SEO Anomaly to itself, signaling to search engines that it is the original content. Additionally, actively engage with the blog’s target audience by responding to comments and sharing your post on social media.
Local SEO for Small Businesses
While Google doesn’t use domain authority as a ranking factor, it’s a good indicator for how well your site performs related to competitors. Sites with high domain authority likely have consistently trustworthy and useful content — which Google prioritizes. Decide on what kind of content you’re making — and for whom — so Google shows your content to the right audience.
c. Alt tags for images
- Think of a citation as borrowing someone else’s expertise to add more credibility to your own content.
- Like content, usability, and links from other websites pointing to yours (backlinks).
- You can also see how your competitors are ranking for the same keywords.
- It is also essential to submit sitemaps through the Search Console so that Google can crawl your site properly.
Following a common sense approach to the end goal for the end user is a much more effective and long-term strategy. As we said above, Google and ranking has evolved exponentially over the last 25 years to a point where there are hundreds (maybe thousands) of factors and machine learning overlays. Providing Google with high-quality, consistent, and accurate information is a great way to improve your brand’s local SEO.
Danny Sullivan recommends basing decisions on whether a change is good for the site visitors because that will align it with the kinds of sites Google wants to rank. Recognize that the web has an element of randomness that make some site visitors wary about visiting a site for the first time. Some high-quality sites fail to stand out because they do what they think they do what everyone else is doing. Site visitors may appreciate more effort to make it clearer who is behind the site.
Internal links are links from one page on your website to another. They’re important because they’re how PageRank flows around your site. In other words, internal links boost a page’s authority and tell Google it’s important. Google likely knows that searchers value posts with templates more than those without, so you should probably include one if you want to rank higher for this keyword. For example, all the top-ranking pages for “pancake recipe” are blog posts with recipes.
Apart from Clearscope and Ubersuggest, SEO tools like Semrush and Ahrefs are useful for performing a competitor analysis. Use the Ahrefs website authority checker to analyze your Domain Rating. For example, this is the summarized result for HawkSEM’s recent page speed test. This uncovers what your real users are experiencing in SEO terms. For more accurate results, consider running Lighthouse in an incognito window to avoid interference from browser extensions.
They’ll forget the domain name but they’ll remember that mascot and the site. Broken links (404 errors) occur when a page has been moved or deleted without an existing redirect, leading to a dead end for visitors. Google doesn’t necessarily penalize sites for the occasional broken link, but too many can harm SEO and UX. Every single user consumes most of the content through mobile phones, that’s why mobile optimization matters. Here is an answer to your question “How to improve a website’s Google ranking” Let’s look at some core strategies to improve a website’s Google ranking.
For example, people might search for “running shoes nike.” But you should use a variant like “Nike running shoes” instead. For example, people who search “best running shoes” generally want an article with information and recommendations. For example, the knowledge panel isn’t considered to have a traditional ranking position.
Almost overnight, the page shot to #1—and it’s been there ever since. Want to see how Chatmeter can help your business dominate Google Maps? The higher your business ranks, the more likely customers are to find and choose you. Think about the last time you needed a nearby service — maybe a coffee shop, a plumber, or a pet store. You probably pulled out your phone, searched for “best coffee shop near me,” and clicked on one of the top results in Google Maps. One of the most common mistakes I see by publishers is that they can list all of the things they did for SEO but very little if anything that they did for their site visitors.