5 Easy SEO Fixes To Improve Your Google Rankings

SEO is overwhelming. I’ve worked in marketing for years and still only feel like I’ve scratched the surface in understanding it.

However.

I know it works. I’ve seen firsthand how making a few small tweaks can dramatically improve your Google rankings and, in turn, your traffic.

The tips I’m about to share are basic steps anyone can take to move their website in the right direction—which is upward in Google’s rankings.

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1. Optimize titles and meta descriptions

Your pages’ titles and meta descriptions are Google’s go-to for understanding what those pages are about. They’re what appear when your site shows up in a Google search result.

Pretty much any modern website CMS has a spot within the page editor for you to input your title and meta descriptions. On WordPress, for example, installing the Yoast SEO plugin will give you this handy little area to input titles and meta descriptions on the back end of every site page:

On Hubspot, another popular CMS, the input area looks like this:

According to MOZ (the definitive source on all things SEO), title tags should be under 60 characters while meta descriptions should be between 50 and 300 characters.

2. Correct 404 errors

You know how it feels when you’re at a party, the conversation is flowing, everyone’s having a great time, and suddenly someone bumps into the speaker and cuts off the music? Nothing kills a party faster.

A 404 error is the same way.

It occurs when a user clicks on a link to a page that has been deleted, and it brings the visitor’s browsing experience to a screeching halt. In the best case scenario, they’ll be confused and frustrated with your site. In the worst case, they’ll straight up leave.

At least Zola has a cute 404 page and not a boring, auto-generated one!

The good news is, 404 errors are easy to correct.

In WordPress, use the Redirection plugin to identify broken links, then correct them. To do this, you’ll tell the plugin where to send users who click on the broken link. So for example, if you find a broken link to an outdated blog post that you unpublished, you might redirect the link to the URL for a newer, updated post on a similar topic.

At the very least, redirecting 404s to your home page is better than nothing.

Other website platforms have similar redirection plugins and apps, like Easy Redirects for Shopify and the URL Mapping Tool in Hubspot.

3. Link within your own pages

Google uses “crawlers” to navigate around the internet and index content to display in search results They work like spiders, crawling along strands of web from one page to the next.

The problem is, if a page of your site isn’t linked to any other pages, Google’s crawlers have no way of finding it. It’s as if there was a tiny inaccessible island in the middle of the spider web.

To help Google understand your site’s architecture and index all of your pages, link to your own content between your site’s pages. For example, I often reference other blog posts visitors can read for related information.

According to search experts, internal linking also helps spread your site’s search power more equally among all its pages (like if your home page ranks really well on Google and it has internal links to five different service pages, those service pages will also benefit from higher rankings).

4. Improve page load speed

Website speed has been a factor in search rankings for about a decade, but Google recently announced that it will now affect mobile search results, too. This means your site’s load speed is more important than ever.

You can run a speed test on your site here.

For every additional second your site takes to load, your abandonment rate increases and your conversion rate drops.

If you’re not a developer, the easiest way to improve your site’s speed is through a plugin like W3 Total Cache that takes care of some of the major speed issues for you.

You can also hire someone to do it on a site like Upwork, which I highly recommend. I once royally f$cked up my site by attempting to alter my page caching on my own. A cleanup of your site’s load speed is an inexpensive fix that can contribute to a significant decrease in your bounce rate and an increase in conversions.

5. Stop stuffing keywords and focus on content

You probably know keywords are an important indicator that helps Google understand your website, but in the last few years the search engine has dramatically shifted its approach to keywords. Keywords are still a factor in search results, but intent is so much more important.

When someone types a query into Google, Google works hard to understand what did the searcher actually want to find? Chances are, a page stuffed with the keyword they put into Google isn’t the answer. Google can tell whether a searcher liked what they found by gauging how much time they spent on the site and how much interaction they had there.

I still see websites with keywords awkwardly, randomly thrown in. Like, “We’re the experts in cheap Toyota repair Atlanta!” That sentence would never come out of a human’s mouth and was clearly created with keywords in mind. If you do this too much, Google actually penalizes your site for it!

Instead of getting so caught up in keywords, focus on creating awesome, meaningful content. My rule of thumb is to pick one keyword phrase to focus on per website page and really dive into great content on that keyword. So far, this practice has served me and my clients well.

For example, in this post I decided to target the keyword phrase ‘Instagram post ideas.’ You’ll notice that I included this phrase in the post’s title, and just twice in the 1,000 word post. Both instances flow naturally and aren’t stuffed in awkwardly.

Instead of just repeating Instagram-related keywords over and over, I took the time to create an awesome list of actual post ideas, and as a result, people spend a lot of time on that post when they arrive at it. It’s currently my number one search-trafficked page on this website.

All the tips I’ve outlined here could be completed in a day or less and will go a long way toward bumping your site higher up Google’s rankings. And if you have a bit of marketing budget to invest, hiring an SEO expert to tackle some more technical improvements is a great use of your money.