According to HubSpot, 75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results. It means that no matter how good your Joomla site is, it's useless if you are not on the first page of Google. We all know that ranking first on Google is hard but it's not impossible either. As already said several times here, the SEO recipe is pretty simple:
- a clear content strategy marketing
- provide excellent contents
- and few tweaking and technical optimizations
All these ingredients will dramatically boost the chances to rank your Joomla website higher. If you're not familiar with these points and not sure how to do, don't worry because this guide is here to help you.
This article details you 7 pro tips and tricks to boost your Joomla website ranking on the search engines.
#1 - Improve The Overall Speed of Your Joomla Website
The very first thing you need to do if you want to rank higher on Google, is to make sure that your Joomla site runs smoothly without any delay on desktop and mobile. According to this infographic from Kissmetrics, here is what happens when your site lags for just one second:
- 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
- If an e-commerce site is making $100,000 per day, a 1 second page delay could potentially cost you $2.5 million in lost sales every year.
- 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less.
Nowadays, the user experience depends on your website speed. This speed affects SEO and consequently, SEO affects your ranking. If a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load, over a quarter of users won't click away. If your Joomla website exceed that load time, you must optimize it to rank higher on Google.
73% of mobile internet users say that they've encountered a website that was too slow to load. Since 2018, page speed is one of the ranking factors for Google and its search index and to guarantee mobile web pages optimum speed, they created the AMP format.
How to improve the speed of my Joomla website?
There are few tricks here but the first one is about the cache. When a user visits your Joomla website and loads a page, Joomla will load all the necessary informations and components to present the page. By enabling the Joomla cache in the global configuration, Joomla will remember all of the elements to load. The next time the users visit the same page again, it will load much faster.
#2 - Select The Best Joomla Hosting Partner
You can't have a fast loading Joomla website without a good hosting partner. No matter your optimization, no matter your hard work on the technical points, you must select and work with a reliable and efficient hosting partner.
But speed in't the only factor to check when select an hosting service. Safety is also (even more) an important criteria to check, as the location of the servers. Lucky you, there are numberous companies currently offering safe and SEO friendly hosts. If you want to rank higher on search engines, there is no other way except choosing the best Joomla hosting partner.
#3 - Optimize the Content of Your Joomla Website
If ranking a website is a war, then the content is your most powerful weapons. So, your objective here is to create content that's unique, engaging, interesting, helpful, and overall better than others websites. Then, the audience will surely and naturally visit your pages. For business owners, creating contents can be a hard working effort and so they have to ensure search engines gets notice of their content.
To create these contents, you have to really know what your audience is looking for. This way, you can publish contents that caters to their needs and interests. You can visit forums like Reddit and Quora to find out what are the hotest trending topics.
After you've found the topics and the keywords, proceed to create content based on those keywords. Make sure your article's title, headings, and subheadings contain your targeted keywords. And don't get stuck on just creating articles. To be more relevant and more interesting, you can include contents like videos on your articles.
#4 - Optimize The URL of Your Joomla Website
Publishing powerful contents of your Joomla website is great but not enough if you don't optimize your URL too. Let's take an example:
https://my-website.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=378&Itemid=2381
It's much easier to read for humans if you can optimize your URL and include your targeted keyword in it, like this:
https://my-website.com/tutorial/how-to-optimize-my-joomla-website
This way, humans will easily remind your URL and search engines will easily understand the matter of your page that the URL represents. To change your URL, just log in your admin panel and open the global configuration. For the SEO parameters, set the "Search Engine Friendly URLs" and "Use URL Rewriting" to "Yes".
The second thing you must do is to decide whether your URL will use the www prefix or not. Indeed, Joomla doesn't automatically redirect your page to a specific www URL. It means that if you don't choose for one, you will have 2 different URLs for the same page. Google will think that it's duplicate content and will penalize you for it.
Open your .htaccess file and add your prefered rule:
With www
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^my-website.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*) https://www.my-website.com/$1 [QSA,L,R=301]
Without www
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.my-website.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*) https://my-website.com/$1 [QSA,L,R=301]
No matter here what you choose for your URL, as long as you choose one and the other one is not reachable.
#5 - Gain Backlinks to Your Joomla Website
If the content is king, then backlinks are the queen of SEO. Indeed, the backlinks are one of the most important factors that Google uses to determine a website's ranking. This is not about quantity, it's only about quality. One backlink from a website with a domain rating of 80 or more will be much more valuable than many backlinks from websites with low domain ratings.
Backlinks from reliable and trusted websites will indicate Google that the content in your site is trustful for the search engine users. As a result, Google will rank your site higher in his index.
Publishing guest posts on high ranking websites is a simple way to gain organic backlinks but there are others ways. Here is how you can gain bakclinks with guest posting:
- Find out which reference sites in your industry target the same audiences as you
- Contact them via email to offer them a guest post
- If they're interested, write one or more articles for them
- Add a link back to your site in every guest post that you'll write for them
To check your current backlinks and monitor your progress on this point, you can use a reliable tool like Ahrefs' Backlink Checker.
Backlinks for web-eau.net
#6 - Fix the 404 errors on Your Joomla Website
Dead links or broken links can be dangerous for your Joomla website. These kind of links redirect your visitors to a 404 error page but if there are too many error pages, this will ruin the visitors' experience. You will lose visitors and this will negatively impact your web ranking.
To fix this issue, I recommand you to use tools like Google Search Console and Joomla component Redirect. Once you figure out the broken links on your website, replace them with the ones that are working or remove them completely from your site.
Here, I recommend you to control this point every month or more oftenly if you add contents regularly. Don't let the 404 errors ruin your website.
#7 - Optimize Your Joomla Website for Mobile
In the third quarter of 2020, mobile devices (excluding tablets) generated 50.8% of global website traffic. It means that one in two visitors is accessing your Joomla website through his smartphones(or tablet). If your Joomla site is not perfectly mobile friendly, those visitors will leave your website and search for other more responsive and more user friendly.
Another excellent reason why you must optimize your Joomla website for mobile is because of Google's mobile friendly ranking algorithm. This algorithm update was released in April 2018 and was designed to give mobile-friendly websites a boost when it comes to ranking on Google mobile search results.
You want to check if your web page is mobile-friendly? Google has a online tool for this and you can test your Joomla website here :
If needed, you can use a Joomla AMP extension for a better speed and display on mobile devices.
Wrapping Up
If you want to learn more about the SEO for your Joomla website, check out this other article on the ultimate SEO checklist for Joomla. It might be very useful if you want to know how to optimize your Joomla website.
If this guide was helpful, don't hesitate to share it to your friends. And if you have any question, any comment or any query, don't hesitate to share it on the comment section below.
