If you are in the horticulture industry and you run a website, you may have this critical goal.

“To improve page rankings for all its web pages.”

Having such a goal is noble. There’s nothing wrong to want to improve web-pages and make them rank at the coveted # 1 position.

Why?

Having a page at the top of search results is gold. It means getting lots of FREE traffic, thus saving you thousands of advertising dollars!

Don’t you think that goal is worth pursuing? Anyone in the horticulture or any industry should strive to have his or her pages on the top of search results.

Like anyone else in the horticulture industry, I wanted my homepage to rank number 1 for the keyword “horticulture copywriter.”

To me, the keyword was important.

It expressed my expertise, goal and business focus. Therefore, I was hungry to have my website to rank in the top spot for it. If it did, prospects searching for a horticulture copywriter would be able to easily find me.

However, I had a big problem.

It’s a problem that everyone—including you, and a horticulture copywriter like me face.

To rank for any keyword, even the uncompetitive ones, is not easy. You have to dislodge some severe competition and do lots of work.

Dislodging the Competition to Improve Page Rankings means that you must have the best webpage compared to the competition.

Its design must be superb. It must have a lot of backlinks, and many social media shares.

That’s a tough feat to achieve—especially if your page is new, or you are starting online marketing.

If you have a new page, you’ll have to spend sleepless nights working on it—to achieve the feat.

I came to that conclusion when I first searched for the keyword “horticulture copywriter.”

Just as I expected it, my page was nowhere on the top 100 Search Results.

Having worked so hard, that outcome—though expected—made me shrink into my sofa feeling dejected and ashamed.

“How in the world can I fail?” I asked myself.

That question lingered in my mind for a whole Sunday evening.

I am sure you felt the same way, or even worse when you failed to rank a page for a target keyword.

Ooh, what a disappointment! I had to do something urgently considering that I was offering horticulture SEO services.

How the search results looked like before I started working on my page…

You can see, my page was nowhere at the top for the keyword “Horticulture copywriter”

A Few On-page SEO Tweaks Later and The Page’s Ranking Skyrocketed to Position 1.

If you believe SEO doesn’t work, today let me tell you SEO does work.

It worked for this website in a big way. By tweaking its on-page SEO, I improved the page rankings tremendously.

That is why I have confidence that if you hire an experienced horticulture SEO expert, you can improve page rankings.

As you can see from search result below, when I first did a google search for the keyword “Horticulture copywriter,” my page appeared nowhere in the search results.

However, courtesy of on-page SEO—and other SEO techniques, it now appears on the search results for the keyword “Horticulture copywriter.”

“What did I do,” you may ask.

I followed a simple process that anybody—including you—can follow RIGHT NOW to increase page rankings!

If you follow the same process as I did, you’ll improve the rankings of every page or blog post you create.

Here is the process:

Step 1: To Improve Page Rankings, Know the Current SEO Status Your Target Webpage

This is the first step of improving your page rankings.

If you want to improve the Google rankings of your page, you must have a knowledge of what is ailing your page. To know the problems of a page and its SEO status is not difficult.

All you need to do is “Conduct an SEO audit of your target page.”

Doing an SEO audit so simple.

In fact, anyone can conduct an SEO audit of any page—including that of a competitor.

All he or she has to do is, “Manually check the various page elements and meta like the keyword density, meta-description, URL structure, etc. — and see if they conform to Google’s requirements.”

Alternatively, he or she can use SEO analysis tools—like the Google page insight tool or the free SEO analyzer tool, or Neil’s Patel SEO analysis tool.

Since doing a manual SEO site audit is tiring—even for an experienced horticulture copywriter like me—I opted to use help from the free SEO analyzer tool.

The tool is handy, simple and straightforward. To use it, all I needed was to enter the page’s URL then click Analyze.

From the page SEO analysis, it was clear that I needed to create more internal and backlinks to the page, share the page on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and other social media sites.

Step 2: Work on The Areas of Weakness to Improve Your Page Rankings

From the SEO audit I conducted using the SEO analysis tool, it was evident that I needed to work on the following areas:

• Heading tags
• Meta description
• External links
• Internal links
• Social media shares
• Keyword density

Heading Tags

As you can see from the image below, I had the wrong heading structure for the page. The right structure should flow from H1, H2, H3 all the way from H6. I rectified this structure by changing my theme heading options.

