There is nothing more frustrating than doing a search for one of your customer’s webpage, only to see the site nowhere to be found in the first SERP. As you click next to page 2 nothing, then page 3, and you finally happen to stumble on your new customer’s page. Your customer has an amazing article and research, but for some reason they can’t rank higher than the third SERP. You have been hired to analyze the page and increase their ranking as well as to share the knowledge and set the standard for the company web development department.
As you scan through the site you are putting your SEO heat on and strategizing on ways to improve your customer’s site rankings. As you scribble in your note book you write the following key things to think about:
- Webpage structure and loading speed
- Great quality content
- Good balance of images and text
- Outbound links to reputable sites
- Encourage sharing on social media
Starting with webpage structure and loading speed. The current state of the site is that it loads, on average, at around 4 to 5 second. Also, the site opens with a massively large image where the user must take an action to close the large image or accept the cookies before seeing the heading of the webpage. This is disruptive for users. Recommendation for improvement are as follow, make the cookie security request small and not intrusive, by putting it at the lower part of the page. Also, I would move the advertisement image to the left side and reduce the size a bit. Lastly, I would minimize the advertisement and unrelated outbound links at the bottom of the page. By making these changes the page should load much faster.
Shifting to solid quality content, this site content is stale, not only the article but also some of the links included in the body of the page. Ideally, to move the rankings up the content should be relevant and up to date. I would suggest refreshing the content and cleaning up some of the stale links.
As far as balance between image and text, I would recommend that the images are kept to a minimum, clean, and with high graphics. The text should be crisp, well written, and large enough for readers to engage with. Also, the site should have a responsive design, to accommodate smart phones and tablets.
Assuring that the outbound links at the bottom of the page go to high ranking and reputable pages will help Google up the stakes/ranking of this page. Several of the links at the bottom of the page direct users to low quality advertisement and ridicules gossip pages.
Lastly, you should recommend that your customer adds several social media links in order to make it easy for readers and visitors to share the content through social media channels. By letting users share the content in social media, it should increase the rankings of the site.
In conclusion, there are tons of low hanging fruit and ways to improve the ranking of this site. With some minor tweaks and some fresh quality content, with smaller more responsive images, the webpage can move up in the rankings and potentially to the first SERP page. Other more aggressive changes could include an in-depth responsive redesign, with more reputable links, social media exposure, and less advertisement.
Sources:
“34 Ways To Improve SEO Rankings in 2019.” Quicksprout, 29 July 2019, www.quicksprout.com/ways-to-improve-seo-ranking/.
“Five Ways to Improve your Site’s Rankin (SEO) “ Michigan Tech, 25, October, 2019, www.mtu.edu/umc/services/digital/seo/