Page rank refers to how highly a specific page ranks in Google search results for relevant queries. Having a high page rank means your content shows up closer to the top of search engine results pages (SERPs). This results in more clicks, visitors, and conversions.
Improving your overall site’s page rank takes time, but it’s worth the investment for long-term organic growth. Here are 5 tips to help boost your pages’ rankings in Google:
1. Focus on Creating High-Quality Content
The single biggest factor for improving page rank is developing truly useful, one-of-a-kind content. Provide value that readers can’t find elsewhere.
Consider these best practices:
- In-depth research: Don’t skimp on research. Interview experts, dig through first-hand sources, compile primary data, etc. Share insights readers won’t find anywhere else.
- Unique angle: What fresh perspective or style can you bring to the topic? Who is your target reader and what do they really want to know? Tailor the content specifically for them.
- Compelling writing: Hire great writers if needed. Tighten up copy with a strong opening, useful headings, illustrations, simple language, and concise but thorough coverage of the topic.
- Multimedia: Include relevant charts, infographics, photos, videos, etc. These help demonstrate expertise while improving engagement.
- Actionable advice: Don’t just educate, give readers specific steps to solve their problem. Checklists, case studies, and worked examples are great.
- Up-to-date accuracy: Facts and best practices change over time. Revisit older content to ensure it’s still accurate and relevant before promoting it.
Remember that thin content designed just for search engines won’t sustain rankings long-term. Start by providing genuine value, and the page rank improvements will follow.
2. Optimize Technical SEO Factors
Beyond content, search engines consider over 200 technical ranking factors. Confirm your site meets the basics:
- Mobile-friendly: With Google’s mobile-first index, ensure site loads quickly on mobile and uses responsive design. Avoid tiny text, too many ads above the fold, or other frictions.
- Site speed: Pages should load in under 3 seconds. Enable caching, compression, lazy loading for images, and other optimizations. Use a tool like Pingdom or WebPageTest to measure improvements.
- Safe linking: Avoid broken links and use descriptive anchor text. Don’t link out to low-quality sites, as that can negatively impact rankings.
- Accessibility: Make site accessible to all readers using semantic HTML, alt text for images, captions for audio/video, and other standard practices.
- Secure hosting: Use HTTPS on all site pages and implement SSL/TLS best practices. This signals security and trustworthiness.
Stay on top of Google algorithm updates and fix any issues flagged as site damaging in Google Search Console. Technical SEO establishes critical site-wide fundamentals.
3. Build Trustworthy Backlinks
The quality and quantity of external sites linking back to a page influence its rank. But not all links are equal in Google’s eyes.
Focus on building contextual backlinks from relevant, high authority sites. Here are a few ethical link building tactics:
- Earn press mentions: Craft compelling pitches focused around novel data, expert insights, or newsworthy trends in your niche. Make reporters’ jobs easier by offering the story angle.
- Request reviews of your product or service: Ask happy customers to review your business on their blog, YouTube channel, or industry sites like G2 and Capterra. Ensure their audiences overlap with your ideal buyers.
- Contribute guest posts: Contact sites you read and ask about contributing an article. Align the content with their audience needs rather than just promoting yourself. Provide useful insights their readers will appreciate.
- Participate in relevant forums and groups: Share your specialized knowledge to establish expertise. Contribute value without overly self-promoting. Include a link to a helpful resource on your site when relevant.
- Curate and share content: If other sites have great related content, share it! Link to their content when curating on your own site or social media. This builds goodwill and shows you don’t just care about yourself.
Patience and persistence pay off. Focus on slowly building a diversified network of high-quality backlinks over months and years, not overnight.
4. Leverage Social Shares and Engagement
Google considers social signals like shares, likes, and clicks as weak ranking factors. But earning a steady stream of social engagement still benefits SEO in a few key ways:
- More brand signals: When content gets shared publicly, Google sees it as a sign of trust and interest. Popular pages seem more authoritative.
- Expanded reach: Going viral may bring thousands of new visitors. Some fraction of those visitors will link, mention, or otherwise signal endorsement of your content.
- Higher dwell time: Engaging social content gets people to stick around longer, which boosts site-wide time-on-page metrics.
- Backlink opportunities: Influencers, journalists, and other important sites monitor trending social content for stories. A hit could earn backlinks.
Post consistently on the social platforms where your audience is active. Interact and promote others’ content too – not just your own. Tastefully weave in social sharing prompts within natural content.
While overtly spammy tactics won’t work, social engagement from real humans does benefit SEO.
5. Monitor Results and Iterate
SEO is never “one and done.” You need an ongoing process to:
- Track which pages rank for target keywords in Google. Use tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Google Search Console to monitor positions.
- Dig into metrics for ranking pages: dwell time, click-through-rate, backlinks, social engagement, etc. See what factors they have in common.
- Run controlled experiments changing one variable at a time. For example, promote an older post on social media vs. create a new piece of content. See which has more impact.
- Analyze competitors who rank higher than you for target keywords:
- What are they doing differently with content?
- Do they have more backlinks from certain sites?
- How much social engagement and outreach do they get?
- Brainstorm new link-building and content promotion tactics. Assign clear next steps to try based on what the data says worked.
Listen to the feedback search engines provide, and keep working to incrementally improve your page rank over time. Small but consistent gains add up to big results.
Did these tips help? Let me know in the comments if you have any other page rank success strategies I should try!