Where does your business appear on Google when potential customers search for your chosen keywords? If you're not at the top - or near the top - it can be frustrating. There's plenty of evidence that very few users go beyond the first page of results in a Google search. In fact, they are more likely to refine their search than move on to the next page. Fortunately, there are a whole host of actions you can take to ensure your website appears on the first page in 2016.
Here are the five most important ones.
#1: Care more about authority than keywords
Using keywords in your web content is still important, but the days when high keyword density was the key to ranking on Google are long gone. In fact, the placement of your keywords is not nearly as important as the overall authority of your website. Google's algorithms are very sophisticated and no longer rely on keywords in a title or H1 tag to decide whether a page is worth visiting. Rather, they focus on contextual meaning and look for expected words to rank pages.
For example, if you wanted to rank for a keyword like "best legal advice", you would have to use that keyword three or four times in strategic places to have a chance of ranking. Now, if you talk about expert legal advice, Google can recognise that your page is relevant to the keyword, even if you don't use it more than a few times in your article.
#2: Pay attention to bounce rates and the time spent on your site
Another surprising SEO development for 2016 has to do with evaluating whether your site is giving visitors what they need. Not only does Google crawl your site for keywords and context, but it also looks at what visitors do after they leave your site to determine if your site is authoritative or just a waste of time. For example, if a visitor searches for one of your keywords and clicks on your site, Google looks at how long they stay.
A dwell time of several minutes could indicate that a user has engaged with the content on your site and found what they are looking for. However, if they spend several minutes on your site, return to their list of search results via the dreaded back button and click on another page instead, it's a good sign that your site didn't offer what they needed. If you have a high bounce rate, a good way to improve your search rankings in 2016 is to make sure your site is providing the answers to the questions implied by your chosen keywords.
#3: Optimise your website for mobile users
In 2015, mobile search queries on Google surpassed computer search queries - and this trend is likely to continue. Google has prioritised mobile search, as the Mobilegeddon mobile-friendliness update in early 2015 showed. If your website isn't mobile-friendly, now is the time to change that. Fortunately, most businesses can switch to mobile-friendly or (ideally) mobile-adaptive websites with little effort.
Sometimes it's as simple as changing the template you use for your website. For example, if you have a WordPress website, you have a huge library of templates at your disposal, many of which are mobile-friendly. You may need to customise your website slightly to make a new template work, but it's worth the work. The beauty of websites that adapt to mobile devices is that they adapt to the mobile device in question.
Mobile customers tend to be very impatient and are unlikely to wait for a slow loading page or scroll horizontally to read your content. Taking the time to optimise your website for mobile users can do more to improve your search rankings in 2016 than anything else.
#4: Avoid content that is too short
It wasn't that long ago that blog posts of 250 to 500 words were considered the norm. Short and sweet was the rule of the day, and the assumption that people wanted short content led to a flood of short articles that had little value or meaning. That has all changed. Truth be told, the trend towards longer web content has been around for some time, but this year it has become the rule rather than the exception. Research shows that internet users are much more likely to engage with content between 1,000 and 1,500 words than with short articles.
And why? Because they want valuable information, and - with rare exceptions - it's difficult to convey in just a few hundred words. Sure, you can offer a top 10 list that's only 500 words long, but you won't be able to explain why the items are on the list as well as you would if you were writing a longer article or blog post. The reason Google places so much emphasis on length is because it wants to ensure that visitors are directed to pages that are designed for humans, not search algorithms. If you're worried about publishing long content, remember that you can break it up with subheadings and images to make it more readable.
#5: Ensure that user-friendliness is at the forefront
In a way, this last point is a summary of everything that has been said before. Each of the above points leads back to one thing: usability. Old-school SEO focused on tricking Google's algorithms - to the point where many websites were much friendlier to computers than they were to humans. Google is more and more concerned that its search results lead users to websites that answer their questions.
You want users to feel comfortable searching. That's unlikely to happen if they land on a site that's not mobile-friendly or that's stuffed with keywords but doesn't contain any real value. There are many things you can do to test the usability of your website, including split testing individual components of your site. However, the best thing you can do is to do everything you can to answer the key questions that arise from your chosen keywords and make sure your site is easy to read for every user and on every device.
Ranking on the first page of Google is always a challenge. Regardless of your niche, you will face stiff competition. It may sound strange, but the best way to rank well is to forget that you're trying to rank. Don't worry about algorithms and SEO tricks. Instead, focus on making your website a place where potential customers can find exactly what they need. If you do that, the search rank will follow.
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