Well referencing your site on Google in 2022 and making your business ever more visible on the internet are essential objectives today. The observation has become relentless in 2022, where everything is digitizing at full speed, it is absolutely necessary to highlight your know-how and your brand forward and not let your website vegetate in the depths of the abyss of Google.
In order to position your site well, it is very important to respect Google’s codes to optimize your natural referencing effectively. At SEO BRISK, we make your job easier with this list of things to know and optimize in SEO to properly reference your website on Google in 2022.
- Clearly define the keywords to target
- Have a good technical SEO base: H1 and Title tags, Sitemap…
- Have well-written and structured quality content
- Well reference your site by making it live
- Effectively work on internal networking
- Have an external linking strategy (netlinking)
- Optimize the speed of your website
- Have a secure site for your visitors
- Boost your SEO without overdoing it
- Work on your social networks
- Have a responsive site on all media
- Thinking about questions asked via voice search
- Well reference your site thanks to the tools at your disposal
Properly referencing your website thanks to the basics of SEO
Clearly define the keywords to target
Choosing your queries is a key step in your strategy to properly reference your site on Google. These are the queries that users search on Google when they want to have explanations or answers that could relate to your core business. Properly referencing your site on Google therefore requires understanding what your future visitor will be looking for, but also the keywords and queries on which you want to be visible. Trying to position yourself on an uncompetitive query or keyword will be easier than trying to position yourself on a high demand query.
- Analyze your market and the competition positioned in your business niche
- Define realistic objectives and the keywords on which to position yourself
- Don’t aim too fast too big! It is not possible to be competitive right away with the big guys in your industry if you are just starting out.
Have a good technical SEO base: H1 and Title tags, Sitemap…
These are the foundations of your website and it is the key to ranking your site well on Google! Unfortunately for you, you will have to get your hands dirty to optimize the technical base of your website. On all the pages of your site are hidden hot areas that allow Google to better understand the content of your pages. These famous hot zones are the Title or Meta-Description tag. that visitors can see by doing a search on Google, but also other “on-page” tags (i.e. specific to each page) such as semantic markup (H1, H2… H6) which allow sub- title each page of your site and give valuable information to Google… because to properly reference your website, it is Google that needs this information to index it!
- In order to facilitate the work of Google robots, optimize the hot areas of your site directly via suitable plugins (Yoast SEO, RankMath, etc.) or from the source code of your website (Title tags, Hn tags)
- Place your targeted keywords and queries for each page in hot zones.
- Optimize the indexing files of your website such as the Robots and Sitemap files which give valuable information to Google on your pages to be indexed.
The key to a good website lies in the foundations that you will create for it. If the technical base of your site is strong enough for Google, the information concentrated on your pages will have a tenfold impact compared to a technical base deemed insufficient and too light.
Have well-written and structured quality content
Without content on your site, no natural referencing! The content you post on your site is analyzed and then digested by Google to bring out expressions and keywords that meet the needs of visitors. It is therefore essential to take care of the texts that you have on your website. But be careful not to fall into the easy way by writing a lot of content without thinking about quality, because Google will consider interesting and well-written text as quality content! The more your page will be complete, explanatory and with your expertise in it, the more likely you will be to rank your site well on Google.
- Think quality over quantity. A well referenced page rarely has 100 words, it must provide expertise and reflect professionalism when read.
- Do not over-optimize your content with tags, titles and other keywords used repeatedly…. Google knows how to spot when you’re trying to cheat.
- To avoid going all over the place, it is best to establish a content strategy on your site in advance to avoid going around in circles and risking that two pages have the same keywords and targeted queries.
And above all, never forget one thing when you write a page on your site: you have to think of the visitor first! If Google ranks you high, that’s good, but if the user doesn’t bother to read your content, that’s problematic.
Well reference your site by making it live
To properly reference its website, it must show signs of activity to Google. Don’t worry, Google doesn’t need a new article every day (even if it’s necessarily better than one every month…) to judge that a site is active, but the objective remains to don’t let your site gather dust. A site that does not give a sign of life is not good for the visitor, who may think that your business is no longer relevant, or that your information is no longer up to date. Remember to update your information and review the website from time to time to correct certain pages or improve them, without forgetting to add relevant and quality content to your website, either via new pages or by your blog, your references or your latest achievements.
Effectively work on internal networking
So that a visitor does not find himself faced with a wall when he arrives on your site, it is important to create various exit doors for him to visit more of your site. This is called internal linking. Like a spider’s web, a page will allow via internal links (i.e. from one page of the site to another page of the site) to redirect the visitor to a second page which will complete his knowledge. Or other information related to the page he is reading. In addition to allowing the user to continue to benefit from your site, you will diffuse the weight of your page from an SEO point of view to the page pointed to.
