Who wouldn’t want to be at the top of the most popular search engine? Ranking higher on Google not only increases website traffic, your internet presence, and the trustworthiness of your company; it also plain feels good.
The fact is that “ranking higher” is a relative concept. You can be a new site or a rookie in SEO who wants to rank your blog article higher than page six, or you might want to climb from the sixth slot on page one to the top spot. So I’m going to provide 17 ways to rank higher on Google in this piece, divided into three levels, from the more simple techniques to the more complex ones.
How to Dominate Google
For those of you who might not be as familiar with the field of SEO, this part primarily consists of the fundamentals of SEO. If you want to rank, be sure to check these options.
1. Choose Sensible Keywords
You must first and foremost be aware of the keywords you want to rank for. Of course, you want to appear in search results for keywords used by your target clients. These are keywords, and to determine which of these are feasible for you to rank for, you’ll require keyword research tools.
The following variables come into play while choosing the ideal keywords to aim for in order to rank on Google:
- Volume: The number of times the term is searched each month. How difficult it is to rank for that keyword in terms of competition.
- Domain Authority: The strength of your domain How simple it will be for you to rank for keywords depends on domain authority. It will be simpler if your website has been around for some time and you have been producing high-quality material during that time.
- Relevance: It makes no sense to rank for a term that won’t drive relevant visitors to your website.
Pro Tip
Start with low volume, low competition keywords to obtain traction when developing your SEO strategy in the beginning and gradually build up from there. Depending on your industry, “low” will mean different things, but starting with keywords in the 90–400 range might be a good idea.
2. Verify the Keyword Intent
Informational, commercial, transactional, and navigational keyword intent are the four main categories. Now, when it comes to SEO, informational intent keywords are your main concern. However, you need to delve further into the specific information that the person searching for that term is looking for, even inside your informational intent keywords.
I was looking for a keyword to target with some screenshots I have of great websites and features, for instance. When I discovered that the keyword website ideas had a search volume of 2900, I thought it was ideal. But when I searched for it on Google, I discovered that the results were more likely to be for side hustlers looking for their next company idea or novice engineers looking for their next project.
It won’t rank if I use screenshots of my website to target that keyword. However, if I search for “website design ideas,” that’s a different matter.
3. Compose Lengthy Content
How do you achieve a high Google ranking? long-form, in-depth information about the keyword you’re aiming for. The best example of this is with blog entries, but landing pages can also benefit from this.
For instance, our landing page for the free Website Grader appears on page one for the keyword “website grader.” It could appear to have little content at first sight. However, if you scroll down below the fold, you’ll uncover a gold mine of text in the form of FAQs.
Pro Tip
Keep in mind that I said lengthy, in-depth content. Go straight for the peanut butter and avoid the filler because Google dislikes thin content.
4. Implement On-Page SEO
The key to getting a high Google ranking is this. Here is a quick list for you:
- Place your keyword organically in the body of your page as well as in the meta title, meta description, at least two H2s, image file names, image alt text, and the URL.
- Add links from at least three additional pages on your website to the page you are linking to internally.
- External linking: Place 1-3 links to reliable, pertinent pages on your page.
- Keep your meta description between 155 and 165 characters, and emphasize the benefits that readers will receive from clicking on your link.
How to Improve Your Google Ranking
That’s how you score highly on Google, then, okay. But perhaps you’ve already taken all of those actions. Perhaps you already have a decent ranking and wish to improve it. Keep reading if it describes you.
5. Concentrate on Long-Tail, Ambiguous Keywords
Long-tail question keywords are an added bonus because they offer chances to appear higher than the top results for broader, extremely high-volume keywords—through the People Also Ask section—and are typically the keywords that hit the sweet spot in terms of volume and competition.
For instance, the term “social media marketing” received 32K (yow) searches. The top two results are WordStream at number one and Sprout Social at number two. The PAA segment, however, sits smack dab in the midst of those two results. Any page that answers one of those queries after a reader expands it will now be ranked higher than Google’s #2 result.
