SEO: How To Rank Your Website on Google [Vietnam]

With a current population of about 97 million people (based on the latest estimates), a growing economy, and increasing foreign investments, Vietnam is undoubtedly a great place in South-East Asia for business opportunities.

And to seize the opportunities, it is important to understand the potential of effective online exposure.

Having a website displaying your products or services, advertising online, and ranking on Google’s 1st page, have all become crucial factors in your company’s success. SEO marketing is now a crucial aspect of your business marketing plan

 

How do Vietnamese people use the Internet?

According to Truong Minh Tuan, Minister of Information and Communication, the internet has now become an important part of life for everyone in Vietnam, from manual workers to doctors, students to office workers, everyone can find information on the internet.

Vietnam’s gateway to the internet formally opened two decades ago, which was a huge milestone for Vietnam’s telecommunication sector. Since then, the number of internet users in Vietnam has kept increasing.

Vietnam only had 205,000 internet users in the early days, 17 million users in 2007, and 31 million in 2012, and this number has now reached 50 million users, equivalent to 54% of the population, after only 2 decades of internet network access. 54% is higher than the world average of 46.46%, and Vietnam is one of the Asian countries with the largest number of internet users.

Vietnam is also seeing impressive growth in internet-based services and products, such as e-commerce, food delivery channels, online advertising, mobile apps, etc.

All industries in Vietnam are represented online now, and even government branches manage social media accounts so they can communicate with people more efficiently.

The number of internet users in Vietnam is projected to grow to 59.48 million internet users in 2022.

All this information lets you understand that the Vietnamese online market is full of opportunities, but also full of competition. Having a good website is.. good. Having a good website that generates traffic is great! And for this, we need to understand SEO.

 

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What is SEO?

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the name given to all the actions taken to improve search engine rankings so that your website can appear on the 1st page of a search result.

SEO is a major aspect of your online development that ought not to be neglected, and agencies offering SEO services can help your website rank higher on Google.

In search results, Google displays links to websites it considers relevant. Relevance is, for example, measured by analyzing the number and quality of links from other web pages, amongst many other factors that we’ll summarize.

To optimize your website for search engines the right way, there are heaps of steps to take and optimizations to carry out. Here, you’ll find a few examples of what works.

However, this list isn’t exhaustive: more than 200 different criteria are taken into account in Google’s algorithm. And this list is pretty much evolving and adapting daily.

 

What are Google SEO ranking factors?

As said, there are more than 200 factors that Google takes into account when it comes to ranking a website. Today we talk about SEO marketing since these SEO adjustments done to your site will help drive traffic and conversion. Some of these factors are old and have been existing for years, and some are the result of technological improvements. Contracting professionals for their SEO services is key to driving traffic to your site.

However, some general concepts exist, and if you follow them, your website will have a good chance to rank :

 

Relevancy

That is probably one of the most important factors for your website to rank: is it relevant?

And by relevant, we mean, are people looking for your products, your services, or your content?

What your website is about will determine if people find it or not, depending on if they’re looking for it or not. When a user searches for specific keywords, if the content on your website matches those keywords, then your site has a better chance to rank higher for that search query. Hence the importance of having an SEO marketing plan

This factor is obvious, and of course, not the only one. Ranking on Google’s first page is extremely competitive and other factors are also crucial.

 

Popularity

The popularity of your website is also a great indicator for Google to determine your ranking.

Google collects data from your website to understand your visitors’ behavior. Once Google has enough data to understand how your visitors interact with your website, it can deduce if your visitors stay on your site and spend some time, or just quickly visit and move.

To put it simply, when a user is searching for something, lands on your site, and quickly bounce out, Google sees this behavior and deduces that users find your website, but don’t stay long on it simply because your content doesn’t provide enough value. Websites that keep their visitors’ attention longer, will rank higher.

So to rank higher, you have to provide your visitors with quality content. When your website has good content, people stay longer and interact differently with it. The time spent on your website is a great indicator of the value you provide your visitors with. And great content would not be seen if your site doesn’t run quickly and smoothly, hence the importance of contracting an SEO company to work on your SEO for WordPress bringing visitors to your content.

When people stay and interact with your site, Google sees it and will push your ranking to a higher place.

 

Page & Domain Authority

If you are at a place in your industry where people trust your brand and your expertise, your website should reflect this authority. Providing useful content that pleases your visitors is key because they will be likely to use your content and share it on their website or their social media. And when they create links on their site to your site, it shows Google that your content is valuable, and as a result, it increases your domain authority.

If your content is so good that people refer to your site from other websites, by creating links to your site, Google will use this information and understand your site and content is popular, therefore it will rank you higher. If you are a growing company, it can seem hard to compete with well-established giants of your industry. But now you know that by providing value to your online visitors, your domain can gain ranks, and move closer to your biggest competitors.

There are a lot of actions to take to rank a site well, and today, one of the most important factors is Technical SEO.

Fortunately, SEO companies offer SEO services for WordPress, so that your SEO can be taken care of, while you work on your business.

 

What is Technical SEO and why is it important?

According to SEO Guru Neil Patel, “Technical SEO is like the backbone of your website, its structure. Without it, everything else falls apart.”

Let’s take one example of how important Technical SEO is. Let’s say you’re publishing great content on your website, like a great article that your audience is eager to read. But when they click the link, the page takes forever to load. Well, you may want to have a look at those numbers :

Indeed, the slower your page loads, the more visitors you lose, and your bounce rate increases, which Google doesn’t like.

