Gather company reviews
Gathering company reviews is a great strategy to help you make a real impact in the search engine results. When Google crawls your website and finds reviews, they may decide to display this information as a ‘rich snippet’. Rich snippets are found in regular Google search results, but they display extra information about your company, such as a star rating, which can massively improve the aesthetic of your listings in the search engine results pages.
1 Gather company reviews2 Attract backlinks3 Optimise page titles & meta descriptions4 Customise your URLs
It’s proven that users are much more likely to click on the rich results, improving your Click Through Rate (CTR), which is one of Google’s primary ranking factors. Additionally, if people leave your business reviews on Google, this will help with your trust level within the search engine. Good feedback demonstrates to Google that you have a great quality product or service and will help you rise the rankings. Read More: How To Get On the first page of Google
Attract backlinks
Attracting backlinks is an excellent strategy for boosting organic SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). A backlink is a link from one website to another. For example, if a business links to your website from their own, you have gained a backlink from them. Backlinks are deemed to be highly valuable for SEO as they represent a vote of confidence from one site to another. Top results on Google’s SERPs have 3.8 times more backlinks than those below them. So, you should aim to attract as many high-quality backlinks as you can. This means links from high authority websites that have plenty of visitors and good quality content. Backlinks from spam sites or site with low-quality content can actually be detrimental to your SEO. If your website has quality content on it or clearly shows that you provide a product or service, then the chances are you will naturally gain backlinks over time. Other websites will want to share your information with their visitors if it’s relevant. However, you can also be proactive in your approach to obtaining backlinks. You could reach out to relevant websites and ask if they could share your content by providing a link to your site.
Optimise page titles & meta descriptions
It’s important to note that 53% of the 20 top search engine results use keywords in their page titles. Google uses body text and subheaders, amongst other factors, to match results to searchers. Research keywords in your industry and spend some time analysing the SERPs to see if the exact keywords appear in some or all of the titles in competitors’ organic results. This will give you an idea of what the formula is for ranking so that you can build your own strategy. Additionally, well-thought-out, optimised meta descriptions are another great way to stand out on the SERPs. Meta descriptions will sit below your page title and provide a short description of what content users can expect to find if they click on your result. Therefore, they need to be compelling to encourage the reader to click and read the page in detail. Meta descriptions not only affect ranking results but are essential for promoting clicks to your site.
Customise your URLs
URLs don’t affect your ranking in the search engines, but custom URLs give the user a clear description of what your link relates to. Microsoft research discovered that there is a level of ‘domain bias’, finding that descriptive URLs get 25% more clicks than non-descriptive URLs. If you use a content management system like WordPress, you can amend your URLs before publishing pages to ensure they are as relevant as possible to attract clicks. You can even work through previously published pages and amend the URLs to make them suitable. However, you should ensure you have 301 redirects set up for the original URLs – especially if there are backlinks to them set up already. Standing out on the SERPs is crucial for increasing your online presence without denting your marketing budget. By utilising a strategy focusing on gathering company reviews, you’ll not only show customers how good your product or service is, but you’ll also be making a significant impact on your organic SEO. Using company reviews alongside backlinks and optimizing your page titles, meta descriptions, and URLs, you’ll soon notice measurable improvements in your SEO performance.