3 steps to dramatically improve your Google ranking
An easy to follow guide without the technical lingo
Google receives over 63,000 searches per second.
‘Per second.’ Wow.
Ranking on the first page of Google is therefore vital to your business.
I’ve written the following 3 steps in an easy to understand format, without the technical lingo.
These methods are proven to help you optimise your website and improve its ranking on the worlds leading search engine.
Step 1: Analyse keywords
The strategy
The first thing you’ll want to do is decide what keywords to optimise your website for.
You’re aiming for keyword phrases that are highly relevant to your business, have high search volume and low competition.
Spend a good few hours researching the best keywords to optimise your website for, look at your competition, their blogs and what they’re regularly talking about on social media. These should be your key topics.
Don’t be naive
Make sure you’re not giving yourself an impossible mission — You will stand much more of a chance of a #1 Google ranking for long-form, compared with short-form keyword phrases.
For example: Optimise for ‘cheap landscape gardener in essex’ rather than ‘landscape gardener’. This is too competitive and will likely take you years to achieve results, if any.
Recommended tools
Here are some free keyword analysis tools to identify the most profitable keywords for your business.
Google keyword tool (part of the Google Ads account)
Google suggest box (found at the bottom of Google searches)
Step 2: Create page
Once you have decided on your keywords, it’s time to create your pages.
Attractive design
User experience and ‘time spent on page’ are factors that Google are now considering when ranking your site.Look at your competitors websites and other websites which rank highly on Google for the same keyword phrase as yours, and use the ‘copy-cat and improve’ technique to create a top performing web page.
Keywords, keywords, keywords
You’ll want to add your keywords to the following areas:
Sub folder and page names
Meta title and meta description tags
Headings and sub headings
Copy to include your keywords in 10 to 15% ratio of page
Image names
Image alt tags
Internal text links
External text links
Technical factors
I know I said I wouldn’t go deep in to technical detail, so I’ll keep this simple —
Back-end code — remove any scripts no longer in use
Responsive — Ensure your site is optimised for mobile and tablet devices
Website load speed — reduce image sizes
Security — host your domain as https rather than http
Think user experience — browse from page to page with ease
Recommended tools
Here are a some free tools that can help with highlighting any technical issues you may have on your website:
Step 3: Build links
So, keyword research complete and web page created.
Now, this next step is the most important.
Unfortunately, you’re not going to achieve high Google rankings on your own.
You need advocates.
To stand out from the crowd (and when I say crowd I mean over 2 billion websites globally), you will need to let Google know that your site is of high quality.
To do this you need to get votes.
Votes come in the form of links from other relevant and high quality websites.
This simple formula is: the more links (from quality sites, not spammy sites) the higher your chance of a page one ranking for a particular keyword search phrase on Google.
The strategy
The trick here is to research your competitors websites to find which websites are linking to them. Because there’s a very good chance they will also link back to your site.
This is the copy-cat method. But your aim is to copy and improve, to trump your competition.
Seek out potential backlink opportunities and then email the website owner, politely asking if they could link to your latest blog, article or landing page (it must have value to them).
Recommended tools
Here are some free tools to help you research your competitors websites to find backlink opportunities:
Final note — it’s completely down to you
To recap:
1. Analyse keywords
2. Create page
3. Build links
Applying these 3 vital steps will undoubtedly improve your rankings on Google. These methods have been proven for many businesses.
How successful you will be depends on your drive and determination to trump your competition.
It is a long-term process, you won’t see results over night, but with the desire and by simply taking action, you’ll start to see some big improvements within the first few months.
All the best and good luck,
Gary B