How to Improve Your SEO: Get Better Google Rankings with These 10 Tips
SEO, or search engine optimization, is the practice of making your website rank high on Google, Bing, and other search engines. This is important for your junk removal business… and just about any business at all, really! That’s because it’s a surefire way to reach out to more potential customers without costing you a penny. That’s right—unlike pay-per-click ads, you don’t have to cough up cash to have good SEO. Employ the correct strategies, and you’ll rank higher on search engines naturally. This causes more people to find your business when searching for junk removal services in their region, and in turn, causes you to book more jobs.
So we understand that SEO is kind of a big deal. The question is, how do we improve your website’s ranking? Well, allow us to provide some guidance. At Junk Removal Authority, we’re the website management experts, and we’ve prepared ten tips that you can use to better your business’s SEO, get more website visitors, and get more business. Let’s get started!
1. Have a Great Website
To start, you’re going to want a high-quality website, and there are a few reasons for that. First of all, Google knows if your website is bad. Sites that are not visually appealing, do not have a clean and easy-to-navigate layout, and are not mobile-friendly will not rank well.
But just as a thought experiment, let’s say you make a shoddy website and somehow make it rank well. People will click on on your results, land on your website, and immediately press the back button to check out a competitor instead. Why? Because, just like Google, potential customers know when you have a bad website too. If they are unable to easily navigate your site and find the information that they need, they will not convert into a customer.
We can’t stress this enough: make an attractive, functional website, or you’ve already lost!
2. Set Up On-Site Optimization Correctly
Making an attractive site isn’t enough, though. You also need to make your website attractive to Google. You see, search engines are always indexing new web pages so they can offer their users the newest, most up-to-date search results possible. The summarized version of this process is this: by making your web pages accommodating to the indexing process, you can boost your SEO results.
How can you accomplish this? Choose a keyphrase for each webpage, then make sure it doesn’t appear too little or too often. (This is called proper keyword density.) Have an accurate meta description for your page, and add alt tags to your on-page images. Additionally, have a logical internal linking structure. When you link your pages together in a cohesive way, search engines have an easier time indexing your website, thus increasing your ranking in search results.
There are tools that provide guidance for how to improve each of your website’s pages. We recommend Yoast, a tool that will show you what areas of your site pages need improvement to achieve better SEO rankings.
3. Pay Attention to Loading Speeds
Large images, plug-ins, and videos hosted directly on your site can slow loading speeds. Simply put, in today’s world of short attention spans, if your site doesn’t load quickly enough, you’re already losing visitors to your site. Use tools like GTmetrix and Pingdom to test loading speeds and see how your site stacks up.
4. Make Your Site Secure
Is your site secure? Google checks whether or not your site uses the HTTPS domain protocol as one of its ranking factors. To get HTTPS on your website domain, you must have an SSL certificate, which allows an encrypted connection between your website and your site visitors.
5. Create Targeted Landing Pages
Potential customers are going to search a variety of different phrases, so make multiple pages that target each in order to cast your net wide. One broad page targeting the keyphrase “junk removal” isn’t going to cut it.
Create pages that target other phrases, such as “furniture removal”, “appliance removal”, and “hot tub removal.” How about pages that are tailored for city-specific searches? For example, our sister business Junk Doctors features pages that target the keyphrases “junk removal in Raleigh” and “junk removal in Charlotte”.
6. Include Videos
Google loves seeing videos on your pages, so if you can consistently include them throughout your website, you stand a lot to gain from it. Additionally, when you have a video embedded on a webpage, that means website visitors might watch it and stay on your webpage longer than they would have otherwise. Longer visit times are tracked by Google, which helps it evaluate your page quality as “good.” So grab your camera, make an informative video, and add it to your site!
7. Have an Active Social Media Presence
Google likes seeing activity on your business’s social media pages. For example, regular posts on YouTube and Facebook will help increase your SEO, especially if people are engaging with your content: liking, commenting, and sharing.
Already posting on social media but not seeing much engagement? We’ve noticed a direct correlation between increased social media posting and increased SEO ranking, even without engagement. So, don’t let up on your social media posts! It could very well pay off.
8. Avoid “Black Hat” Techniques
What is a “black hat” technique, anyway? Simply put, it’s when you attempt to cheat the system to boost your SEO ranking. For example, when you cram a few paragraphs with a dozen or more instances of your keyphrase, it could be considered keyword stuffing. Don’t do this—make sure your keyword density is appropriate!
Another “black hat” technique is keyword cloaking. Nowadays, high school students in English classes who don’t want to type a two-thousand-word essay might type most of it, then put a bunch of filler words at the bottom of the page and make them the same color as the page background. Suddenly, Microsoft Word says the essay is more than two thousand words, the English teacher gives the essay a green checkmark, and the student gets away scot-free.
This might sound fine and dandy, and you might get the idea to put all your keyphrases at the bottom of your webpage and render them invisible. Don’t do this. This trick might work on some English teachers, but it won’t work on Google—and Google won’t hesitate to put your website in detention. Don’t risk penalized SEO results. Play fair!
9. Pay Attention to Your Google My Business Map Listing
Stay active with your business listing on Google! Whenever you get reviews, respond to them. It’s a quick and easy way to help boost your SEO. Also, consider your business’s location relative to other cities in the area. An address in a busier city with more people is going to drive more online traffic than an out-of-the-way, country address.
10. Ensure Your Info Matches Across the Web
Google appreciates consistency, so make sure your information is consistent. Across your website and all your social media, are your phone numbers, addresses, and emails matching? If they aren’t, then you should adjust them so they are. Not only will search engines reward your efforts, but your clients won’t wind up confused, too.
Improve Your SEO with Junk Removal Authority
There are a lot of ins and outs to search engine optimization. Sometimes, when you’re running all the other aspects of a junk removal business, it can be too overwhelming to fully focus on how to improve your SEO. Thankfully, you don’t have to, thanks to the digital marketing team at Junk Removal Authority.
Unlike other online marketing companies, we know all about the junk removal industry, and we’ve perfected the formula to create great SEO for junk removal businesses. Want your website to thrive in your clients’ search results the fast and easy way? Then getting in touch with us might be the best first step for you.