One of the most common questions we find website owners have is

How can I improve my SEO ranking and get my website to the top of Google?

As they say, there are many ways to skin a cat, and SEO is a complex subject, Google says there are over 200 ranking factors.

Some of you may be on a budget and are looking to roll up your sleeves, and are happy spending the time learning and building your website.

How To Increase Your Ranking For Free & Rank Higher On Google

So we will start off with the easiest and quickest wins that you can get because the quicker you can get to positive results the better.

These will be free and just require a little bit of work to do.

It means you will stick with it and that website could potentially be a life-changing asset for you, your business and your family.

Further down the guide will be more tricky or longer-term SEO strategies.

Some of these will require investment because getting your website to the top of Google means you will be up against competitors who have invested in their website.

What really makes the investment pay off is all the steps before it has been done, because it will make the strategies work even better.

There are a lot of other great guides on how to rank higher on Google, but in our opinion, they throw everything at you but in no particular order.

So it is easy to get lost and confused about what to do first.

The main assumption of this guide is that you want to learn how to do search engine optimisation yourself for your website. Also that you have a small to medium budget to invest with as you move through this step by step guide.

This is a step by step roadmap to get you moving in the right direction in the search results.

Don’t skip steps as this will an efficient roadmap to increase your rankings in Google. If you have already done the step then move on to the next section.

Follow this step by step SEO guide as we show you how to improve your Google ranking with your WordPress website in some steps.

To give you a general philosophy to keep in mind when going through this process.

The philosophy to rank higher on Google is trust and authority.

This means every step that you do will help build your trust and authority in Google’s eyes.

The higher these two aspects of your website is the higher you will rank your website in the search engines.

The reason for this is because Google’s mission is to answer each search query as fast as possible and send people to the best website with the best answer.

This is why we start with the fundamentals first because if you have a slow loading website for example, then it will be bad user experience. So in this example, Google would rather rank a faster loading website.

Once you have fixed your foundations and done all the fundamental steps in this guide, your website will rank higher in the search engines and hopefully eventually reach the top.

Contents

Setup

1. Set up Google My Business
2. Make sure your website is https
3. Sign up for search console
4. Sign up for Google Analytics

Technical SEO Fixes

1. Technical audit
2. Page speed
3. Optimise images
4. Add images and videos
5. Fix broken links
6. Update WordPress plugins
7. Add menu items to the footer
8. Mobile friendly
9. Fix duplicate content

Onpage Optimisation

1. Finding quick wins with google analytics
2. Finding related keywords with google related searches
3. Find out what customers are searching for
4. Write a good title and meta description
5. Use header tags correctly
6. Use keywords
7. Use LSI words
8. Better content on pages
9. Internal Linking
10. Outbound Linking

Offpage Optimisation

1. Get directory links
2. Get social media links
3. Get web 2.0s
4. Google Map
5. IFTTT
6. Create videos
7. Create blog posts
8. Google Ranking Tools
9. Guest posting

Set up Google My Business

It sounds illogical right to do this first but think about it – if you are a real business you should be on Google My Business (GMB).

Simply go to Google My Business website and sign up.

You will want to verify your listing which you can do by entering your details and asking Google to send you a postcard with a verification number on.

It should take about a week to come.

The benefits of this are it will help you rank a little higher because Google knows you are a real business with a real address.

This is mainly for local businesses, so if you are not a local business simply skip the steps where it is for local businesses who are looking to show up in Google Maps search results.

So Google will trust you more.

There are a few important things you need to do when you sign up for Google My Business (GMB).

1. Fill out all your details completely, this includes description, opening hours, services, area served and everything else that you can possibly fill out.
2. Get as many images as you can, you want images for all the sections including inside the business, outside the business, staff members, products, etc.
3. If you are a local business then before you upload your images to Google My Business you will want to Geotag your images with an Image Geotagger this helps with ranking in the Google Maps.
4. If you have any videos you will want to upload your videos

These are things that a lot of websites don’t do with their GMB listing.

So if you are doing them, then Google will like you more and trust you more so you will get a boost in search and in Google Maps.

The next step is to get a GMB website, it is free and you can find it within the GMB dashboard.

It is simple and easy to create and you can get it up and running in 10 minutes.

It uses a lot of the information you have already put into your Google My Business listing which is why it is quick to get set up.

This is mainly for businesses but it won’t harm doing it because Google likes it when you use their services.

Get your Google Website here.

The next step is to make some posts which you can do inside Google My Business. This is great for businesses because these posts show up when people view your map listing. But also because you can get your keywords in the posts which help you rank in Google Maps better.

The final step is to get reviews. This is an ongoing step that you should be doing in the background as you go along. This step is mainly for businesses because getting more reviews is one factor that helps you rank higher in Google Maps.

You will want to get reviews from previous customers by sending them an email or making a phone call. If you can’t do that then get employees to leave a review or friends and family.

Just get 10 or so reviews for your business and you will be on your way.

One tip is to ask your customers to describe what product or service they have had from you and whether they liked the service.

This will get some of your keywords in the review which again will help you rank higher on Google.