How to rank on the first page of Google?

Ranking on the first page of Google is tough, but you can achieve it by following the proven SEO practices consistently and diligently. Even if you have just created a website, these tips can increase your chances of ranking on the first page of Google. Let’s first see why you would want to rank on the first page of the search engine giant? Google dominates 86.6% of the global search market, followed by Bank, Yahoo and Baido. Nearly 3.5 billion searches are performed on Google every day.

With this much demand, ranking on the first page helps you dominate others. In fact, organic results on the first page of Google get 90% more traffic compared to the results on the other pages. The high number of clicks on the first page is quite obvious, as Google shows most relevant search results on top based on your search intent. Along with that, ranking on a highly controversial first page can help you go way beyond your competitors in terms of performance, traffic and profits. With that, let’s learn how to rank a website on the first page of Google.

Step One: Monitor your technical score before you try to rank your website on the first page of Google, you first need to make sure that it is indexed. You can check if your website is indexed or not by simply searching in this format site. Replace yoursite.com with the domain name of your website. If your website shows up in the search results, it has been indexed. If it doesn’t, you need to get it indexed.

You can also check if the URL is indexed or not in your Google Search Console account. Go to Index and then Pages or use the Inspect Functionality tool. The process of indexing is simple: submit your XML sitemap to Google Search Console by clicking on Sitemap under the Index section. This should nudge Google’s Web spider to start crawling your website. You can control the pages that get indexed with the help of a robots TXT file.

Step Two: Improve your onsite SEO, On-page SEO elements help Google’s algorithm understand the context of the content it contains, and it’s really hard to get on the first page of Google. If your On-page SEO is not on point, use rankwatch SEO IQ for this purpose. Here you enter your targeted keyword, landing page and location for which you wish to rank and the tool will analyse your landing page and compare it with the top ten ranking pages of your competitors and return back on 40 plus on page parameters and optimization suggestions where you should work in order to outrank those ranking competitors. Focus on On-page factors, whatever tool suggests you heading tags, ideal word count that you should be targeting, metadata, title and description, alt, text, etc.

Step Three: Add LSI keywords to your Page. LSI keywords are an advanced On-page SEO tactics and they are working great right now. So what the heck are LSI keywords? They are the words and phrases that are related to the topic of your page. For example, here are some LSI keywords for the keyword mini parts. These LSI keywords confirm to Google that your content is actually about the topic.

And as it turns out, covering an entire topic on a single page is the key for ranking on the first page of Google. Utilise Rankwatch SEO IQ feature for this purpose. Again, since it will take the top ten ranking competitors into consideration for your targeted keyword in your targeted location, this is a much better and winning approach.

Step Four: Match your content to search intent. Google uses advanced algorithms to determine the search intent.

Based on the search intent, it presents results that satisfy the underlying motivation or desire of the user. Therefore, it is an important factor for showing up on the first page of Google. Understand it with this example, the user searching for how to tie shoelaces needs a quick step by step visual guide to do it. Google’s Smart algorithm figures this out and shows a video that teaches how to tie shoe laces. It ranks other results below it as a video would best satisfy the user’s search intent.

So search intent is better understood as the why to what of a search query. To get it, put yourself in your user’s shoe and get a feel of the kind of searches they make, the sort of search suggestions they get, the results showing up for a particular query, the type of content that ranks on top. It will help you come down to the four main types of intent informational user wants to know, navigational user wants to visit, transactional user wants to buy and commercial user wants to buy from the available options. Once you understand the search intent of the queries in relation to your site and its content, you are all set to rank higher on Google. So focus on users’ intent.

Step Five: Target Long Tail Keywords, the secret of ranking on the first page of Google is to ditch the popular keywords. Yes, you heard that right. Most big marketers and SEO experts target short tail, highly competitive keywords. However, you can rank on the first page of Google for most search queries. If you target the search queries in the form of questions or sentences, these are known as long tail keywords.

In journals, they are less competitive, more targeted, intent based, and they contain short tail keywords in them. So you hit two birds with the same arrow. Suppose you are a manufacturer of apple cider vinegar and you want to rank for apple cider vinegar a very competitive keyword. You can start targeting long tail keywords related to apple cider vinegar, such as how to make apple cider vinegar. What are the uses of apple cider vinegar?

How do we prepare apple cider vinegar? Why apple cider vinegar is beneficial for health, etc. When you start ranking for these long phrases, you will easily rank for apple cider vinegar later. If you wonder how to find long tail keywords, Rankwatch has a free keyword research tool. Just enter the root keyword and it will give you a variety of keyword suggestions, including cushions.

Also, you’ll get the search volume, competition and cost per click of the respective keywords. These keyword matrices will help you in the selection of the keyword. Also, check out Rankwatch search console module and find long tail and cushion based queries your website is already ranking for. Here, use the Advanced Filtering option to identify question based queries simply by refining results where the question words like what, who, how, etc. Occur or download the complete search queries data.

And on Excel, you can add a column word Count and use this formula to calculate the word count of queries your website ranks for. And then filter down the search queries where the word count is more than three and spot all the long tail keywords.

Step Six: Publish insanely high quality content, you have probably heard that to rank in Google, you’ll need to publish high quality content. And while this is true, it’s also super hard to take action on. After all, what does high quality content actually mean?

