Colleagues reading an article on how to rank higher on Google

Just like you’d want a physical shop to be easy to spot in town, you should learn how to rank higher on Google so that you can aim for its virtual high street (the coveted 1st page).

This will allow your badass woman-founded business to generate more relevant traffic and leads from search engines.

But I know how confusing this all sounds if you’re not an SEO expert or copywriter.

Relax: I’ve broken it down into 8 actionable tips for you.

Let’s set the right expectations, though.

How long does it take to rank #1 on Google?

On average, it takes longer than a year to rank #1 on Google. In fact, 95% of new web pages don’t reach Google’s top ten within the first year.

The ones that do, on the other hand, tend to get there in a few months.

So, my advice is to be patient and don’t get discouraged. As long as you keep putting these tips into practice, at least.

8 SEO tips on how to rank higher on Google with the website of your woman-founded business

Let’s tackle one SEO aspect and tactic at a time.

Optimise your pages and website structure

Your website shouldn’t be something you’ve built or commissioned years ago and never touched again.

If you want Google to find it and navigate it effortlessly, you need to make it as easy as possible for search engines to do so.

Make sure you have a clear website structure: relevant internal links, no broken links (you can check them here), and an up-to-date site map
Target one main keyword per page: find it with a keyword research tool, use it strategically (for example, page titles, headings, image alt descriptions, and a few times within the actual text), and don’t target it on different pages so as not confuse Google

2. Put UX and readability before search engines

The Google BERT update was an unequivocal sign that this search engine is moving more and more towards user-friendly content rather than robotic keywords.

Write for your users and then optimise for search engines
Do so without compromising your readers’ experience: for example, Google will tend to prioritise the more grammatically correct and conversational “Best places to eat in London” over a clunky “Best restaurants London”.

3. Understand and master your E-A-T principles

No, we’re not talking about your culinary habits.

E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. Because Google wants to provide its users with the best website experience, it favours businesses with high E-A-T .

So:

Make sure you offer error-free content, cite authoritative sources, and have a trustworthy contact and about page
Try and get links from authoritative websites
Don’t forget that Google can check the expertise of each page author, too
Another thing that can penalise your E-A-T is if your business has lots of bad reviews: Google understands that your customers are not happy, so it’s not going to suggest your website to new users. While it might be the last thing you would have thought of, a campaign and strategy to improve sentiment around your business and your customer service can actually help your website rank higher, albeit indirectly⁠—crazy, I know! (1)

4. Be mobile-friendly

Why would you want to focus on computers only when 58% of all Google searches are done on mobiles?

Ever since what is commonly referred to as the ‘mobilegeddon’ update in 2015, Google has been unashamedly prioritising mobile-friendly websites.

After all, would you rather find an outdated static page on which you have to manually zoom in to read a single sentence or a dynamic and responsive design that adapts to your screen’s width?

Do your business website a favour, and run a Mobile Friendly test on Google: it will show you what you need to improve in order to let the search engine know that your website can perform amazingly on phones too. (2)

5. Optimise for voice search

I’m a bit old school: I prefer typing every single query—well, I am a writer, after all. My stepfather, however, is always bringing the phone to his lips for any question he’s got, and so are millions of people.

I can’t blame him: voice search is becoming more and more accurate and it allows you to multitask more easily.

Queries that are spoken out loud are going to be even more conversational than written ones, so, as I mentioned before, focus on user-friendly sentences and long-tail keywords.

Look at the ‘People also ask’ section on Google when searching for your most relevant keywords, add blog posts or pages that answer those questions directly, and use structured data markup if you feel like getting techy.

Also, optimising for voice search means optimising for mobiles, too: two Google crawlers with one stone!

6. Improve your page speed

We went from patiently waiting for our dial-up Internet connection to load in the early 2000s—I’ll never forget that iconic screeching sound!—to exiting a website if it doesn’t load within 3 seconds.

To be fair, though, it’s not just us humans who hate slow websites: search engines do too!

Since page speed is a direct ranking factor and post-early-2000s humans are impatient, you must ensure that your website loads fast.

Luckily, there are lots of free online tools that allow you to check its speed, such as Pingdom, GTMetrix, Experte, and Google’s own tool: they usually provide you with a score, an average load time and a list of what you should improve. (3)

7. Keep snippets in mind

Let’s go back to the basics. Before worrying about how to rank higher on Google, remember what you (and your audience) use Google for: to get information and answers.

While the search engine might not be able to give you the meaning of life—but everyone who’s read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy knows that it’s 42—it can give you pretty much anything else.

However, whilst multiple pages can answer the same question, only one gets the spotlight, aka the featured snippet.

Once you’ve familiarised yourself with your most relevant keywords and the most common queries and questions related to them, try and answer each and every one of them individually with separate pages, sections, headings, or blog posts that target that particular long-tail keyword.

One (or more!) of them might very well become the featured snippet for it.

8. Make the most of your blog

Guess what? 80% of all searches are informational (4), so you should really make the most of them by targeting your relevant keywords, trending topics in your niche and the searches that are associated with them!

The best way to do so is to have a blog page on your website and a freakin’ awesome blogging strategy, of course.

A blog allows you to rank for long-tail keywords, achieving an average of 434% more indexed pages than websites without one. (5)

Having a blog has lots of benefits that range from supporting your newsletter and social media strategy to establishing yourself as an expert in your field, but the most popular is probably the fact that it helps your website’s SEO.

Plus, as we established earlier, Google prioritises user-friendly pages and, especially, good content: make the most of your blog to provide top-notch content to your existing customers as well as to attract new users, show Google that your website has got all the answers and position yourself as an expert in your niche whilst ranking higher on search engines.

Now you know what to do, but don’t forget: SEO takes time!

Start implementing these tips on how to rank higher ASAP, and I bet you’ll see some juicy results in a few months. You’ve got this!