Tired of troubleshooting expensive SEO services that promise Google first page rankings but leave you buried in endless courses and minimal results?
This easy 7-step guide is your guaranteed shortcut to get your content ranked on Google’s first page.
- Determine How Google Sees You
Google determines the types of keywords that’ll bring the most traffic to your content based on your site’s level of authority. If your website boasts high authority, it can be advantageous to include difficult keywords that typically bring in a lot of traffic. But if your site has low SEO authority, it’s better to use keywords that might result in less traffic, but are easier to rank for weaker domains. Often, older websites have more authority and backlinks than newer sites.
- Choose Smart Keywords
In order to determine which keywords will help your site rank and accrue traffic, some keyword research is necessary. Both paid and free tools exist that help with this process, but for the sake of this guide, we’ll stick with the free options.
First, brainstorm 15-30 keywords that people may think to look up while searching for your service or product. Be sure to consider keywords that hit both buyer intent and information intent. And try to make each keyword 3 words long.
Once you’ve got your list of keywords, analyze the corresponding search volumes to narrow down your list, prioritizing the 5 best keywords.
- Determine Search Intent
After you’ve chosen your top 5 keywords, you need to consider the search intent behind each. This foresight will tell you what type of content you’ll need to create in order to rank. The easiest way to determine search intent is to simply enter your keyword into Google. Now, consider two things:
First — What are the most common results out of Google’s top 10? Are they mostly blog posts? Videos? Images?
Second — What’s the searcher’s intent? Is it informational, meaning they’re looking for a specific answer to a question? Navigational, meaning they’re trying to find a particular website? Or is their intent transactional, meaning they’re looking to make a purchase.
Typically, videos and blog posts are the most suitable format for informational intent keywords whereas landing pages or product/service pages work well for keywords with transactional intent.
- Create Content That’s Optimized for SEO
Now that you’ve got your keywords and intent, it’s time to make content that’s optimized for SEO. Some things to keep in mind:
URL — Make sure your URL utilizes keywords, but don’t make it too long.
Title — Using modifiers in your title (like best, top, cheapest, etc.) is an easy way to get extra traffic, so long as you also include your main keyword in the title as well. Sometimes you can get away with using a synonym in place of a keyword, but it’s SEO best practice to feature the keyword.
Images/Videos — Multimedia images and videos make your content look better, and they also increase the amount of time a user spends looking at your site.
- Link Up
Unless you’re a big-name website with high authority, your site will need backlinks in order to rank on Google’s first page.
Internal links navigate to other pages within your website. The benefit of these is two-fold; on one hand, internal links help your page climb up Google’s rank ladder, while at the same time they keep visitors on your website longer, which is another factor Google ranks.
External links take users to and from other sites. The more external links your site has, the stronger Google will deem its authority. Backlinks are external links that bring users to your site, and although they’re difficult to come by, they’re Google’s strongest ranking factor.
- Track Your Traffic
You’ll want to keep track of how your pages rank for their target keywords over time. Google Analytics is a great (free) tool to help with this. By monitoring your site’s stats in real-time, you’ll be able to double down on keywords that produced positive results and retire keywords that yielded neutral or negative results.
- Now That You’re on Page 1, Stay on Page 1
Alright, so your brilliant keywords and plethora of links have gotten your site to Google’s first page. But… How do you stay there?
Google has a ton of new ranking factors they’ll throw at you once you get to page 1—like click-through rate and dwell time. You can improve these by staying up-to-date on your meta descriptions, continuing to create (and internally link) new content, and keeping your page designs aesthetic.
Finding ways to improve your Google ranking can be a difficult task, which is why many companies turn to business partners like KitelyTech for help. At KitelyTech, we stay up-to-date on the latest trends and changes in the Google search algorithm so that we can help companies maximize their search engine rankings. Call us at (800) 274 2908 to get help reaching the top of your search engine results.