So yeah, you do want to publish awesome stuff on your site, but it needs to be the type of high quality content that people actually share on social media and link to. That’s because as you might already know, Google’s algorithm is largely based on backlinks. The more backlinks your site has, the higher you’ll rank. And the best way to build backlink to your site is to publish high quality content that people will actually link to, also known as Linkbit. Here are a few ways to increase the odds that people link to your content become a data source.

In other words, publish something that people can cite in their blog content. Focus on long form Content I already talked about it back in the on page pointer. Well, as it turns out, longer content is also great for getting links. Well, there’s no perfect word count for blog posts. Content that’s 3000 words plus tends to do best when it comes to link building.

Also, focus on publishing visual content, stuff like infographics, maps, charts, flow charts and videos. Visual content is great for getting links.

Step Seven: Optimise for Featured Snippets. Featured Snippets are the rich content formats shown on the top of Google’s first page results. They display content from a web page to answer the search queries whenever possible. If you rank for Featured Snippets, your content will automatically rank on the first page of Google.

But you cannot mark or submit your web pages to be a Featured Snippet. Google does that itself. However, you can always optimise your website content to be suitable for being a Featured Snippet. Here are a few tips: create question answer content pieces, include relevant keywords, use headings and subheadings, write short sentences and paragraphs, be concise and clear. Use Rankwatch Suiq feature to see which serve features and type of schema your top ranking competitors are using on their landing page for your targeted keywords.

Study structured data and learn how it works. Structured data is a way of describing your site to make it easier for search engines to understand. I recently made a video on Serve features and how to rank for it, which I have linked in the description below. So do check that out to learn more.

Step Eight: Build Backlinks to your site publishing amazing content is great and all, but for your content to get links, people need to actually see it.

In other words, you can’t just take a publish and prey approach to content marketing and hope that people will link to it. That’s because your content is a drop in an ocean of blog posts, videos, Instagram stories and Facebook posts that come out every single day. In fact, WordPress reports that 70 million new posts come out every month. Now, there are a lot of techniques that you can use for link building, but I will definitely recommend focusing on these three techniques. Firstly, get links via lost links.

Use the rankwatch link centre for this purpose, you can find not just your domain’s lost links, but also your competitors lost links using this easy filter. Secondly, focus on guest posting. It is the act of writing content for another company’s website to boost your domain authority using external links pointing to your web pages from those high authority domains and thirdly, resource pages.

Resource pages are great for link building. That’s because resource pages are the pages that someone created to link to the best stuff on a given topic.

Step Nine: Build authority in a niche Google uses expertise, authority and trust as a ranking factor and prefers results from a website with high quality expert content expertise. The author has relevant experience, a skill or knowledge authority. The website has a good online reputation and influences trust.

The website provides accurate and transparent information. Suppose you’re searching for FIFA updates on Google. The top results are from the news websites and the FIFA official website. All of them have a good E.A.T value for the FIFA World Cup related information. On the other hand, if you search for Google algorithm updates, you would be getting results from authoritative sites in the SEO niche.

The reason again, is E.A.T. So if you regularly create content for a particular industry, you would build an authority in that niche and it helps your content to rank higher on Google and soon find a place on the first page. Now, you might think, how much content can one person make? The answer is guest posting. It hugely increases the chances of your website reaching the first page of Google.

Benefits of accepting guest posts for your website include getting more high quality informative content, diversifying your website’s content leveraging mutual link building opportunities and attracting more readers. Enhancing your online Footprint but this doesn’t mean you won’t publish your own high quality blogs. You must plan and prepare a content marketing strategy that helps you build authority in your industry. Publish expert content regularly to compensate for the lack of guest posts on your website. You can even have a team of in-house writers who have expertise and knowledge of your industry to write blogs.

That way, your website’s authority will increase and its chances of ranking on Google’s first page too. Track and monitor your SEO Results so at this point, you should start seeing your site ranking higher on Google than before, which is great. And you can use Rank tracking tool rankwatch offers for regularly monitoring the progress because the smart AI Lara will also keep on pointing new opportunities to you post studying your surpluscape for your targeted keywords and competitors. But how do you know if those rankings are doing any good for you? That’s what this step is all about.

In this step, I’m going to show you how you can track your results like a pro. Check organic traffic on Google Analytics rankings are great and all, but when it comes to measuring the results of SEO marketing, nothing beats organic traffic. In other words, traffic that comes directly from search engines. Check impressions and clicks on Google Search Console this is a nice complement to the Google Analytics organic traffic report we just talked about. This report and Search Console basically shows you how many people saw your site and how many of those clicked on your site.

As you might expect, the more people that see and click on your site from Google, the better. Then check on leads and sales. In other words, is this influx of traffic actually adding to the bottom line? This is the question that people gloss over, but if you want to get a huge ROI from SEO, you need to know if all these visitors are turning into customers. There are many ways to track this, but my favourite is Goals features in Google Analytics.

Find the link on the description below on how to do goal setup on analytics. I hope you have enjoyed my step by step guide to Rank higher in Google. Now I would like to hear what you have to say. Which technique from this guide are you going to try first? Do let me know in the comments below.

Thanks for watching.