You simply never know what long-tail search terms Google will return in PAA, giving your content a chance to rank better than the #2 results for a competitive keyword.
Pro Tip
Don’t target PAA inquiries with the intention of improving your Google ranking. Target long-tail question terms instead with the primary objective of ranking for those terms and the secondary objective of gaining some additional ranking through PAA.
6. Make Your Content Skimmable
Google is increasingly emphasizing offering solutions rather than just a list of pages. Thus, “zero-click search,” where a user can find the information they’re looking for directly on the results page without having to click into any individual result. Being the source from which Google constructs an answer is the next best thing—and your way to rank higher—but if you can’t beat ’em (Google is like Goliath on ‘roids’), join ’em. This isn’t fantastic for those of us who want to boost website traffic.
Make your material easy to skim as this is the greatest method to optimize for it. By doing this, Google will be able to pull portions of your material to create results that are more like answers, such as the Featured Snippet, Passage Ranking, and even meta descriptions. This is how:
Utilize the header tags. You can accomplish this with every website builder/CMS. Make sure they are included in h2> and h3> tags rather than simply raising text size and weight to create headers. For instance, in our blog post on “How to Brand Your Business,” the obvious H2 heading “How to brand your business” is followed by H3s for each of the phases.
Set up clear headings. Sadly, SEO can occasionally stifle your originality. A reader should be able to quickly find the answers they need by skimming your article’s headlines. As you can see in the image below, Google created a meta description based on the H3s rather than the one we provided for the previous post.
7. Make Clear Declarations
Not the vulgar sort, please. What I’m trying to say is that even if you have a multi-part answer, if you’re specifically targeting question keywords, make sure you have an explicit statement that both answers the question and restates it.
Here is the SERP for “how long should a blog post be in 2022.” The ideal blog length for SEO in 2022 is likely 1,760–2,400 words, according to Hook Agency, but Wix, the second-placed result, provides a response without explicitly reiterating the query.
And for “how-to” keywords, you can end the article with a sentence like, “So to recap, here’s how to [do X]:” and then list the techniques or suggestions from the piece. Before delving more into each topic, you could perhaps start the post with an overview section that provides a bird’s-eye view.
8. Incorporate Relevant Images
There are several ways that adding images to your page might improve its ranking. In addition to making for more interesting content that keeps visitors on the page longer, this also increases the likelihood that your photographs will rank in image search results, which are increasingly becoming a part of regular search results.
Stock photos and blank graphics will not work for blog entries that you want to rank higher though. Images that clarify ideas, add value, and align with the keyword’s goal are necessary.
For instance, you can see that Google prefers screenshots of January social media posts and event landing pages in the SERP for “january marketing ideas” in addition to the fact that it is quite visually appealing.
In order to meet searchers’ expectations, Google the keyword before writing content about it to get a sense of how essential visuals are as well as which visuals are coming up.
Pro Tip
And if you notice that title card images are appearing, as in the example above, then create one!
Now, if your blog template already generates a header image (as WordStream’s does), relocate it to the conclusion of the post because doing so would be unnecessary. Alternatively, check to see if you can post a social image using your SEO plugin (Yoast is what we use). Although the image won’t be seen in the blog post, it will still be linked to it and be searchable.
9. Including a Table of Contents
This is a simple addition that Google seems to particularly appreciate to your blog entries. Frequently, Google will directly insert such links into a post’s meta description.
This is how you do it:
Enter the HTML view of your post and add the following code above any H2 or H3 that you want links to:
<a id =”section-title”></a>
Keep the quotation marks, and use dashes or underscores to separate several words if necessary. Then, include your table of contents at the top of your post and include a link to #section-title for each item:
For instance, I tagged this section of this page with the following phrase:
<a id=”higher”></a>
I then linked #higher to “How to rank higher on Google” at the top.
