Are you tired of trying out dozens of SEO strategies, buying various SEO services that promise guaranteed Google first page rankings, and endlessly studying SEO courses? Well, you are in luck – your search is over. Just follow this simple 7 step process & rank on the first page for keywords that will bring you traffic & sales.
1. Know where you Stand in Google’s eyes
Knowing how strong your website’s authority is crucial. It determines your whole SEO strategy.
Your domain’s authority in the eyes of google determines which kind of keywords will bring the most traffic to your site.
If your site has high authority, you can go after difficult keywords which usually bring in more traffic whereas if your domain is not strong SEO-wise, you should go after keywords that result in less traffic but are easier to rank for by a weak domain. Older websites usually have more authority and backlinks compared to newer websites.
A simple 3 step process to determine your domain authority
- Visit Moz.com Link explorer and create a free account.
- Enter your site Url in the explorer.
- Note down the domain authority
For a comprehensive understanding of your website’s organic performance in Google, it’s worth considering the use of a Google website rank checker. This tool enables you to evaluate your website’s visibility in search results and monitor its ranking positions effectively.
2. Keyword research smartly
Keyword research is the process of finding the right keywords which we can rank easily to get targeted traffic.
There are a ton of free and paid tools to help you with this process but for the sake of readers’ convenience, let’s see how you can do it for free:
First of all, come up with 15-20 keywords that people might search for when looking for your product or service.
Make sure you include both buyer intent and information intent keywords. Each keyword should be at least 3 words long.
For example, if I had an eCommerce store selling badminton equipment, I would come up with buyer intent keywords like:
- Cheap badminton rackets
- Badminton rackets for kids
- Plastic shuttlecocks
& some information intent keywords like:
- How to hold a badminton racket properly
- Easy badminton trick shots
- Badminton court dimensions
Now put these seed keywords into keywordshitter (Nice name, right). Hit run and let it run for around 2 minutes.
Next, go to searchvolume.io, select your target country, and put the keywords generated by Keywordshitter, in the box to get their search volume.
Export the list of keywords with search volume and open the file.
Remove all the keywords which have too high search volume ( several thousand) and too low SV (10-100). Keep trimming the list until you have a list of 20-30 keywords left.
Another alternative is Keywordtool.net which does both things (generating keywords and giving search volume).
Finally, Install the Moz bar. Put each keyword into google search and analyze the results.
If 2 or more websites that are ranking on page one have a DA lower than yours (which you determined in the first step) and less than 5 links to the pages, you have a good chance of ranking for that keyword.
Repeat this step for all 20-30 keywords to see which keywords you should target.
You should have a list of at least 5 keywords in the end.
BTW You will be surprised to learn that even zero search volume keywords can bring you a lot of traffic
3. Figure out the search intent
Once you have nailed down your top 5 keywords, you need to find out the search intent behind them. By deciphering the search intent, you will know what kind of content you need to create in order to rank.
Just put the keyword in google and hit enter.
Now we have to Figure out two things:
What kind of results are the most common out of the 10 shown by Google? Are they blog posts, videos, product pages, PDFs, images, or something else?
and what is the intent of the searcher:
- Informational intent – Someone looking for information. Example – How to email someone, what is an email.
- Navigational intent – Looking for a particular website. Example – Gmail Login, Facebook signup.
- Transactional/Buyer Intent – Looking to buy something. Example – Buying a website or a web hosting platform and getting insurance quotes.
For informational intent keywords, videos and blog posts are the most suitable format whereas for transactional intent keywords, product/service pages, landing pages work the best.
Navigational intent keywords only work for the site/company searchers are looking for.
Even if you are able to rank for “Facebook”, you won’t get much traffic if any traffic, as almost all the traffic will click on facebook.com in the search results.
4. Create SEO optimized content
Now that you have figured out what keywords to target and what kind of content to create for them, it is time to actually create it.
Most likely it’s either one of these two – A blog post or a Product/service page and for both of these content types, the same SEO optimization rules apply.
Keyword-rich URL
Your URL should always be the main keyword you are targeting and should not be too long.
For example, the keyword I am targeting is “Google first page guaranteed” therefore URL looks like attentionalways.com/google-first-page-guaranteed/, many people use the entire title in the URL.
That makes the URL too long so I suggest you don’t do that.
Main keywords in the title
Your main keywords should be in the title of your page/post.
Since Google treats synonyms similarly, you can get away with using synonyms in the title but having something totally unrelated is a bad SEO practice.
Add modifiers to the title
Modifiers like Best, top, cheapest, (current year), etc in the title help you get additional traffic without additional effort.
