Phoenix Website Design – How to be more visible on Google SERPs? (Part 1)

All the optimizations that we do on our website are for one ultimate goal: to be on Google search results. For whatever keywords you want to rank for, we all want our websites to show up pm the search results even for related searches.

However, this won’t be achieved that easily. Because there are trillions of websites, competition is stiff. You really have to find ways on how to stand out from the rest. This is like finding a needle in a haystack.

On the bright side, there are also billions of searches done on a daily basis. Furthermore, 15% of these daily searches are terms that have never been searched before. New searches are opportunities for websites to stay relevant.

• Sign up on Google Search Console (and Bing Webmaster Tools)
• Create and submit a sitemap to the various search engines
• Check if there are crawl errors

So, I will discuss in this post how to increase the visibility of your website. Whether it’s new or not, you can still gain more traffic and visits with these tips. Read them below:

1. Sign up on Google Search Console (and Bing Webmaster Tools)

• For Google to find your website, you need to give a heads up. Luckily, this is easier to do with the help of Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
• Obviously, Google users need the Google Search Console. Meanwhile, Bing users need to sign up for Bing Webmaster Tools. Basically, the different search engines have their own set of webmaster tools. So, you need to:

1. Research on the specific search engines that know your website exists.
2. Next, you need to figure out if they can successfully crawl your website.
3. After, you need to know what specific keywords are ranking in the SERPs.
4. Create and upload a sitemap for your website.
5. Lastly, receive notifications if something feels shady (such as malwares, and hacked sites)

2. Optimize and submit a sitemap to search engines

• After you chose the webmaster tools for your website, confirm that you are the website owner. Then, submit your sitemap. If you need help with this step, Google created a help page right here.
• For those who do not know, a sitemap is a complete list of all your website’s pages. Moreover, a sitemap contains the links of each page and the specific elements found on the page.
  • Generate a sitemap – There are many available tools online that can help you in creating a sitemap. Usually, XML is the preferred sitemap format.  For websites powered by WordPress, Yoast SEO is a free tool that you can use.
  • The XML Sitemap should only include the essential pages. Finally, you can send the sitemap to Google, Bing, and many others.

3. Check if there are crawl errors

• Submitting a sitemap is NOT enough. You need to make sure that search engines can freely crawl your website. There should be NO errors.
• Because if crawling and indexing fails, it will still be useless. So, in order to avoid possible errors, you need to:
  • Sign in to your Google Search Console account.
  • Under Index, find the COVERAGE report, and review the page that has issues.
  • If done, click the VALIDATE FIX button.

Next? How to be more visible on Google SERPs? (Part 2)