by Martin 5 years ago 
Creating a website for your business is one of the best things you can do. The largest issue with any website is getting traffic to it. If your site is on the 17th page of Google, nobody will ever see it. Older sites have worked their way up over the years to get on the first page. But how do you get there when your site is new?
In this article, we show you how you can get the attention of Google and rank faster than your older counterparts.
1. Keyword research
Researching for relevant keywords should be your number one step before you even start designing the website. Think about your target audience and what you want your site to be about.
However, the trick is not just finding relevant keywords but low competitive keywords. These keywords are searched for by many people every month, but they lack competition.
There are many keyword research tools like Ubersuggest you can use to come up with different keywords for every page of your website and avoid keyword stuffing.
2. Optimize the site architecture
Before you start creating content, you have to ensure the structure of your website is well organized. A good structure will make it easier for bots and spiders to find pages on your site. Besides being simple and scalable, the architecture of your site should have internal linking so you can go to another page directly.
Just a small piece of advice from David Sanchez of Digitalis Medical regarding internal linking – do not overdo it. Two or three well-placed links to other relevant pages will do and make sure to use diverse anchor text for your internal links.
3. Optimize your pages
After identifying the best keywords for your website, the next part is to optimize it to reflect those keywords. Since you don’t want Google to find you guilty of keyword stuffing, choose one primary keyword for each page on the site. You also have the option of outsourcing this work to a seo bolton agency, or any other depending on where you live if you do not have the time to work on these SEO strategies yourself.
Speaking of SEO strategies, your homepage should have a general business keyword while the service page has a service keyword. To help Google understand and rank your pages, you should;
- Insert your primary keyword in the title H1
- Optimize the page URL to explain what the page is about and insert the target keyword
- Write high-quality keyword-rich content but avoid keyword stuffing. A good startegy is to enter the primary keyword in the first 100 words and again in conclusion. You should also write longer content of 1000+ words so you can insert more keywords naturally.
- Insert keywords in the title tag and Meta description. The title tag tells people what the page is all about so it’s a great place to insert the target keyword. Make sure your title tag and Meta description are catchy and click-worthy.
- Optimize your images alt text because Google cannot read pictures. Insert a keyword in the alt text so Google can connect it to your content.
- You can always find an SEO agency to get a free
website audit from to give you more tips on what you can do.
- Remove blocking factors
Google uses bots to crawl and find your website. If your web designer forgot to remove some blocking elements such as Robots.txt file or Flash, the bots wouldn’t be able to find your site.
Setting up Google search console is a great way to fix indexing errors and track the performance of your website on Google. Once you have verified with the search console that your site exists, you should submit an XML sitemap so that Google knows your site is available for crawling.
- Optimize page speed
The speed of your website is another factor that determines how high you rank in search engines. However, today Google even looks at how optimized your website is for mobile use because most people who search for content do it via phone.
A site can be slow if your images are too big, or Javascript has not been minified. Luckily, there are a few available tools you can use to enhance the speed of your site on top of compressing the images.
One important step to take to reduce your page speed is to reduce the Time To First Byte (TTFB). This metric measures the time it takes for a server to start sending data after a request is made. You can consider taking a Time To First Byte Test to help you identify and address issues that may be slowing down your server response time. By focusing on this metric, you can improve the performance of your site, leading to better user experience and high search rankings.
- Foundational backlinks
For a local business, creating a Google My Business Profile is a must. If you want to improve your credibility, analyze how your competitors got backlinks to authority sites and follow the same route. Building backlinks to your website from other authority websites is one of the most important things you can do to rank the site. Also, when your content has backlinks, it shows authority and credibility, so Google finds it worthy.
Ranking a brand-new site is not a walk in the park. It’s a long-term strategy that will start bearing fruit between 3 and 6 months if you are consistent and strategic. Your job is to keep working on your SEO strategies, monitoring the performance using Google search console and analytics.