Start in the design phase to ensure your site is ready to earn a top spot Google rankings. It’s less about getting notice—although it is—as it is about demonstrating the quality of your site’s content.  

Here are seven tips to start:

1. Design a mobile-friendly site

Use tools like Salesforce Marketing Cloud Mobile Studio and Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to help design a mobile-first site. Google penalizes sites that are not optimized for mobile.

2. Create an XML sitemap and submit it to Google

Salesforce 1Platform has the tools to help create an XML Sitemap. A sitemap is necessary for Google to be able to find and index webpages.  Once you have it ready, submit it to Google using the Google Search Console.

3. Decrease site load time

Optimize images, enable browser caching, enable compression, reduce server response time, and use a content delivery system to increase site speed. Sites that are slow to load lose ranking. Most users will bounce if a page fails to load in under three seconds.

4. Use the best keywords

Use a keyword planner to identify the best keywords for content. It will give you a list of target keywords to use on a landing page.

5. Get high quality inbound links

Produce great, informative content to get inbound links from other sites with high page rank. Google algorithms view this as evidence of valuable content.

6. Use high-quality quotes, stats, and images

Add quotes and statistics from those who have influence over potential customers. These “influencers” may come from within a supply chain or be journalists or industry analysts.

7. Refresh popular site content

Identify popular content and revise it with new images, charts, statistics, and quotations. This builds on existing SEO and signals to search engines that the fresh content is popular.