How to Boost Google Search Performance for Your Business
Google is the most popular search engine, with a market share of over 95% on mobile devices and nearly 82% on desktop. With this in mind, it only makes sense that business owners see immense value in performing well in Google search results.
In just over a year, Pilot Mountain Creative helped a B2B tech company earn over one million impressions on Google, leading to more qualified leads for their team and a shorter sales cycle.
But how can the average business owner do the same? By using the right plugins, leveraging Google’s suite of data analytics tools, and learning how to make content with SEO in mind, you too can boost Google search performance for your business.
Understanding Google Search Impressions and SEO Rankings
Let’s start with a fundamental question to understand the basics: What is an impression?
As defined by Google, an impression is “how many times a user saw a link to your site in search results.” Now that you know the definition, you can start to think critically about what you can do to make your business seen by more users on Google. It’s important to keep in mind that high impressions don’t always mean your business will perform well. Sometimes, high impressions on Google can mean your site has a lot of bot traffic (We’ll discuss how you can fix that in this blog, too).
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Rankings are defined as where your business ranks in the Google search results. If you had an average ranking of 3 across your site, that would mean that on average your website will appear as the third link in Google’s search results. These rankings are always moving up or down, which can be based off many factors like the type of content you add, how fast your website is, and whether or not your competitors are paying to rank ahead of you.
Getting Rid Of Bloat to Improve SEO
When one client requested a brand overhaul for their 10 year anniversary, the Pilot Mountain team provided a new website and SEO services.
Before the rebrand, the client was getting a lot of impressions, but their average SEO rankings weren’t where they wanted them to be. We started our redesign by looking at the bloat the client had on their site. By “bloat,” we’re referring to extra pages that served no purpose and were only attracting bot traffic.
Having bloat negatively impacts your site by pulling down the SEO performance of the rest of the site and making it harder for potential customers to find what they were looking for. This simultaneously worsens the user experience, which will also harm your SEO.
After deleting the unnecessary pages and installing the Yoast SEO plugin, our team was easily able to mark these pages as noindex, which tells Google not to pay attention to certain pages.
This meant the next time Google crawled the client’s site, it wouldn’t count pages marked as noindex towards their SEO rankings.
Result: Over 1 Million Impressions in Under a Year
As you can see, these simple steps led our client to receiving over 1 million impressions on Google.
Our redesign was completed in July, which is where you will see a noticeable drop in impressions, a result of the decrease in bot traffic.
Impressions & SEO Improvement
Here you can see the direct correlation of our redesign with an increase in SEO performance.
This rise in SEO compensates for the lost bot traffic by delivering more qualified leads that are farther along in the buying process for our client.
How to Create Content with SEO in Mind
With the bloat out of the way, we turned our attention towards improving the client’s SEO for the most important aspects of their site like the home, contact, and product pages. To do this, our team rewrote descriptions of products and services, call to actions, and headings on the client’s site to better align with the keywords they wanted to rank for.
When writing copy for your site, there are a few tips to keep in mind that can boost your Google search performance:
Determine what keyword or phrase you want to rank for before you start writing.
The keyword should be prominent at the top of the page. This helps Google understand exactly what your page is about.
The keyword should be sprinkled evenly throughout the page - but not too much. You can hurt your site’s ranking by over-saturating pages with their keywords just for the sake of boosting SEO.
Keep user experience in mind. Pages that are hard to navigate, have colors that blend in with each other, or load slowly can all negatively impact your SEO.
Combining all of these tips together can help get you started on the path to create SEO-focused content for your site. There are many other things you can do to improve too, but these points are good starting points that many business owners can try out themselves.
How to Track & Analyze Your Website’s Google Search Performance
Google offers a free suite of useful tools that you can use to track, analyze, and optimize your business’s search performance.
The two main tools every business owner should be utilizing are Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
Google Analytics
Analytics allows you to view data about how users are interacting with your site. This includes:
How Users Are Finding Your Site
What Device Users Are Viewing On
How Long Users Stay On A Page
The Number of Total Users Visiting Your Site
How Many Users Have Never Visited Your Site Before
Google Search Console
Search Console allows you to track the SEO performance of your website and track certain data points like:
Impressions
Clicks
Click Through Rate
Conversion Rate
Now that you’ve had an overview of why it’s important, the tools you need, and how you can get started ranking well on Google, get out there and give it a try! Remember that everyone has to start somewhere and everyone you see with the top ranking on Google started exactly where you are now.
If you need help getting your Google tracking set up or would rather have our team optimize your SEO for you, use the form below to get started.