Its difficult to get PDF’s to rank on page 1 of Google
PDF’s are not mobile friendly and quite difficult to navigate!
However here are some tips with the help of some experts that may assist in optimising your way to the the top
Some of these suggestions also apply for ordinary webpages, but mind that you might need the pro version of Adobe for some steps.
- Write good content: That’s the backbone of SEO, and it doesn’t change for different formats.
- Add an optimised title: Like web pages, PDFs have titles too. Search engines use the title to describe the document in the search. And if there’s no title, they rely on the file name.
- Add an optimised description: This is not a ranking factor, but enables you to control the text that appears in search results.
- Use a relevant file name: The file name will be part of the URL and, therefore, it’s a small ranking factor.
- Include image alt attributes: This helps search engines to understand the content of your images.
- Use headings: Headings make your document more readable and enhance the user experience.
- Include links: Internal and external links are ranking factors, exactly like webpages.
Tracking PDF views
There are several ways to track the views your PDFs are getting. Some easy solutions are:
- Event tracking: You can track clicks on your PDF and send them to your analytics system following these instructions.
- Embeds: You can embed your PDF into a page using Javascript or an iframe to track the views of the page itself.
- Server logs: Since PDFs are stored on a server, any access request for the files will be recorded in your log files.
Ranking PDFs might not be easy, but this guide should help point you in the right direction.
