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So you’re getting to grips with the basics of SEO, and now you want to improve your website’s ranking. To do that, you’ll need to make your content “search engine friendly”.
Google’s algorithms are super complex (and also really smart). They can tell when you’re providing value to your audience.
Luckily, this means anyone can improve their site’s ranking with a bit of leg work. You can take that from me: With next-to-no experience, I grew my website and started ranking first on Google for over 250 keywords. If I can do it, you can too! Here’s what I’m going to cover in this guide.
1) How does Google rank my site, anyway?
The Google Overlords are very transparent about how they rank websites. Above all, they want content to be useful, relevant, and accessible.
Google uses crawling bots, known rather spookily as ‘spiders,’ to search through billions of web pages for information. Then, Google’s algorithms take this info and decide which pages are the best fit for a user’s query.
2) Hey Google, how can I improve my website’s ranking?
Quick Aside: There are loads of technical methods to boost your website ranking—such as making your pages easy to navigate—but I’m not going to bog you down with the nuts and bolts of technical SEO here. If you’d like to know more, see my guide on how SEO works.
For now, let’s hone in on improving your website’s position through great content.
a. Make your content useful
Google is always assessing the usefulness of your content. To rank highly, you need to deliver value to your audience. Think original research, unique opinions, in-depth articles, or helpful illustrations.
There are tons of ways to provide value to your audience. The key is to focus on addressing their needs with great content. It also helps to be original and offer something that your competitors aren’t.
b. Make your content relevant
Google wants to provide users with relevant content based on their search queries. To climb the rankings, you need to understand your audience’s needs and, by extension, the questions they’re asking online.
Then, you need to answer these questions with expert-level content. You should also add keywords so Google can match up your audience’s queries to your page.
The tricky part here is stepping into your audience’s shoes and imagining the questions they’re typing into their search bars. Fortunately, Google can help with this, too! See my easy guide to doing keyword research for free.
c. Make your content accessible
Google wants to ‘maximize access to information’. This means they want your website to be free and accessible to everyone.
Anyone without niche expertise in your specialist subject should be able to read your content and think ‘Wow, I totally get this topic now!’ To make that happen, your writing needs to be clear, concise, and easy to understand.
In Summary
SEO is anything but an exact science. I hope this guide showed that you can boil down the process into fundamental ideas. Just focus on providing value to your audience over the long term, and you’ll have a great chance of ranking.
And, if you’d like to find out more, check out my beginner’s guide to writing SEO-friendly content.
My name's Claire and I’m an SEO and content strategy expert. I help startups and ambitious businesses improve their content, so that customers can find your website in search, and so that when they do, they convert.
I’m a former startup CEO, and I’ve worked for some of the world’s biggest publishers (Penguin Random House, Oxford University Press), as well as training with Google's in-house SEO team. I even built a website to attract 45k in organic search visitors/month. Drop me a line if you need help of any kind with SEO and content.
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