Everyone is interested in improving their visibility on the web. This is why many are looking for shortcuts. The fact of the matter is that SEO is more of a long game and anyone promising quick results should be greeted with a high level of skepticism.

This post will break down the steps needed to boost your visibility in the Google search engine result pages (SERPs).

That said, I know you are equally interested in knowing one thing.

How Long Does It Take to Improve Google Rankings?

The truth is, it actually depends on how long SEO takes. SEO doesn’t happen in immediately. Every situation offers a unique set of variables.

The level of competition, how your website stacks up against the competition, skill, and budget can all play a role in how quickly one can move to the top. So, with that in mind, let’s break it down in a more quantifiable sense and review what you can do to make things happen sooner, rather than later.

A study by Ahrefs turned up some interesting information, in terms of how long it takes to rank on Google.

Main results were:

● On average, a page that ranked in the top 10 was over 2 years old. Moreover, the average age of pages that ranked first was nearly 3 years old

● Among the pages that ranked in the top 10, only 22 percent of them were less than 1-year-old.

● Of all pages in the study, only about 6 percent appeared in the top 10 search engine results for at least one keyword within one year.

● Zooming into the top 6 percent pages, most of them were able to get to the top 10 from nowhere in 2 to 6 months.

Based on the results, about 94 percent of the websites in the study never made it to the top 10 rankings within a year.

How to rank in google SERPs?

As you can see, to reach the top 10 in the search engine results page in less than a year takes lots of hard work, skill, and sometimes luck. And this takes us back to the topic: How to rank in google SERPs?

Optimize for Mobile

With Google rolling out the mobile-first index, your website needs to pass the Mobile-Friendly Test.

According to Google:

“… our crawling, indexing, and ranking systems have typically used the desktop version of a page’s content… Mobile-first indexing means that we’ll use the mobile version of the page for indexing and ranking…”

Tasks

Users need to be able to perform those basic tasks smoothly and without difficulties, even while multi-tasking.

What are the first three to five objectives of your site’s visitors? Ensure they can be accomplished on your mobile site effortlessly.

Performance

Put your users shoe in yours. Do you find yourself scrolling endlessly to access the services or products that you offer?

Do images take a while to load on your website?

Did you know that Google has be using page speed as a mobile search ranking factor?

Loading time is a huge factor on mobile devices, particularly since most of the connections on mobile tend to be slower than those of PCs.

Optimize for Speed

For both mobile or desktop, you must continuously monitor the speed and keep improving it.

Use the Google PageSpeed Insights to monitor your website's speed performance. PageSpeed Insights analyzes the content of a web page, then generates suggestions to make that page faster.

Here’s how you can execute page speed optimization:

Image File Size

Image optimization can be done in different ways, be it by resizing the images, caching, or by compressing the size. This way, you'll reduce page loading times.

Browser Caching

When a web browser loads a page, it loads a number of resources. Browser caching stores these resource files locally on the users’ computer. That way, when a user navigates to a new page, those resources need not be loaded again.

Script Handling

Make sure that you actually need the countless JS and CSS files, as they end up slowing down your website. If it’s possible to merge several scripts into a single file, go for it. That way, there will only be one retrieving call to the server to load all the scripts.

Always update content

We all know Google looks at the freshness of content, right? What if I tell you that you don’t have to create content from time to time just to rank well and that there’s a strategy that will help you skyrocket those rankings without a lot of extra work? Sounds Interesting, right? Keep reading to learn more.

Google web crawlers search your site and save the last time a page was updated, placing a higher emphasis on fresh content. By revisiting older blog post, updating its content, adding relevant images, target keywords, updating the meta description, the headline and changing the publishing date to today will help make your content fresh.

Work on the Links

Both internal and external links continue to have a huge influence on how your website ranks.

Fix Broken Links

Many website owners have a habit of ignoring broken links or links that do not direct user to the right page. This can create a less than ideal user experience and visitors are likely to walk out of your website.

On-Page Optimization

Onpage optimization (AKA on-page SEO) refers to all measures that can be taken directly within the website in order to improve its position in the search rankings. Examples of this include optimizing the content or improving the meta description and title tags.

Google wants to help you out here. They have produced a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide meant for anyone interested in promoting online content via Google search.

HOW TO RANK IN GOOGLE SERPs?