SERP is an abbreviation for “Search Engine Results Page,” and Ranking stands for “Position,” among others. Together, they represent the position of your website or blog or article on a search engine result page. When we query for a “Keyword” in a search engine, results get displayed based on our query. Search engines follow their algorithms to populate results in relevance to the Keyword. The keyword is the word what a user thinks about when he desires to search. If I am looking for a summer cruise ride and stay in California, my keywords for search maybe “Summer cruise from California.” There are many search engines in the world. Google occupies the number one spot, followed by Bing. We have pets at home, and they love to play with us. They demand attention and importance. My friends have been telling me how they have been playing with their pets all through the day due to lock down and working from home. Similarly, you should treat your website as a digital pet and bestow attention and importance. The importance it seeks is to wine, dine & dance on the first page of Google and every website’s heartthrob is Google SERP ranking. Google and Bing have their algorithm to show up a website on the first page or first in the search listing. It is a golden principle that no search users go beyond the second page of search engine listing and most do not even go beyond the first page. Hence, your website must get listed on the first page of google search so that your site comes up for the relevant keyword. The process of growing natural traffic to your website both qualitatively and quantitatively is known as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). When we started our google SERP ranking improvement project for www.retailviva.com, our objective was to get ranked on the first page. We are a team of four that wanted to attempt this. It is all started on 17th April 2020 with our first meeting to debate and discuss and lay the path forward to achieve this. The first step was to understand google webmaster guidelines in toto. This strategy much helped us to understand all the little nuances that we need to care for in a website. We scheduled one-hour meetings thrice a week and a day in the middle was left to accomplish changes that we must make based on our previous day understanding of SEO techniques. Simultaneously, we realized that content is king and to confess, we had poorly written content on our website then. We started re-writing content for about 35 pages, with a clear articulation of relevance of content for each specific page, plagiarism-free. The related pictures selection also was a task added to content preparation. The keywords were the riddle and puzzle to be solved, with questions like single keyword per page or multi-keyword per page or which relevant keyword search users will think first. We quickly realized that one must make several strategic decisions along the pathway of the website SEO process. We applied collective decision making after consideration of all contexts. We sometimes agreed, few times agreed to disagree, but all times agreed to the conclusion. When we started, our SERP ranking was at the bottom of the 120th page in google search and we could see us forging forward every week as we began making changes in tune with our learnings on SEO strategy. The motivation of small success made us finish the google webmaster guidelines from the first word to the last without missing any side links and when we finished, we were more than ordinarily confident that we have at least done everything right as per the author. We did a similar exercise for Bing as well quickly in the next few days. It was 90 days of learning something from scratch and we moved to the third page in SERP by that time. We had a unique website design wherein our home page was the visualisation of our module icons with links without any wordings at all. Google loves unique websites and we consider our site as unique, quite unusual to other product websites. We then realized that we must have wordings to represent our home page for Keyword tagging and with a single line wording and tag line, we hit our last nail to finish it in style. The D-day was the sweet 100th day, and we noticed that we are at a numero uno spot in SERP in google occupying the very first position in about 35 developed countries starting from the United States and ending in New Zealand for “cloud retail ERP” keyword. The simple learning was that follow the author’s instructions meticulously to get the best results. I will fail in my duty if I do not mention three colleagues who contributed the maximum to this project namely Santosh Kumar Chakilam, Sudhakar Emani, and Neha Velshetty. Kudos to my colleagues who scored 100 out of 100 in 100 days. They are on to their next mission to maintain SERP rankings and that discovery will give us more knowledge to pen sometime in the future. Until then, please try and make your website wine & dine on the first page of Google SERP. Written by (Ragu)nathan Kannan
