You’ve researched your keywords, figured in the right rate to implement them and are hiring a ghostwriter to get the best possible bang for your buck out of your content marketing budget. But your search engine ranking doesn’t seem to be improving. When you’ve already done everything right with your keywords, here are some other factors to examine that may be affecting your search engine ranking:
Slow loading times
We’ve all run across these pages. You wonder if a few bytes maybe went astray, because why else would this particular page be taking f-o-r-e-v-e-r to load? If you’ve got the patience, you may leave it loading or maybe you’ll hit the refresh button a time or two. But when the page still doesn’t load, you give up and go back to the search you were working through, showing up as a bounce that leaves the marketing manager at that site wondering what’s going on with their high bounce rate.
Headers and Bullet Points
Most people looking at search results want to quickly determine whether the page they’re looking at has what they need. If there are long blocks of plain text, it’s too easy for them to get discouraged and go on to the next site instead of staying on yours. Google recognizes that subheadings and bullet lists make it much easier for the average user to find the information they need quickly and easily, so pages that have well-placed headers and bullet lists will end up higher in search results than long-winded text. Aim for 3-4 sentences per header and between three and seven bullet points. If you need more than that, go to a numbered list so that your viewers can keep track of where they are on the page more easily.
Images
The size of your images affects how quickly your page can load, so this is directly related to the first topic on page speed. But beyond wanting to get the smallest images that can still convey your message effectively, think about image descriptions. Because Google is computer-based, it can’t tell what an image conveys, but it can read the descriptions, also known as alt text. By putting in great description of what is in the image, including your keywords, you’ll get a higher ranking than a site that doesn’t have any alt text descriptions.
These three areas are just the tip of the iceberg, but they’re important ones. Combined with well written, quality content that has value to your viewers, you should find your search engine ranking improving rapidly. Don’t forget to test with different machines, operating systems and accessibility features and you’ll be in the game!
Cathleen V is a multi-talented writer with experience in various fields. She focuses on content, article and blog writing for small business management, content optimization and marketing, arts businesses, crafts, agriculture, home improvement, food, nutrition and natural health. She is a top 1% content writer out of over 22,000.