Many people add modifiers like these to your main keyword while searching online. This is not completely necessary to add modifiers but it is a nice and quick way to get more traffic.
Wrap title in H1
Although WordPress wraps the title in the H1 tag, by default many themes overwrite this. Check if this is the case with your site, and correct it.
Use multimedia like Images and videos
Using images and videos in your posts not only makes it look better but also increases the time a user spends on your site which is good for SEO.
Subheading in the H2 tag
All your subheadings should be in the H2 tag.
Link out to external resources
Linking out to relevant external resources helps google determine the topic of your own page better and improves user experience as well.
Image alt text
All the images you use should have an alt tag. Don’t leave it blank.
Long content (Google loves it)
Lately, Google has been preferring Longer content over shorter content. Aim for 1500 words on a page at least. And to go one step ahead, create content based on briefs from Content Harmony which shows exactly which topics to include in your content to rank better.
5. Get some links
For any type of page to get traffic, it needs to make it to the front page of google. And unless you are a huge site with tons of authority, your page will be needing backlinks (sometimes tons of links) to get to the first page.
The two types of links the page should have are:
Internal links
Internal links are links from other pages on your site. These are the easiest to get, however, many people overlook this.
An example of an internal link is this, where I am internal linking to my post about Email Outreach lessons that I learned after 5000 Link Building emails.
The benefits of using internal links are two-fold. Not only do internal links help your pages climb up google rankings, but they also keep your site visitors on your site for longer which is another Google ranking factor.
External Links
External links (links from other sites) are like votes.
The more votes you have, the higher your site ranks on google. Backlinks continue to be the strongest ranking factor in Google. But they are hard to come by on their own.
You need to make a link building strategy for your site and execute it to earn links.
If you want to get started with link building, I would suggest starting with Link exchanges and link swaps with other site owners. When done in moderation, it can help you get great results.
6. Track its Google ranking and traffic
The next step is to start keeping a track of where your pages are ranking for their target keywords so that you can get real-time feedback on your link building efforts.
As you build links, optimize the content, increase your site speed or make any other changes to your site, the pages will either move up or stay in the same position thereby providing you with insights as to which activities are helping you the most SEO wise.
By using the change in ranking positions as feedback, you can double down on activities that result in an increase in rankings and cut back on activities that give no or negative results.
You can use Serptoday’s free plan to start tracking your rankings. Serptoday is especially useful to bloggers who are just starting out and don’t have much money.
7. Optimize the page after it gets to Page One
After your page gets to page 1 for the target keyword, new ranking factors like Click-through rate, dwell time, etc will kick in.
To keep your page on page 1 you not only have to keep building links, but you also have to do the following:
Optimize the title tag and meta description for the most clicks from Google
These 2 things are what a searcher sees before they decide to visit your page.
Optimizing the Title and meta tag is similar to dressing up for an event. People judge you by how you look before they decide to talk to you (in our case, visit our page)
Here is an example of how CTR affects ranking:
Suppose you are in position 6 and you update your Title and meta description which is more compelling than the websites ranking above you.
When Google sees more people are clicking on a page ranking at position 6 than higher-ranking pages, it will promote your page higher.
Improve Dwell time
Dwell time is the time difference between when a user clicks on a search result and when they come back from the website to the search results.
The longer they stay on their website, the better it is as Google sees a longer dwell time as a signal for a good user experience.
Here are 4 ways you can improve dwell time:
Keep updating the content of the pages
By updating the page with up-to-date information on a regular basis, users are more satisfied with your content and stay on your site longer.
Build internal links
As explained in the fifth point, building internal links helps increase the dwell time. By internal linking, you give readers something more to read about.
This especially works well when you link out to closely related articles.
Make your website faster
In July 2018, Google rolled out the “speed update” which rewarded faster sites over their slower counterparts. This is how speed impacts your rankings directly. The indirect effect is through dwell time.
If a user clicks on search results but your site takes too long to load and show the content he came to see, he is very likely to click the back button which affects your dwell time. Audit your site with this tool to see how well it performs.
Make the Content pleasant to the eyes
If the page is good-looking and well-designed, it is easier for the readers to consume whatever you have on the page.
And if they find it easy to consume the content, they are more likely to stay on the page and read it till the end.
There you have it – 7 simple steps to guaranteed ranking on google’s first page. Notice that I said simply and not easy because it is not easy to rank on google anymore. But if you work smartly, you can definitely achieve it.
It requires a lot of consistent hard work to rank on Google these days but the rewards make it all worthwhile. Here is a list of some digital marketing tools to make the process a bit easier for you!
And here are some more SEO tips to help you optimize your site further!