- Make links between your pages and your articles to encourage users to continue visiting your site
- Decrease your bounce rate if you follow your statistics carefully by offering your visitor to see other pages
- Increase the weight of the pointed page to increase its “juice”.
Have an external linking strategy (netlinking)
Because talking about yourself is good, but someone else talking about you is better! When you create a backlink, a link created by a site that talks about you, you encourage Google to trust you more. Netlinking is word of mouth for your website. The more you are talked about well by trusted sites, the more Google will think that your information is credible.
- Choose the sites that will talk about you carefully. A dubious or malicious site that advertises you will penalize you, which is the exact opposite of what we are looking for here.
- Prioritize the quality of partner sites over quantity.
- A backlink allows you to generate traffic to your website but also to increase this credibility and this notoriety with Google.
Optimize the speed of your website
Criterion of choice for users as for browsers, we are now used to finding the information sought in just a few seconds. If the most visited sites are often fast, it is above all a question of guaranteeing optimal navigation for the user. If the latter find themselves faced with a site in the process of being changed for too long, they will more easily tend to leave it. Here are some examples of effective improvements to rank your site well in Google:
- Use lightweight, web-friendly image formats (like Webp or JPEG-progressive)
- Quantify the server that hosts your site so that it can serve all your visitors without creating queues or slowdowns.
- Optimize your source code when possible (via plugins if you are on a CMS for example)
Have a secure site for your visitors
Having a site in HTTPS may not be what will cost you the most time to install on your website, but from a technical point of view, you will have taken a good step forward in your SEO for b2b! Today, Google no longer favors sites that it considers insecure because its objective is to offer visitors to a site the best possible navigation.
And since your site is not limited to Google, you also have to think about the end user who visits your site. A customer is unlikely to feel secure when browsing a site without HTTPS. Worse still, many browsers today take the time to warn you of a threatening page that the site you are about to browse is not secure. A good chance of seeing the user go back and end up on your direct competitor’s site because of a badly closed padlock story…
Boost your SEO without overdoing it
Google has, over time, developed its algorithm for properly referencing its website and certain rules have evolved over time. Certain modifications have made it possible to penalize abusive practices and two algorithms deployed by Google pinpoint this famous abusive content. Google Panda was set up to fight against poor quality content, while Google Penguin penalizes sites of poor quality or questionable notoriety. All of this is put in place to make room for sites that REALLY offer quality content and in-depth expertise without bogging you down with excessively used keywords and many backlinks unrelated to your business. Do not fall into these bad habits that will sooner or later prevent your site from being at the top of natural referencing. Properly reference his website:
- Do not buy backlinks whose origin you do not know
- Do not place your keywords in all paragraphs of your page
- Don’t just think of Google when writing
- Don’t use Call-To-Action with basic phrases like “read more” or “click here”
- Do not copy and paste text found on the Internet, this is called “Content Duplicate”
- Do not put all of your text in bold, not everything is important
Rank your site well on Google by taking advantage of visitor habits
Work on your social networks
Many social media (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.) are now used by a large majority of people in everyday life. They represent an inexhaustible source of traffic as the content is varied on these networks. Each network is different and has its own codes, which is why it is good to be interested in the algorithm of each one and to know:
- Publication times
- The target audience
- The content that hits the mark
Have a responsive site on all media
In 2022, the use of a mobile medium has become a reflex for a large majority of the population. Whether on mobile phone, tablet or even his watch for the bravest, we can access a web page or our social networks without the slightest problem to find any information. More and more, your site is visited via these mobile terminals and the sites must begin to respect the codes of the mobile. Google has taken the plunge and its SEO algorithm is now based on the mobile version of your phone, by its responsive version (i.e. which adapts to any mobile format without necessarily sticking to the computer version that we know).
- Integrate a responsive design or an AMP version into your site
- Make sure navigation is smooth and fast like on a computer
Thinking about questions asked via voice search
Voice systems are taking up more and more space in our lives with connected speakers, home automation and our smartphones just waiting to be woken up by our “Say Siri” and “Ok Google”. These features give rise to increasingly natural and interrogative searches. It is therefore necessary to think of turning your articles and your pages in the form of a question, because a user will tend to question Google by asking him a question contrary to a search formulated in writing.
Use tools to properly reference your site
Well reference your site thanks to the tools at your disposal
There are many tools that allow you to monitor and improve your natural referencing strategy. Use it to unearth keywords, improve what already exists on your website or monitor the effects of your work in real time.
- To improve the existing on your site (under WordPress for example), use the Yoast SEO or Rank Math plugins.
- On Google Chrome, install the SEOquake extension to see all the hot spots on your pages.
- To find new keywords, favor Ubersuggest, Google Trend, SEMrush or Serpstat.
- To manage your results, use free tools from Google: Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
Most of these tools are free and easy to use. If you would like further expertise on your results or to implement these solutions, do not hesitate to contact us.