How to Optimize Your Joomla Website to Rank Higher on Google

Research from HubSpot reveals that 75% of users never go past the first page of Google search results. It means that no matter how good your Joomla site is, it's useless if you can't rank on the first page of Google.

While ranking first on Google isn't easy, it's not impossible either. A few tweaking and optimizations to your Joomla site will dramatically boost your chances of ranking higher. If you're not sure how then don't worry because this article is here to help. Here are 9 tips and tricks to boost your Joomla site ranking on the search engine. 

Improve Your Overall Site Speed

To rank higher on Google, the first thing you need to do is to make sure that your Joomla site runs smoothly without any delay. Here is what happens when your site lags for just one second according to Kissmetrics.

• 40% of visitors will abandon your site
• You'll potentially lose 7% of your conversions. If you're making $100,000 per day, you'll lose $2.5 million in sales by the end of the year.
• Customer satisfaction will drop by 16%, and they may never visit your site again.

Most of the case user experience depends on your site speed then speed affects SEO and SEO affects your ranking. A survey says that If a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load, over a quarter of users won't click away. Once you exceed that load time, you can optimize your Joomla website and rank higher on Google. You can use our revolutionary instant page extension to reduce waiting time and to speed up your Joomla website. 

In the same survey says, 73% of users reported that visiting a website that loaded too slow discourage them to click over. Even Google considered page speed as one of the ranking factors for its search index and to guarantee mobile web pages optimum speed they created AMP.

When someone visits your site and loads a page, Joomla will load all the necessary features and components to present the page as well as possible. By enabling the Joomla cache, Joomla will remember all of the elements so the next time someone visits the same page again, it will load much faster. 

Optimize the Content of Your Site

In the war of websites, content is what really matters. If you can create content that's unique, engaging, interesting, helpful, and overall better than most sites, then surely the audience will naturally visit your site. To some, especially business owners and brands, content can be hard working SEO machines and so you have to ensure Google gets notice of your content too.

To create such content, you have to really know what the audience is looking for. This way, you can create content that caters to their needs and interests. Conduct keyword research using tools like Ahrefs to know what keywords are currently popular. You can also visit forums like Reddit and Quora to find out the hot trending topics among internet users.

After you've found the keywords, proceed to create content based on those keywords. Make sure your title, headings, and subheadings contain your targeted keywords. And don't get stuck on just creating articles. Including content like videos on your page can actually attract more attention, as videos currently make up 74% of online traffic.

Optimize Your URL

Optimizing the content of your site isn't enough, you have to optimize your URL too. Instead of having an URL that reads like this:

https://www.themexpert.com/d/1WCw3dDjsgH-El13E1BCmU8PrU_pnfg9VBrQYCLv--zM/edit#

It's much better to simplify the URL and include your targeted keyword in it, just like this:

https://www.themexpert.com/blog/7-must-have-joomla-extensions-for-every-site

This way, Google and other search engines will quickly understand the content of your webpage that the URL represents, making it much more likely to rank higher. To change your URL, just go to your website's Joomla Global Configuration. Then, set the "Search Engine Friendly URLs" and "Use URL Rewriting" to "Yes". 

The second thing you need to do is to decide whether your URL will use the www-prefix or not. Unlike WordPress, Joomla doesn't automatically redirect your page to a specific "www" URL. It means that if you don't choose one, your page will have 2 different URLs. Google will think that you have duplicate content and penalize you for it.

It doesn't really matter what you choose, as long as you choose one URL and make the other inaccessible.

Use Joomla SEO Extensions

One of the benefits of using Joomla is the fact it has extensions for almost everything, including SEO. Using these SEO extensions will enable you to analyze your site and search for weaknesses that you can improve. Every Joomla SEO extension has its own benefits and drawbacks, you just need to figure out which one is the best suited for your site.

Gain High-Quality Backlinks ​

Backlinks are one of the most important factors that Google uses to determine a website's ranking. And it's not about quantity, it's about quality. One backlink from a website with a domain rating of 90 will be more valuable than five backlinks from websites with zero domain ratings.

High-quality backlinks from reliable and trusted sources will tell Google that the content in your site is relevant and people need to know about it. As a result, Google will rank your site higher. There are several ways to gain organic backlinks, one of them is through guest posting. Here's how you do it:

• Search for other websites within your industry that target similar niche audiences like you
• Look for their email addresses and reach out to them via email
• If they're interested, proceed to write articles for them
• Don't forget to link back to your site in every guest post that you write.

Use tools like Ahrefs' Backlink Checker or some backlink API to gather the data and monitor the progress of your backlinks.

Fix Broken Links

Broken links or dead links are dangerous for your website. These links will redirect visitors to a deleted page or 404 error page. Too many error pages will ruin the visitors' experience while browsing on your site. This will make you lose visitors and negatively impact your web ranking.

To fix this problem, you can use tools like Google Webmaster Tool, Joomla Redirect Manager, and others to scan your site for dead links. Once you figure out the broken links, replace them with the ones that are still working or remove them completely. Click here for a complete guide to finding and replacing broken links.

Optimize Your Site for Mobile Use

More than half (52.6%) of all website traffic comes from mobile devices. It means that most of your visitors are accessing your site through their smartphones or tablets. If your Joomla site isn't mobile-friendly, then those people will abandon your site and search for other more responsive websites.

Another important reason why you should optimize your site for mobile use is because of Google's mobile-friendly ranking algorithm. Basically, this algorithm is designed to give mobile-friendly websites a boost when it comes to ranking on Google mobile search results. You can also use Joomla AMP for better speed on the mobile web page.

FAQ Schema​

Did you know, the top 3 positions of desktop search got 10-31.5% organic CTR? You can get them with a faq schema and get more clicks on your web pages from the Search Engine Result Pages. When you get more clicks, it can improve your site conversion and help you to rank higher on Google.

FAQ Schema makes your web pages eligible for rich results in the search engine result page. You can add multiple questions with the title tag and focus keyword. Although FAQ Schema in Joomla is quite a complicated process, but you can easily create and add FAQ schema to your Joomla site through Quix.

If you want to know more you can follow the following blog post about "How to Rank Higher and Improve Your Website CTR in Google Using FAQ Schema."

Selecting Good Joomla Hosting 

Having a fast-loading Joomla site isn't enough to rank higher on Google while having a fast loading host will also matter. Poor user experience always affects your site conversion, and here an excellent fast loading hosting can overcome that along with a fast loading site.

If there happens any data loss, then it can cause a ranking loss for you. So, you have to care about the server location and the performance of the hosting company. There are a lot of parameters and a vast number of companies currently offering SEO friendly hosts. If you want to rank higher on Google, then there is no other way except choosing the best Joomla hosting.

Wrapping Up 

If you want to learn more about optimizing your Joomla website, check out our other article on The Complete Step-by-Step Guide to Joomla SEO. If you have something to add, don't hesitate to pour your thoughts on the comment section below!

Author Bio 

This article is contributed by Andre Oentoro is one of the co-founders of Milkwhale, an internationally acknowledged infographic production agency. He helps businesses increase visibility on the internet with visual data and well-placed outreach campaigns. If you want to contribute a quality article on our site, check our submission guideline.