So even if you publish great content, you could be losing traffic if your site isn’t optimized well and your pages load slowly. Hence how important it is to work with digital agencies that offer SEO services.

And this is just one example that shows how important is Technical SEO.

 

The different aspects of technical SEO

Technical SEO is focused on how well search engine spiders can crawl your site and index your content. SEO companies help you achieve it.

Technical SEO follows the search engines’ requirements to improve crawling. Also, technical SEO is constantly evolving, as it follows search engine requirements that are in a state of constant refinement and getting more advanced each day.

1. Website speed

As mentioned earlier, your website speed is crucial. The page load speed, meaning the time it takes for a page to fully display its content, is in the top 10 SEO ranking factors that all SEO specialists and SEO consultants know.
So how can you enhance your website load speed?

Your template has to stay simple

It’s quite straightforward: the more elements you add to your template – tracking codes, plugins, widgets – the longer your site takes to load. Limit the elements of your site and keep your template as simple as possible. And you already understand that it’s not good to make your visitors wait for pages to load. The fewer elements on your site, the faster it runs. It also refers to the code which needs to be optimized. SEO companies and SEO consultants can optimize your whole website code to make run faster.

Optimize your images

Limit the size of your images by adjusting them appropriately. Large pictures can increase your loading time. So you want them to be as light as possible. To do so, you can use websites like https://imagecompressor.com/

Also, you can use images in the jpeg format for photographs, and png format for graphics.

Limit redirects

We’ve all been there, we click on a link to a page, and we’re redirected to another page. Well, redirects slow down the speed of your site, especially if you have multiple redirects.

For a 404 error page, which appears when a page of your site can’t be found, or simply if the visitor types a wrong URL, you must design a personalized page. If possible, one that reflects the colors and style of your site. Keep your visitors entertained, if possible with a bit of humor, and guide them back to your homepage, or any other important page of your site. If your 404 error page is simply a bland white page with a 404 message, likely, your visitor will simply leave your website.
Google Search Console can help you spot the errors on your site. It will show you your website 404 errors. An SEO company can assist you in fixing all those errors.

 

2. Mobile friendliness

Mobile friendliness is as important as website speed.

On April 21st, 2015, Google released a significant new mobile-friendly ranking algorithm that’s designed to give a boost to mobile-friendly pages in Google’s mobile search results.

The change is so significant that the date it happened is being referred to as “mobilegeddon” (derived from Armageddon). This change had a big impact on the way Google ranks websites. It was the start of the new era of mobile search. Since then, being mobile-friendly has been a key factor in SEO.

One of the best ways to prepare is to test that Google considers your web pages to be mobile-friendly by using its Mobile-Friendly Test tool. And nowadays, most web agencies offering SEO services know how to optimize the SEO of your site’s mobile version.

3. The website architecture

HTTPS

Choosing the Hypertext transfer protocol is important. And the most SEO-friendly choice is the secure protocol: HTTPS.

Since the 6th of August 2014, Google has included HTTPS on their ranking factors list and made this information public. Usually, Google doesn’t share its ranking factors, so that’s quite a rare event.

In other words, your website will rank higher if you have it on HTTPS://

In addition, HTTPS can also help with analytics. In Google Analytics, you can only view the referrer details if your site uses HTTPS.

HTTPS also offers more protection and security to your site, so it’s worth it. If you are not familiar with the analytics of your site, an SEO agency and their SEO specialist can offer you a complete monthly analysis of how your site is performing, in terms of visits, engagement, conversion, etc.

Breadcrumbs

Another important part of SEO-friendly architecture is breadcrumbs. All SEO specialists know that breadcrumbs help the user of a site know his exact location on the site. This type of navigation assist the user orientation. They also help him move backward in the site without having to look too long for its steps. They’re very popular with e-commerce websites.

URL structure

Clear and consistent URLs describe the pages of a site both for users and search engines.

Optimizing your URLs well for SEO, will help your site rank higher. So it is important to make them as descriptive as possible, but also as brief as possible. A user should understand what a page is about just by looking at its URL, ideally. If a URL is too long, it could cause trouble for the page to load.

 

What can an SEO agency do for you?

• SEO Audit: An SEO agency can help you set up a real SEO keywords strategy to enhance your SEO marketing

• SEO Plugins: An SEO company is capable of selecting the SEO plugins that will help improve your rankings tremendously

• Images Optimization: Images can consume a lot of space and make your website run slower if they’re not optimized correctly. An SEO company will make sure all images on your site are fully SEO optimized.

• Code Optimization: CSS, HTML, and Javascript code can be optimized to achieve different results: better ranking, faster website, and smoother site architecture.

• On-Page Optimization: Each page of your site contains elements that can be SEO optimized (Meta descriptions, Titles, URLs …).

• Google & Bing Subscription: Google offers a wide variety of services you can subscribe to, to conduct advanced studies of your site performance.

• Linking Campaigns: Building links/backlinks is an important part of growing your site’s authority and creating traffic.

• Google Analytics Audit: Frequent analysis of your site is crucial to understand how well your site is performing and what needs to be fixed.

• Content Writing: Quality content is key for your SEO. Consider hiring content specialists to produce articles, posts, reviews, case studies, and so on to fill your website.

 

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