How to Rank Higher On Google (Without Cheating)

Overview

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most important and high-impact marketing strategies you can pursue as a business owner. It determines how high up the list of search results your website appears when someone uses a search engine like Google to search for your services.

Why does this matter?

People search for marketing agencies, dentists, or plumbers in their city because they need one. The people searching for products or services on a search engine like Google are, very often, highly motivated buyers.

Reaching the top of Google is practically an unfair advantage over your competitors and represents the pinnacle of SEO success. It also reduces your reliance on search engine marketing platforms like Google Ads and social media platforms like Facebook, and Instagram, so your business isn't entirely dependent on paying for each click you get.

Search engine optimization can be a goldmine for your business

A recent report from Sistrix found that 28.5% of all traffic on Google goes to the first result, while second-page results get less than 1% of Google's search traffic.

There's a reason companies invest piles of money trying to get every advantage they can to improve their search engine rankings.

And with the rising advertising cost of platforms like Facebook and Instagram, savvy business owners are learning more about how search engines work and implementing successful SEO strategies to improve their rankings and diversify their web traffic.

But Google can be hard to please, even for the most seasoned website owners and SEO experts.

These SEO techniques and strategies will help you understand how search engines work, the basics of on and off page SEO, and what you can do to boost your rankings and make your business more visible.  

How to conquer search engines

The truth is, there are no shortcuts or magic potions for search engine optimization and getting your site ranked at the top of Google. On top of that, Google is constantly updating its algorithm to keep businesses on their toes.

But don't get discouraged. By taking a deliberate, informed approach to search engine optimization, you can achieve meaningful results for your business and climb to the top of Google's search engine results pages (SERP).

I'm going to cover as much territory as I can about the basics of on page and off page SEO so you can optimize for both your potential customers and make your site (and content) as Google-friendly as possible.

Let's jump in.

Step #1: Get to Know the Google Algorithm

Successful search engine optimization starts with understanding how understanding how Google ranks websites.

This is what Google's algorithm is all about.

Google's algorithm is essentially its internal rulebook for deciding where web pages should rank. Google has made many changes to the algorithm, and these changes are not always publicly announced. As a result, most people who work in search engine optimization will tell you they don't actually know what is going on with the algorithm as it has been well hidden from those outside of the company.

Here are just a few of some of Google's most substantial updates:

• October 2016: This is one of the biggest updates Google has ever released to its algorithm. Dubbed "Mobilegeddon," this update ranked sites based on their mobile compatibility and mobile content. This affected around 40% of Google's organic search results.
• May 2016: This update impacted how Google deals with slow-loading websites, providing better rankings for faster-loading sites.
• April 2016: This update was known as the "Quality Update," It appeared to affect sites that were not user-friendly or mobile-friendly. It also impacted sites that copied other sites' content and sites with duplicate or similar titles.
• February 2016: This update, known as "Possum," affected local rankings. Google started to look at the distance between a business location and the searcher's location more heavily than before, causing many businesses to see increased visibility in their local areas.
• August 2015: This update, known as "Jagger," was the first of many that had more to do with technical SEO than content or on-page optimization. Google announced that it would be looking at site speed more closely when ranking sites in SERPs. Sites with high bounce rates saw a decrease in traffic, while sites with low bounce rates increased.
• September 2014: This update is known as "Penguin." It affected sites that had low-quality content or too many links to the site.
• May 2014: This update, called "Phantom," was a huge update for local search results. It changed how Google displayed its map listings, giving each business its own map listing instead of having multiple businesses in one listing.
• April 2014: This update, called "Hummingbird," had the biggest impact on semantic search. Google started focusing more on entities than words and phrases, allowing sites to rank better based on their content rather than just keywords.
• January 2014: This update was known as "Farmer." It affected how Google finds fresh content online, especially in regards to user reviews. For example, if a site received many reviews in December but did not receive any reviews between January and November of the next year, this would likely impact its rankings.
• October 2012: This update is known as "Panda." It focuses on sites with poor quality content ranking higher than they should, thus giving search engines more accurate results.

Google's search engine updates in 2021

There have been eight confirmed Google algorithm updates in 2021 alone, so it's important to stay on top of what Google's up to. Thankfully, there are tools that provide tons of information about recent updates and how these updates could affect your site ranking. With a better understanding of how Google works, you will be able to optimize your website for better rankings on its search results page.