10. Make Your Meta Titles Boring
You did read that correctly. The title that displays on the real SERP is your SEO title, often known as a meta title. Google also doesn’t give you a lot of opportunity for creativity, comparable to headers. The best strategy is frequently to choose a title that is similar to one that is currently ranking on page one.
Therefore, while you might use a more colorful H1 title (the title that displays on the page itself), keep your SEO title to 60 characters or fewer, front-load the keyword, and be aware of modifiers that seem to be in vogue, such as including the year in the title.
How to Get the Best Google Rankings
for increasing your position or for ranking even higher for extremely competitive keywords.
11. Obtain Backlinks
An external website linking to your page is known as a backlink, and it counts substantially when determining your rating. You might already be receiving backlinks if you’re producing quality content and advertising it on social media. However, you can also proactively build backlinks to particular pages.
12. Dig Through Your Search Results
You may find out which search terms cause people to view your page in search results and which ones cause them to click by using Search Console. This might assist you in discovering new headings to include on a page as well as new keywords to use for individual pages. If you’re already ranked for it by accident, you’ll definitely rank when you use that term on purpose.
The query “best advertising sentences” is one that we are receiving impressions for in the graphic below. If I discover it to be a keyword, I may want to make a blog post about it or use it as the headline for an already published post.
13. Use Videos to Target How-To and Tutorial Keywords
Video content is becoming more and more prevalent on the SERP, and in certain situations, it may be your only chance to rank higher for a given subject. For illustration, look at the SERP for “how to advertise on Facebook.” The “top” genuine organic page result is in fact the final result on the page after advertisements, People Also Ask, Facebook’s organic result, and videos.
However, if you provide video material on the subject, you may achieve the best organic result ranking (because Facebook will always be ranked higher).
14. Target Ranked Pages
In some cases, moving a post from position nine to position four can be easier than, say, moving it from page nine to page four. Additionally, the former will result in a significantly greater rise in traffic than the latter. If you have a huge website, filter your organic keywords by position using an SEO tool like Ahrefs or Semrush to check if you have any pages that suit this description. If so, see if you can reoptimize the page.
15. Examine the SERPs
Another tactic that calls for an SEO tool is this one. You should conduct a SERP analysis if you really, really, really want to rank at the top of a particular keyword to determine what would be needed and whether it is feasible. I can see that I’m competing with HubSpot, specifically a page that has 4,589 backlinks from 1,100 different domains on a website with a domain rating of 93, if I want to rank the highest in the entire country for “small business ideas.”
16. Add Schema Markups
Although Schema.org markup does not affect rankings, it might increase your exposure in search results and make them easier to click. Schema markup is a means to inform Google even more precisely what kinds of content are on your page, which may help it show up in rich results. Rich results come in a variety of formats, including articles, breadcrumbs, events, FAQs, how-tos, job posts, and more.
To determine which content on your page qualifies for Schema markup, utilize Google’s Rich Result testing tool.
17. Check Your Technical SEO
several technical SEO tasks are performed at the site level, but there are several page-level improvements you can carry out to raise your position, such as making sure your images are compressed and scaled correctly and that there are no indexation problems. Right in Search Console, you can examine a page’s Core Web Vitals, mobile usability, and more.
Additionally, be sure to perform a manual mobile usability test. To accomplish this, visit the website from a mobile device rather than merely using Google’s mobile-friendliness checker to ensure that the elements are rendering correctly. Code-crawlers sometimes fail to detect certain things.
Recap: How to Improve Your Google Ranking
The end of that. Since the days of the SERP’s original 10 blue links, much has changed. Google is putting more emphasis on visual, excerpted, fresh information to create rich SERPS that offer quick solutions. Use these strategies to achieve top rankings so you can establish authority in your niche and reach your traffic and conversion targets for your website. And to see how we might help, check out our digital marketing options.
