If you think ranking on the top of Google is simple, think again.

While SEO (Search Engine Optimization) isn’t complicated, increasing the ranking of the website, especially to the top position of the search engine results, is no ordinary feat.

So, why do you need to concentrate on SEO?

Well, as a business, we strive to get in the eyes of our ideal customers and that’s exactly what SEO can do in the online space. With well-researched content and advanced search engine strategies, SEO helps you to rank high in Google, which automatically means more traffic to your website.

How Long Does It Take to Rank on Google?

Many of us are anxious to get to the first page of Google rankings quickly. We keep calculating the duration it takes to increase the ranking. But there is no definite period within which your Google rankings will improve.

Ahrefs conducted a detailed study in the year 2017 on this topic and found that 95% of the newly published pages don’t get ranked on the first page within a year. Also, they found that the average ranking of the search engine results on the first page of Google is more than two years old.

From this study, it’s evident that the age of the website has a strong hand in getting ranked on the first page of Google. Therefore, if you are a new website, then it’s best to focus on following all of the best SEO practices to get ranked within the top 10 results of Google when your site becomes two years old.

If your website is more than two years old, then it’s time to put in some tremendous efforts to increase your ranking. In this blog, we will have a look at the basics of how you can improve your ranking on Google and lay a strong SEO foundation to retain your position.

What Are the Essential SEO Basics to Increase Your Google Rankings in 2020?

Here are some of the basic stuff for Search Engine Optimization, without which you cannot get a decent Google ranking for your website. Make sure to follow every one of the points mentioned to strengthen the SEO score of your website.

  • Start with the Basics of Powerful Website Backend

Before we start on with the on-site content, let’s first make sure that the technical part of your website is strong enough. Poor website design, unfriendly website structure and unreliable architecture are going to ruin all the efforts you put on-site for the SEO.

Perform a thorough technical audit and identify the vital areas that need improvement. The technical SEO is one of the critical factors to spruce up the SEO score and this is clear from the survey conducted by SEO Clarity.

You can see that in all types of businesses – enterprises, small businesses and medium businesses – the technical SEO has been named as the most successful SEO strategy. When auditing your website, concentrate well on the technical part of the website structure and the technical SEO for better search engine ranking. 

Keep in mind the scalability of the website in the future and make space to hold your expanding business. Check all the backend website elements and make sure that each one is functional and doing its part. When checking and revising the website backend, don’t forget to work on minimizing the website load time as much as possible.

  • Understand How Google Ranks the Websites

It’s crazy to optimize your website for Google if you don’t know how Google thinks. Though Google regularly makes hundreds of changes to its search engine algorithms every year, there are a few underlying factors that are constant in all of the algorithms.

  • Google favours websites that are mobile-friendly and have also openly acknowledged it as a key factor in their rankings.
  • In one of the crucial algorithm roll-outs of Google, the search engine queries that user types are taken beyond the literal sense. Google tries to understand the intent of the user for typing such a query and lists out websites according to it.
  • In one of the famous SEO updates called the Penguin, Google penalized many websites that use black hat practices or find sites that use artificial methods to increase their search engine ranking.

If you observe the common underlying factor in all of these major updates of Google, the one thing that is prioritized is the ease of use. Therefore, make sure to keep your users as a center of focus even when optimizing your site for Google.

  • Create Optimized Content for Google Search

This step doesn’t necessarily mean that you should create content just for the sake of Google. If we learnt anything from the previous point, it is to create content for the user.

When you are building webpages or new content about your business, align your content with the intent of the users’ search. This is what keywords are all about.

What exactly are keywords in SEO?

Well, think from the user’s point of view about the search terms they will use to search a website similar to yours. Find out the proper search terms and phrases they use. These are the keywords. Include these search terms in your content naturally. You can also use some other search tools to analyze better about what your users are searching for.

Prefer aiming to rank for long-tail keywords in the beginning as it is much easier than the popular search engine terms. You can see from the below image that the CTR of keywords having more than four words has better click rates.

You can also create specific pages that focus on a certain set of keywords for better conversions and search engine results. If you have created new pages or revised the content in the existing pages, don’t forget to create a robot.txt file and submit the XML sitemaps to Google Search Console.

  • Try to Get a Good Amount of Backlinks

Do you know an astonishing fact that 90.88% of pages don’t get any organic traffic from Google?

It’s a staggering fact that a majority of the websites do not get any traffic at all. And do you why?

Yes, the backlinks.

The backlinks matter a lot for the search engine results. 55.24% of the website has zero backlinks and 29.79% of websites have less than three backlinks referencing back to their website. So if you become one among the very few percentages of websites that have backlinks, it will seriously up your SEO score!

How to get more backlinks to your website?

  • Create useful infographics and get some backlinks through it.
  • Promote your content on external websites.
  • Write guest posts for other websites and naturally include your website’s link to it.
  • Write a lot of informative blogs on your website that holds good value in your domain.
  • Contact bloggers and guest article writers and recommend them to reference your website content if they see fit.

Keep continually trying to score backlinks for your website. Please note that getting backlinks from reputed websites and websites that have high domain authority than yours will quickly increase your search engine ranking.

Key Takeaways

In the year 2020, the online space is filled with huge competition fighting to bag every single available customer out there. It’s vital more than ever to concentrate on the Search Engine Optimization of your website, increase the rankings and get discovered more often. Here are the essential SEO basics to cover for 2020:

  • Create a robust website backend
  • Keep improving the technical SEO Services
  • Create content that focuses on including the keywords, i.e. the search terms that denote the user’s intent
  • Develop newly optimized web pages that aim to focus on specific keywords
  • Increase the number of high authority backlinks to your website

Keep continually following these basics of SEO to secure your position high up on the Google search results.