Guide To Rank High On Google. Google ranking is an important factor that determines your business success. This is because the user is more likely to click the results on the first Google search page than check the second-page results.
This is why almost every online business, big or small, wants to rank itself on the top. But owing to the extremely high competition, it can be a crazy journey and might even seem impossible. While searching for ways to achieve this target, you might come across websites offering various promising shortcut tricks and tips to gain top Google ranking quickly. But let us tell you the secret—there is no magic button that you can press to get to the final destination quickly & easily and without fail.
The way to Google’s #1 ranking can be long and requires four key things—persistence, resourcefulness, creativity and dedication. These four factors stand even more relevant because of Google’s ever-changing algorithm that constantly strives to provide its users with a friendly & engaging experience.
A systematic way can help you achieve your goals in a well-defined manner. In this blog post, we’re going to take you through a step-by-step guide that can help you achieve your goal efficiently. No matter what changes Google introduces, these steps will act as your go-to guide every time.
While you must be looking for direct SEO tricks here, like inserting keywords, they can only serve your purpose for a short time. As the Google algorithm changes, the relevancy of an SEO trick, too, reduces or becomes zero.
Just like it’s important to know the alphabets before you can begin writing complete words, it’s important to know the Google algorithm before you can begin with the SEO so that you can adapt it to the latest updates & changes.
Google’s top executives like John Mueller and Gary Illyes confirmed that it keeps on changing & improving its algorithm, and not all of these changes are announced publicly. Keeping up with these changes helps you understand how to rank without shortcut penalties or black hat SEO. It also brings meaningful leads and is successful in the longer run.
Some major updates by Google in recent times were Mobile-first and Mobile-Friendly updates to improve the experience of smartphone users, Pigeon for Google maps, Panda, Google EMDs to identify exact same domains, etc. To keep a track of updates, you can Google Search Central or MOZ’s Google Algorithm Update History.
Step 2: Determine Your Current Ranking
You need to determine where you stand right now to measure the distance you need to travel to reach the top. For this, you can use specific SEO tools. You need these tools to check your website’s:
Rank in terms of keywords:This will help you gather meaningful data like high-ranking keywords and webpages.
Speed: If your website is slow, Google will not show it in top suggestions, no matter how optimized it is. Even the multinational retail giant Walmart experienced a massive decline in conversions when its loading time increased by 3 seconds.
Health: You need to check the overall health of your website to understand the real challenge or issue. Certain SEO tools provide comprehensive information regarding general site problems, DNS, mail/web server, and blacklisting.
Next, you must identify other factors on your website that require improvement. Below are some of the most important ones that you need to consider:
Organic Traffic: You need to determine the channel through which most of your organic traffic comes. For some businesses, it could be through Google searches, while for others it could be social media or even emails. You can do this with the help of Google Analytics.
Conversion of Organic Traffic: Additionally, you should identify keywords that generate website traffic. Tools like SERP Scan will show a 12-month report of the keywords that generated organic website traffic.
Transactional Keywords: These are keywords that generate revenue for your website by bringing not just website visitors, but buyers who are more likely to make a purchase. For instance, instead of using a keyword like “How to reduce acne”, you could use “best acne products”; visitors from the first keyword are looking for information while the others are searching for products to buy.
SEO Dashboard:Once you have these metrics, you can add them to your SEO dashboards that can be accessed anytime. You can create your own dashboard with Google Analytics.
Step 4: Make Your Website Mobile Friendly
Reports suggest that more than 50% of total traffic on websites is from mobile devices. Thus, it’s inevitable to make your website friendly for mobile use. Thus, Google introduced its Mobile-First update in the year 2017 that stated: “Starting today, pages, where content is not easily accessible to a user on the transition from the mobile search results, may not rank as high”. In 2020, it then introduced Mobile-First Indexing that ranks your website on the basis of mobile-friendly navigation. You can take Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to see how your website is doing.
Below are some tips to make your website mobile-friendly:
Keep your website updated to the latest version of your CMS platform to take benefits of all the features.
Make the form fields and CTAs large so that they are easy to tap.
Don’t use too many pop-ups or pop-ups that are difficult to close. This hampers the use of your website and can cause a decline in traffic.
Step 5: Detect and Fix Google Penalties, If Any
Now that you have determined your search ranking and established tracking for the important metrics, it’s time to analyze your website thoroughly and detect penalties, if any. This is a very important step, as no matter how relevant your keywords or content is, if Google has imposed a penalty on your website, it will not rank.
Below are a few things for which Google generally imposes penalty:
Bad Link Building:Many websites ranked with spam links in the past, but no more. Now, bad links have the potential to hurt your website ranking. You need to eliminate irrelevant or unhealthy links. You can use tools to identify the kinds of backlinks currently available on your website and remove harmful links if any.
Link Profile Clean Up:There might be other websites using your profile link on their webpages. If these websites are not good, they can have a direct impact on your profile as well. You can remove such links manually, with Google disavow, or by diversifying Anchor text distribution.
Step 6: Boost Ranking with On-Page SEO
On-page SEO plays an important part in your Google ranking. Once you’ve got rid of Google penalties, you need to make sure that your target audience easily finds your website in their searches by improving your on-page SEO. Here’s how you can optimize your on-page content to gain meaningful leads:
Keyword Research:It provides you with first-hand information about the target audience. You get to know what they search for the most, which keywords have low competition yet are more likely to gain your potential customers’ attention & so on. It helps you determine your buyer’s persona, and their life cycle so that you can identify what motivates them & create targeted content.
You can also see what your competitors are doing & which keywords they are using to rank. This can help you determine your keywords as well. If you’re able to identify & use relevant keywords, it can bring meaningful traffic to your website and improve ROI.
You can add keywords on your webpages, blogs, CTAs, infographics, webinars, demos, ebooks, checklists, podcasts, and any other forms of content.
Optimize Title Tags:You need to make sure that your title tags are unique & descriptive and include the main keywords. Avoid using the same title tag for all pages; create unique title tags for each of your website pages so that you are able to capture different audiences.
Schema Markups:These are labels that provide Google with additional information about your content. It makes the subject text stand out & adds more significance to it. This also makes the SERP result more organized & aesthetically appealing to users.
Sitemap:You must have a sitemap for your website that allows Google bots to crawl smoothly through your content and make your website readily available
Step 7: Link Building The Right Way
Once you’ve removed all the spam links, it’s time to build relevant links. You can do so by
Anchor Text Linking:Provide anchor links on particular keywords and back up those links with keyword-specific anchor text. Do not only use highly targeted keywords but also balance those with generic ones.
Internal Linking: Provide links to internal pages where seems relevant, with optimized anchor text.
Editorial Links:Create meaningful content that serves the user to share it on social media. This expands your reach as users then can share it further and bring more traffic to your website, eventually.
Conclusion
While the world of SEO is limitless, your every effort will be futile if you do not get your basics right. Hope this read was helpful for you to get started. Stay tuned for more such informational posts and grow your business online.
