These tips are a good starting point in understanding the sometimes confusing world of SEO, so they can get their website to the top of Google’s pages.
Ask an expert or an employee at Google how to improve your SEO ranking and you’re likely to get a lot of different answers.
It used to be much simpler – conduct a site analysis, produce a lot of content, stuff in a few keywords throughout, build a few reciprocal links and you were good to go.
But SEO has come a long way since the early days of the internet. Google’s algorithms are a complex system to retrieve data from its search index and keep on feeding people the most relevant results for their search. They are constantly evolving to keep up with the vast amounts of content now being produced and how people are searching for and viewing it, and as a result organisations need to work a lot harder to prove that their content is worth the ranking, and that it’s good quality and valuable.
Charities need to be found by the people they want to serve and help. We’ve broken down a few of the key things charities can do to start improving their search engine rankings.
1. Keep creating high quality, relevant content
In 2019, it’s more important than ever to ensure your content is truly valuable and engaging. Create content for people, not bots. Here are a few tips on what Google considers quality content.
As for the ‘keep creating’ bit, maybe you don’t, but Google rewards sites that regularly update pages.
2. Sign up for Google Search Console
While Google won’t share the exact algorithm for search rankings, they are very good at giving information about it in some select areas – much like how Coca Cola put the ingredients on their bottles, but won’t give the exact formula for how much of what goes into it.
Fortunately, Google created Google Search Console to give you some important clues. This is another free product from Google that provides data and analytics – the difference from Google Analytics is that Google Search Console is focused more on how your pages rank in Google search, as well as the sorts of things you can do to improve that ranking. Sign up now if you haven’t already!
3. Make sure your site is mobile-friendly
In 2015, Google released a significant new ranking algorithm that highly favours sites which are mobile-friendly, to reflect the fact that mobile became the most popular way to browse the internet.
Google Mobile-Friendly test is the best free tool for seeing how well your site works on mobile, and it also lists what elements need fixing if you have any.
You might also want to check out Google PageSpeed Insights, which checks how quickly your pages work on mobile devices (and desktops) and also lists the specific elements that need fixing with how to fix them. – Read more
