How to Get Your Website to Rank Higher on Google | Free Tools and Tips4 min read

Getting our clients’ websites to rank higher on Google, Bing, and other search engines is a big part of our job at Sharp Innovations. Our digital marketing firm has a lot of insight, experience, and digital tools dedicated to helping small businesses achieve better SERP.  But if you’re a small-business owner whose budget is too small to pay for professional digital marketing services, there are a few tools you can use to help get your website to rank higher, including page-load and content improvement tools.

If you give these a try and still don’t see any improvement in your website ranking on Google or Bing, we may be able to help. For clients who want to take the first step, we can offer an SEO audit at a very affordable, one-time cost. Rather than providing you with a list of services, Sharp Innovations integrates various services, all focused on reaching your business’s goals, with tiered digital marketing services to meet various budgets and needs.

Following are free tools and tips to help get your website to rank higher.

Is Your Site Helping Its Visitors?

The best thing you can do to help get your site rank higher is to provide relevant information and/or quality products. Have you spoken with your sales representatives to learn if clients mention site features that are missing? Guidelines, spec sheets, and other useful information that might be useful to a customer should sit on your site, ready for users to engage with it. You want to be the first site they go to for information and assistance.

Are there impactful calls to action? Are those CTA buttons highly visible? At the very least, make sure the phone number is clickable. If you offer services or are a brick-and-mortar store, have your location embedded via Google Maps so customers can quickly get directions to your business.

Improve Website Page Load

A website that takes too long to load is annoying to visitors. Search engines are aware of this and will penalize sites that provide such a bad experience for users. People who visit a website that takes longer than 3 seconds to load are likely to abandon it.

If you notice that your site loads slowly, check if the image files on your site are too large. You should aim to keep them all below 1MB. You can minimize your images before they’re used on your site with free online tools such as tinypng.com or imagecompressor.com. 

If your site is a WordPress site, you can test how quickly it loads using Pingdom. We explain this and more in 3 Steps to Speed Up Your Website.

Get Your Business on Google Maps

If you haven’t created a Google My Business listing, do so. It’s free and you need to have one if you want to show up in Google Maps.

Read How To Make Your Business Show Up On Google & Google Maps – A Step By Step Guide That Any Business Owner Can Follow, a great how-to on the Sharp Innovations blog. It includes images to help you see exactly how to complete your Google My Business listing.

Always Add Fresh Content to Your Website

When you add new information to your site, you have an opportunity to add relevant keywords to it. Search engines prefer sites with fresh content that use relevant keywords and inform site visitors.  You can find free keyword research tools, such a Google Trend or Keywordtool.io, to help you learn which keywords should be used in the content you create for your site.

Increase Positive Reviews

Online reviews are an important factor in how your site ranks online. Are you encouraging your clients and customers to give feedback online?

Google My Business Reviews that have keywords specific to your industry can be a powerful factor in getting your page to rank better.

If your site’s CMS is WordPress, you can install the free plug-in, Download Widgets for Google Reviews By Trustindex.io.

If you want more ideas on how to get more business reviews, schedule a free consultation with a digital marketing specialist.

Use Social Media & Citations

Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and other free social media platforms can send “social signals” to search engines that may help indirectly with your website’s performance in the search engine rankings pages. Social media visibility can help when people engage with posts that link back to your website.

Local online business listings offer another opportunity for backlinks to your site.  Backlinks can help your site rank higher.

Free Consultation

Implement these suggestions and start helping your website rank higher on search engines. If this seems too overwhelming or you don’t have time to dedicate to it, schedule a free consultation, and let’s get a conversation started.