SEO - SEO

10 tips to get higher in the Google results

As digital experts, we're often asked what the one tip is to get a website to score high in Google. Well, that one tip doesn't exist. Google is estimated to use more than 200 different parameters in its algorithm.

Contents

1. Page titles

Page titles are among the easiest SEO factors to influence. It is a title that you set per page and that is very visible to both the visitor and search engines.

What do I have to look out for?
When setting up your page title, use keywords that are frequently searched for and which correspond with the content of the page. If you don’t use relevant page titles, you will score worse with search engines as they will penalize you for it. Where possible, put your USPs (unique selling points) in the page title to draw extra attention.

Backlinks are links from other websites/ pages that point to your website or page.

To map the online world, search engines use a crawler. A crawler is a robot that visits all the web pages, indexes their content and starts looking at the links found on any page to find even more web pages. Backlinks are links that point to your website or webpage from another web domain. The more backlinks you can build for your website, the more important search engines are going to find you, which has an impact on how search results are ranked.

How do I build backlinks?
There are many companies that offer this service, but we do not recommend it, because search engines take into account which websites a backlink is added from. If they are not relevant, a backlink has little to no, or even a negative impact. The best way to change this positively, is to obtain quality backlinks. Ask companies you often work with or clubs you sponsor to add your company to their website with a link to yours.

3. Structured data

Structured data is a way for search engines to better understand websites. It allows you to add context to certain parts of a website so that the search engine visiting the website understands that it offers a recipe, frequently asked question, blog article or something else. Google is betting heavily on this, by giving websites more space and/or priority over other search results, which is incredibly interesting to attract more visitors without an ad.

How can I add structured data?
To implement this, you will need technical knowledge, if you do not have this knowledge it is best to contact your web builder. To make it easy, we have developed online tools to generate the structured data for vacancies and FAQs.

4. Speed

The speed of a page is the number of seconds it takes for the page or website to fully load on mobile or desktop.

Google is strongly committed to speed, and came out with a new version of the Google Pagespeed Test last year that is a lot stricter than the previous one. This is very noticeable when we test a website like Nike.com today: it only gets a 7/100.

If you want to have a competitive website, then it is essential to bet on your speed. To give an indication, you should know that websites that have less than 50 points, according to Google figures, miss out on half of all mobile traffic.

How can I improve the speed?
The speed of a website can be improved in several ways. One of the easiest is to compress your images, i.e., make them smaller in file size. That way, less loading is required. In addition, you can also clean up your code. Often a lot of tracking codes are added for marketing, sometimes these codes are redundant and drag down the speed.

5. URL structure

The URL structure is the anatomy of a URL. It starts with an HTTP or HTTPS protocol, which is often followed by the well known ‘www’. Next comes the domain name of your website and after that the name of the page that contains the content.

This is an important point back for the crawler, as, with a good URL structure, the bot can go through the website much faster. It is also important for you to know which web pages actually rank high in Google today and why.

How do I improve my URL structure?
You can improve the URL structure by including an important search term in your URL. Using the HTTPS protocol and omitting the www are technical improvements. In general, you should have a URL structure with a clear hierarchy. You can test this by starting from your home page and going deeper into your website. If you look at the URL each time it should be a reasonable next step that seems relevant and logical.

6. Google My Business

You can set up a Google My Business account for free and when you connect this page to your website it will be beneficial for your ranking. With Google My Business you can make your business visible without a website. You enter basic information such as location, activity and opening hours. Through this, someone searching for your company on Google can already find you.

How do I improve my Google My Business?
Google My Business is one of the few ways you can specifically indicate to Google what your business is about. We recommend that you start filling in as much information as possible. Don’t just stick to opening hours and location, you can also add things like products.

In terms of reviews, it is a best practice to answer them regularly as well as to have a certain number (you already need at least 5 to get the stars). However, we do feel that 5 reviews are probably not enough if people easily think that these are just from friends and family. Therefore, try to glean reviews from real customers who also leave useful information for your next potential customer.

7. Content

Make sure your content is valuable. Content for the sake of content is worthless. It is important to limit the bounce rate, because sites with a high bounce rate lose interest from the audience AND search engine. With the right content, we can also collect good backlinks (see point 2).

How do I improve the content of my website?
When you write content for SEO, you should first start by thinking about what keyword you want to appear for in the search results. Make a selection of these and also try to make a distinction between general topics and specific topics that fall under them.
The articles with the general topic serve as a link between the more specific topics, so you have a clear structure again. For example, this article also refers to other articles that have to do with SEO, so this is ‘the middle man’.

8. Updates

Update frequently. Sites that are never updated lose their value. Therefore, it may be important to incorporate a blog/news module into a business site. As suchthe most important thing is to start maintaining this blog regularly. Nothing is worse than reading an article and seeing that it was posted in 2005, so it’s completely out of date.

9. Semantics

Besides the title of the page, you also have titles on the page. Each page should only have one H1 title. The H2 and all the headings that follow should also have a clear structure that is easy for search engine web crawlers to follow.

How do I improve my semantics?
We already talked about the structure of the different pages and the URL structure. Semantics is basically about the lowest level of your structure, which is the structure on the page itself. We want one H1 title here, in addition to which you can add lower level headings if it suits your content. Make sure that these headings contain certain keywords that are interesting to you.

10. Meta tags

Meta tags are the pieces of text found under the page title in search results.

Meta tags and keywords used to be very important in Google. Although this is no longer the case, we do think it is nonetheless a factor that makes your backlinks look better aesthetically. If the text is clear, people are more likely to click on it and come to your website.

How do I improve my meta tags?
You can improve your meta tags by adding the most common keywords and combinations for the topic you want to appear for. Google actually puts the user’s search terms in bold when your meta tag appears.

More tips

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