For any company, it is important to improve web ranking; if your page has a good ranking, it will generate traffic that you can convert into leads and ultimately sales, otherwise not.
Do you want to know how to improve web ranking? Next, you will find an introduction to the world of web ranking to understand how it works and knows where to start to achieve the ranking you want for your website.
How do search engines work?
To understand web ranking, we must first understand how Google works, the most used search engine globally. It is used by 90% of internet users, who generate around 63,000 searches every second!
Indeed you have also used Google or use it daily, and you probably came to this article by searching there. We will focus on Google due to its importance in the market. However, the ranking in the other search engines is similar in theory.
Google is the largest index on the internet. Pretend that the Internet is a book and Google is the index. That section tells you where the information you are looking for is located in the book. Google organizes all the information on different internet pages to help users find what they want.
How do they organize the information of 1.74 billion web pages that exist to date (June 2020) and classify them in rankings? The data is infinite, every day, new content and other web pages quit to live, so these rankings change over time. Obviously, it is impossible to do manually or 100% by humans.
Search engines work by algorithms, spiders, or bots that crawl web pages. There are many bots, one of them is Googlebot, Google’s robot, which crawls all possible web pages, reads them, and classifies them.
What is web ranking?
Web ranking is a set of techniques used to locate a web page in the first rank of the SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Page) or rankings on the search engine results page.
Why is Web ranking important?
The ranking of a website is very important so that your customers find you when they are looking for your services and/or products. We already know that 63,000 Google searches are made every second worldwide. We don’t know yet how many of them are looking for what you’re trying to sell, but you’ll find out later.
The important thing now is to highlight that most clicks go to the first rank, 71% to the first 3 ranks of the first page, and very few people, only 0.78% click from the second page.
That is why it is so important to have a good web ranking, to place yourself in the first ranking of the ranking when your potential clients look for your products and/or services, this is how they will know you, and later, if your page convinces them, you will be able to convert them in leads and sales.
If you do not have a good web ranking, your customers will not find you on Google when they search for your services; they will see your competition. That’s not what you want, so read on to learn how to get the rankings your page deserves.
How to do Web ranking?
Let us remember that Google is the internet index and organizes the information, always trying to give the user the best response, at least in the organic results. Generally, the first results are ads, regardless of whether Google considers them the best answer. The user is looking for.
So there are two ways to do web ranking: SEO and SEM, or in other words, organically and paying to advertise.
SEO (“Search Engine Optimization”)
SEO, “Search Engine Optimization,” translates search engine optimization. However, what is optimized is not the search engine but the web page to rank it well. SEO is quite tricky, and for sure, nobody knows what the magic formula is for Google to put your website first. There are more than 200 factors considered by the algorithm.
Some of them are internal, they are within your reach, within your website, and you can directly interfere with them. Others are external factors outside your website and your direct space, although there are techniques to work with them.
Within your website, we can open two groups again. The first is content; content is king, and Google knows it. Original, relevant, and good quality content is highly appreciated by the most searched search engine in the world.
You are doing good practice if you create good content for your website and constantly upload it. That is why blogs are so important since it is the place where websites can update their content more easily.
According to Neil Patel, more than 60% of Google traffic results in a blog post. If you came to this article from Google, you are part of this number.
On the other hand, that content must be technically optimized. This means that it must be understandable for Googlebot. Unlike us, this robot cannot see images, videos, or web pages in the same way. This spider only reads codes.
There are beautiful websites with excellent content, original, relevant, and of quality in our view. Still, the algorithms do not understand, so they do not rank them where they deserve. Here you can read some tips on optimizing a blog article for SEO.
That is why technical optimization must be done to understand your website for users and Googlebot. Meta-data, H1 titles, robots files, sitemaps, alternative descriptions of images, speed optimization, etc., should be optimized.
Remember that Google always tries to give the best answer to the user. With good, original, relevant web content that is also technically optimized, Googlebot will understand it and rank it in the first place to give the user the best response.
But what happens when two or three websites with original and content relevance provide the user with an excellent response? Which page is first? It will probably put the website that has the highest PageRank.
