While we’re always busy working on getting your site to rank higher, there are many small off-page tasks you can do to help us out. Here are just a few for your consideration.
Domain Expiration Date
Google rewards sites with domains that have expiration dates further in the future. So it’s actually a good idea to renew your domain for five or so years instead of every year. Having a domain that expires five years from now tells Google you’re not a fly-by-night and you plan to stick around a while.
At $12-15 per year, this is a very small investment to make. Do this with your domain registrar.
Private Domain Registration
Google prefers that you register your domain using public registration and not private, as just about every domain registrar will try to sell you. It likes to match the WHOIS registrant address/ in your domain record with the address on the contact page of your site. Bonus points for that!
However, there is a huge downside to public registration. You may get spam emails, direct mail, and calls from people who want to build and optimize your website.
Domain Length
One vendor did a study on domain length and found that 17 characters was the average length for a site ranking #1. The study could be biased because older sites will have shorter domains, and older sties have the domain age benefit. As long as your domain is under 31 characters, you should be good to go.
Non-Domain Factors
Google is all about good reputation. A couple of other factors that can help your site rank higher in search results are related to reputation-building.
Bookmarks
When visitors bookmark your page, they tell Google that they like your page and want to come back often. There’s speculation that Google considers bookmarked sites as a ranking factor.
Your action item is to ask clients to bookmark your site. They are more likely to if you have a client login button on your site, a great resources page (and especially one that helps them track their tax refund), or something else that they could use over and over again.
Legal Documents
When your site includes a terms-of-service agreement, a privacy policy, a refund policy, a cookies policy, a legal disclaimer, and other legal documents, Google knows you’ve done your homework and that you have information valuable to let your clients know where you stand.
We can help you a bit with a cookies policy, but since the rest are legal documents, we can’t provide legal advice. If you have these, please forward them and we’ll post them to your site.
Try all or any of these ideas to help us help you rank your site higher.