Getting ranked in the top three search results is a dream come true for any Website owner. But the journey towards this goal is a bit daunting. 

So hiring expensive SEO firms to take all your worries away is a somewhat logical step for those who can afford to do so.

But not all of us have that kind of money to spend for increasing our website’s chances of showing up in the top results. So what’s the other option?

It is spending months upon months learning and implementing effective SEO strategies. But what if you are unable to devote so much time and energy to this task?

If you don’t want to spend a lot of money on hiring SEO firms, but you also don’t have a lot of time that you can devote to learning and implementing SEO strategies, you’ve landed on the right page

In this article, you’ll learn how to track and improve your website’s ranking. All the methods and tools mentioned in this article are available for free.

Let’s start with some statistics gathered by trusted sources.

Close to 71 percent of search clicks are captured by the first page in Google search results. And reportedly, this percentage has increased to 91 percent in recent years.

Tracking Your Website’s Rankings

Your website is up and running, you upload content frequently on it, and its layout is also goods. So what’s the next step?

It is tracking your performance and marking what kind of content performs well and what doesn’t.

There are many free and paid tools that you can use for this purpose.

A good tool will provide you with information regarding the organic traffic your website generates in particular time frames, such as weeks and months. 

• It should track and report the keywords for which your website is ranking.
• It should track any backlinks for your website.
• It should also alert you if there are any bugs or errors in your website.
• A report should be sent to you monthly to inform you what strategy is working and what simply isn’t.

You can choose between many tools like Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, or any other tool of your choice.

This tool will save you the time and effort you’ll have to spend on manually tracking your backlinks, keyword rankings, or finding errors that need to be fixed as early as possible. A monthly report providing all these statistics can be a very convenient solution for all your needs.

Tracking Keywords

Simply adding keywords to the content on your website will not help you increase your website’s rankings. Instead, you’ll have to track your progress over time. Take notes of what’s performing well and what’s not.

Many free keyword tracking tools are available for you to use for this purpose. These tools provide you with data on the words and phrases your website is ranking for.

These tools also let you search for a specific word or phrase to check if you are ranking for it or not. Finally, these tools let you choose a specific region or country so you can track your progress within a specified area.

You can also track these rankings over time and keep a record to compare later on. 

Now you know what kind of tracking tool will work best. Next, let’s move on to the strategies for improving your website’s rankings.

Improving User Experience:

In a survey, 88 percent of online shoppers said they would not return to the website they had a bad user experience on.

Search engines strive to find the best possible results for their users. If they fail to provide such results, the users will switch to a better search engine.

This search engine strategy is something you should keep in mind, especially when designing your website and choosing the content you are going to upload on it.

Because users matter so much to the search engines, they are less likely to rank a website with low-quality content. 

In addition, as the search engines are introducing newer algorithms, they’re getting better at determining what content is good and what’s not.

Stats shows that 53 percent of mobile device users will leave the page that takes more than 3 seconds to load.

Your website must work fast because mobile users are not very patient, and if your website takes more time to load, the chances are that your website has a high bounce rate.

As your website’s bounce rates increase, its chances of getting ranked well in search results decrease simultaneously.

The reasons for a high bounce rate can be a long loading time, low-quality content, outdated content, and bad website layout.

Websites with a high bounce rate are also likely to have less user engagement. To a search engine, less user engagement means that the website is not useful.

But a higher bounce rate can also mean that the user has fulfilled his/her purpose for visiting the website and is now leaving satisfied with the website’s performance. If the user leaves satisfied, they are likely to revisit this website, and search engines will notice this action, which will help increase Google’s or any other search engine’s trust in that website.

To improve your website’s rankings, you’ll have to shift most of your focus from optimizing your website for the search engines to optimize it for the users.

There is no doubt that search engine optimization is necessary, but at the end of the day, you are not hosting this website so that search engines can get some value from it; you are doing it for your customers or users, and they should be your main focus.

Mobile-First Strategy

In the first 4 months of 2021, mobile users accounted for 54.8 percent of the total traffic on the internet.

This number will keep on increasing in the coming years because browsing the internet using your mobile device that is already present in your pocket or your hand is quite convenient.

Despite this fact, website owner’s still don’t focus on optimizing their websites for mobile devices. Mobile phones have smaller screens and less RAM and ROM than laptops or PCs. Therefore, a website designed for a desktop will not look good on a mobile screen, and if the image and video files are large, the mobile phone will take considerably longer to load the website.

Google and other search engines prefer websites optimized for mobile phones because most of their users are browsing with their mobile devices.

Here are the things you should focus on to make your website mobile-friendly

• Improve the loading speed of your website.
• Remove any outdated or low-quality content pages.
• Avoid adding large images and video clips to your website.
• Optimize your website for local search.
• Focus on a responsive web design.
• Use a simple layout.
• Maintain consistency throughout your website.
• If possible, create a separate URL for your mobile site.

Optimizing your website for mobile devices will give a boost to its search engine rankings.

You can also create a mobile app for your website users to build a more personal relationship with them.

Bottom Line

If your website is not ranked well, it’ll hardly generate any traffic no matter how good the content on your website is. On the other hand, a ranked website has much more potential for generating organic traffic and converting it into leads.

Improving the SEO of a website requires a lot of effort and time, but if you seriously want to grow your business or brand, SEO is the way forward. It is the key to your success.

Hiring SEO firms can be quite expensive. If you cannot afford one, focus on learning a few tips and tricks that can help improve your website’s rankings.

Which tools do you use to track the progress of your website?