Write a Meta description

Since the page lacked a meta description, I wrote one that, that had the target keyword, had a call to action, and that conveyed my page’s focus area.

Reduce the External Links

The homepage had too many links pointing to other internal pages. This had the effect of reducing its link juice thus affecting the page rankings. According to experts, the ratio of internal versus external links should be 50%, but mine was at 0%.

Having such a ratio meant the page was bleeding too much authority to other internal pages, but gaining none at all.

If I were to improve page rankings, I had to reduce the links, from the page, pointing to other pages.

However, when I analyzed those links, I realized they were essential for the navigation to those pages. So to increase my link juice, I had to ensure that I had twice the number of internal links pointing to the homepage so that I can have a link juice of 100%

Create Internal links

Internal linking is strategically linking from one page to the next with specific anchor text with the aim of boosting page rankings.

In my case, the anchor text was “horticulture copywriter.”

However, a quick analysis of my website content showed there was very little use of the keyword: “horticulture copywriter.” Nevertheless, I had used the keyword “copywriter.”

To optimize my homepage for the keyword “horticulture copywriter,” I had to find pages containing the keyword “copywriter that Google ranked highly, then change the keyword “copywriter” to “horticulture copywriter.”

Finding the pages—on my site— that rank high for the keyword “copywriter” is easy. All I did was use the site command on Google search. I did this by adding my domain and the keyword “copywriter” after it in a Google search.

The purpose of doing such a search was to let Google tell me the pages, that ranked high for the keyword copywriter. After identifying the pages, I edited the keyword “copywriter” to “horticulture copywriter.”

I then used the keyword that I had just edited as anchor text for my target homepage.

Share the page on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and other social networking websites

Sharing a page on social media can improve page rankings.

And from the analysis of the results of the SEO tool, I had never shared my homepage on social media. To improve page rankings, I had to do it strategically. Therefore, I optimized the page for social media.

How to Optimize Your Page’s Description for Facebook and Twitter to Improve your page rankings?

Optimizing a page for social media involves controlling how its snippet would appear if it were shared on Facebook, Twitter or any social media site.

If you use the Yoast plugin as your WordPress SEO plugin optimizing how your page, when shared on Twitter or Facebook is straightforward. Just click on the social media sharing button as you can see on the image below. 

 Then change how you’d like your page to look on Facebook or Twitter by clicking on the Facebook or Twitter tabs at the top.

Here is how the Yoast facebook tab look like

How the twitter section appears on Yoast plugin

 From the images above, you realize that Facebook and Twitter have specific dimensions they require. To adhere to these dimensions, I used a free 

When it came to improving the dimensions of my images, I realized they were more significant than what Facebook required.

To make them of the right size, I used Lunapic.

• I uploaded them to Lunapic
• Clicked the compress button,
• Entered the dimensions required by Facebook, then hit compress.
• Downloaded the compressed image.
• Did the same for image size required by Twitter

Advertise the Page on Facebook

The theory behind this tactic was once the ad started running, the following will happen. Facebook will send traffic to my page. Some of those people will like my page, and Google will notice it, thus automatically rank my page number 1.

I tried this tactic, and it worked wonders!

Create a guest blog post on a high authority website and backlink it to my page.

Creating a guest post on a blog that is of higher authority than yours has the following advantages:

• You expose your expertise to the readers of that blog.
• You create high-quality backlinks to your website.

Since I did not have a blog in mind, I created a high-quality blog in Quora, and I linked it to the homepage. This action worked wonders, and within days my page was on top of Google.

Added a XML sitemap WordPress plugin

XML sitemap enables search engines to understand the navigation structure of a website better. It becomes much easier for the search engine to find your content, and improve your rankings. Every website should have not only an XML sitemap for search engines but also an HTML sitemap for people. I recommend the following sitemap plugin.

My takeaway:

As you seek to improve page rankings, please remember that multiple factors and variables come into play when it comes to enhancing page rank. Depending on the competitiveness of your target keyword, it may take much longer to rank for it, and the techniques described in this blog post may not work for you.

What strategy do you use to improve your page rankings? Please share them in the comments section below!

Will you improve your Horticulture page’s ranking so that you can get more traffic and sales? We can help you do that. All you need is to check out can contact us today or check how we can help you.