A good natural referencing strategy is essential to increase the visibility of your site on search engines. It aims to optimize your website according to Google criteria, to improve its ranking in the SERPs. However, implementing such a strategy is not an easy task.
Discover, in this guide, 7 techniques to develop your natural referencing.
Develop your natural referencing by creating qualitative content
In its objective to offer ever more relevant results to Internet users, Google places great value on web content.
To rank sites in the SERPs, its algorithms first scan the articles they contain and then assess their relevance. To boost your natural referencing, consider working on the quality of your editorial content.
The goal is to offer articles that specifically respond to user queries.
To achieve this goal, we advise you to take into account the needs and intentions of your target audience. This is important to define an editorial line adapted to your audience.
In addition to meeting the demand of Internet users, your web content must be easily understood by robots. You must optimize your texts by integrating Hn tags (H1, H2, H3, H4, etc.).
These are useful for structuring content, to make it easier for search algorithms to understand.
Develop your natural referencing by improving your netlinking
The popularity index is an important metric that the algorithms evaluate to define the positioning of your site.
To analyze this KPI, search robots mainly rely on your external link profile. In particular, they evaluate the quantity and quality of backlinks that point to the pages of your site.
To develop your natural referencing, it is therefore important to improve your link profile.
This essentially involves setting up an effective netlinking strategy, defined according to your objectives. The goal is to optimize the quality of your content to generate incoming links in a natural way.
It is also possible to go through link building platforms to build and optimize your link profile. To succeed in obtaining relevant and qualitative backlinks, the ideal is to entrust your netlinking to a specialized agency.
Define a keyword strategy
The relevance of keywords is a determining factor in the visibility of your site on search engines. It is according to your keywords that Google defines whether it should display your site or not, following a request.
The principle is quite simple. To propose its SERP, Google compares the request of the Internet user to the keywords used on the pages present in its index. Those that best match the user's request are then ranked in the SERP in order of relevance.
To benefit from a good natural referencing, we advise you to position your pages on relevant queries with high traffic. Here are some things to consider when finding these keywords:
- the search intent of your target audience,
- the traffic rate generated by each evaluated request,
- the relevance of each request according to the topic addressed.
By taking these three main criteria into account, you will be able to target the best keywords to position your pages.
Adopt a responsive web design
To have a good natural referencing, you must also adopt a responsive web design.
The idea is to have an “adaptive” website that displays perfectly on all media (computer, tablet and smartphone). This web design offers a very good user experience. It guarantees excellent ease of navigation, regardless of the size of the medium used by Internet users. They will therefore not be forced to leave your site because of a display that is unsuitable for their screen.
This helps improve your Dwell Time and reduce your bounce rate. Your traffic rate will increase considerably, since Internet users can consult your site from all media. With these different metrics, the algorithms conclude that your site offers an excellent UX and optimizes its natural referencing.
Develop your natural referencing by optimizing your internal networking
The optimization of the internal mesh is also important to hope to have a good ranking in the engine results page.
A neat internal mesh promotes the crawling and indexing of your pages by search robots. Then think about creating hypertext links to connect the different pages of your site to each other.
The idea is not to create internal links in all directions. This must be done in a relevant way to define a coherent site tree structure.
To have a perfectly structured internal network, we advise you to define, for your content, a silo organization. With this type of tree structure, internal links are created to link pages dealing with the same theme to each other. Each hypertext link is thus contextualized, which makes the structure of the site coherent and more understandable for robots.
Improve the display speed of your site
The loading speed of your site can significantly influence its SEO. When a web page takes longer to display, Internet users tend to close it very quickly. Sites with a low display speed therefore see their bounce rate increase. This hinders their natural referencing on Google and other search engines.
To improve the positioning of your site in the SERP, you must optimize its display speed. It is generally recommended to have a loading time of 3 seconds maximum. To obtain such a display speed, it is necessary in particular:
- compress CSS files to lighten the source code,
- optimize visual content (images, graphics and videos),
- choose a very qualitative hosting service,
- opt for a caching solution.
Depending on the situation, these various optimization actions may prove to be ineffective. In this specific case, the ideal is to consider a complete overhaul of the site to improve its SEO performance.
Fill in your Meta Title and Meta Description tags
The Title tag and the Meta Description are two elements often overlooked by some site owners.
These Meta tags are not directly taken into account in the ranking of sites within the SERP. However, they are useful for generating qualified traffic to your site and thus improving its visibility.
So don’t forget to write these tags and optimize them for each page of your site.
Good Title and Meta Description tags should be consistent and relevant to the landing page.
- The Title tag must respect a maximum length of 65-70 characters.
- The size of the Meta Description must be between 155 and 160 characters.
These two tags should ideally contain the main keyword of the page they describe in the SERP.