PageRank is a metric used by Google to measure the authority of a website, which is based on the links that connect it, considering their quantity and quality.
However, PageRank is no longer visible to us. That is why several companies have created different metrics that simulate PageRank, such as the DA (Domain Authority) or Moz Domain Authority.
In short, the more authority a web page has, the more likely it is to achieve a higher ranking position. And how do you get a good domain authority? Getting backlinks or, in other words, links from other websites that point to your website. However, it is not as simple as it seems since not all links have the same quality and value.
In another article, we will explain this point in detail.
What is more important, SEO On-Page or SEO Off-Page?
There is a lot of discussion about whether SEO On Page or Off Page is better; both have advantages and disadvantages. However, both are important to achieve an excellent organic web ranking.
A website with a very good SEO On-Page but without any authority will have little chance of being ranked in a SERP with high competition. And a website with a lot of authority but without SEO On-Page is not going to achieve the ideal ranking either, because Google is not going to understand that this website has the best content and response to the user.
SEM
SEM or Search Engine Marketing is the other way to rank a website. SEM refers to paid search campaigns on search engines. Since Google is the largest search engine used worldwide, we will only talk about it. Google campaigns are handled through Google Ads, previously called Google Adwords.
How does Google Ads work?
Google Ads allows you to place text ads at the top of google search results with your chosen keywords. Ranks In this way, customers will find you when looking for your products and/or services.
It is important to carry out keyword research to know the volume of searches for the different keywords and the level of competition, CPC, and other metrics that will help you determine your SEM strategy.
We always recommend thinking about your ideal customer and not bidding on all the words, but rather those with a higher purchase intention.
Many tools to conduct keyword research include Ahrefs, Semrush, Ubersuggest, or Mangools. At Mangools, you can have a 10-day free trial.
Google Ads will only show your ads when people search for the keywords you choose, and you only pay for people clicking on your ads. These clicks become increased traffic for your website, and if you have it well optimized, you can convert it into leads and/or sales.
The cost of each click is variable; it depends on how many people or companies are bidding on that keyword. Google Ads works with a bidding system.
How does the auction system work?
Like any auction system, it is sold to the highest bidder. The more competition there is, the higher the price, and the less competition will be cheaper. However, some algorithms measure the quality of your page, your ads, etc. And that can also favor your campaigns since you will have greater visibility and chances of appearing above your competition and obtaining a better price for each click.
After all, despite putting ads to the highest bidder, Google will always want to give the user the best response. If your pattern has nothing to do with what the user is looking for, it will be unlikely that they will show your ads, or you will surely they will be very expensive.
The algorithm also considers many factors, such as your daily or monthly budget, your bidding strategy, and the different ranks in the ads.
What is better SEO or SEM for Web Ranking
Many people wonder what better SEO or SEM is. However, we must value both advantages that each of them offers us:
Advantages of SEO
- About 51% of users do not click on ads; they prefer organic results.
- SEO is one of the most profitable long-term strategies. Organically, ranking a website can take a long time, but it will not be easy to get down from there once you are ranked. If you rank your website for a term that is searched a lot, you will have a large amount of traffic each month, for which you will not have to pay for each click to enter your website.
Advantages of SEM
- Around 65% of users click on ads when looking to buy something.
- Short-term effectiveness. The great advantage of SEM is that you will rank your website very quickly. Your customers will be able to find you when searching for your products and/or services once Google Ads approves your campaigns. It’s a matter of hours.
Each case is different, and we cannot say that one is better than the other at a general level. There may be cases where only SEM is necessary, such as an event that will only happen once in 3 months. There may also be times when it is better to do SEO because it is not allowed to campaign in specific categories, as is the case in many countries in betting, gambling, or adult entertainment.
In most cases, it is best to practice SEO and SEM, since the combination of these techniques will allow you to achieve the web ranking you need in the short term, to get leads and/or sales, while you improve organic ranking until after months you have a large amount of traffic that you can convert into customers at a much lower price.
We hope this article has served you to understand the basics of web ranking. This is a reasonably complex world that you will have to spend a lot of time on. If you have free time, dedicate it to ranking your website where it deserves. If not, leave this in our hands while you commit yourself to do what you do best.