How to keep track of Google's algorithm updates

Keeping track of Google's updates is a competitive advantage for your business and helps you climb Google's search results. Two free resources to get you started are Google's Search Central, where Google announces its major algorithm updates, and Moz's Google Algorithm Update History, where they track Google's updates in greater detail.

Pro-tip

Instead of checking these sites every few days for updates, set up a Google news alert for "Google algorithm update" - this way, you'll receive emails if news or blog articles start appearing online about new google updates.

Click here to set up your custom Google Alert

Step #2: Check Your Site Speed and Performance

If your site is slow, you have little chance of a high search position on Google and other search engines. Plus, slow web pages negatively affect your results on all major search engines and reduce the number of customers and leads you generate online.

If the speed of your website is not up to par with Google's recommended standards (ideally under 2 seconds), then there's no point in worrying about other SEO factors such as on page and off page optimization or meta tags because they're moot points - Google won't rank your website higher than any other site that is faster than you.

Site speed and conversion rates

We've discussed above how a slow website will hurt your rankings on search engines like Google.

The other side of this is losing leads, customers, and revenue because your site didn't load quickly enough for your potential customer. This may be one of the costly consequences of poor site speed and performance.

A study conducted by Amazon found that every 100ms in added page load time cost them 1% in sales. With a slow website, all the technical search engine optimization doesn't matter - all the SEO jargon like on-page and off page SEO, meta descriptions, and title tags become irrelevant when visitors don't actually make it to your site.

Simply put, the speed of your website is one of the most important ranking factors and needs to be a priority in your on page SEO process.

How to check the health and speed of your site

Thankfully, it's fairly easy to check if your site speed needs improvement - I use the sites GTmetrix and Google's PageSpeed Insights to measure site speed and overall health.

These tools work by essentially sending web crawlers out to your site to examine your website for errors.

Checking your site speed using GTmetrix

GTmetrix is a free tool that evaluates the health and speed of your website.

Visit GTMetrix.com, type in your URL, then click test your site.

Our site registers a ranking of 99% performance grade, but anything above 70% isn't likely to negatively impact your SEO performance.

If your website is graded less than 70%, it's time to make some updates to your site.

GTmetrix also does a great job highlighting some of the most issues things that may need to be addressed as part of your on page SEO strategy.

Some common search engine optimization errors include things like:

• Missing meta tags
• Broken URLs
• Pages that are missing a title tag
• Images that are large and take too long to load

Simply scroll down to see the top issues with your site.

GTmetrix does a great job of analyzing page speed as well, so click on performance to see how long your site takes to load. The goal is to always be under 2 seconds because Google and other search engines punish sites that take longer than 2 seconds to load.

Checking site speed using Google's PageSpeed Insight

Google's PageSpeed Insight tool is also incredibly useful in understanding how Google and other search engines understand your site.

I like using GTmetrix and Google hand in hand because, while GTmetrix goes more in-depth, it's valuable to know what Google specifically determines to be the biggest issues with your site.

Visit Google's PageSpeed Insight tool by clicking here, plug in the URL of your site, and click analyze.

Step #3: Tracking your organic traffic

With these core pieces above in place, it's time to understand better your organic traffic and what you can do to get more of it.

While it's helpful to know things like how many visitors you're getting on your site, Google Analytics gives us the ability to track exactly where each visitor comes from. This helps us understand the difference between organic search traffic from Google vs. traffic from paid social media marketing, Google ads, email marketing, and referrals from external links on other sites.

We're also going to discuss Google Search Console, one of my favorite SEO tools designed specifically to help site owners improve the technical performance of their web pages on Google's search engine.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is the most widely used web analytics software on the planet, powering over 100 million websites and mobile apps. Google Analytics can help you measure things like traffic sources, page views, social media shares, conversion rates, ad performance—even how people find your site in the first place. This data not only helps you understand what’s working (and what isn’t) but also allows you to adjust tactics to improve results for future campaigns.

If you want to find out more about your visitors, Google Analytics is a great place to start.

Google Analytics allows you to track conversion rates and how people convert at different stages of your website. For example, do people spend a few minutes reading your blog or the about us section before booking a meeting or appointment with you? This type of information is useful to know.  

Once you understand where your traffic comes from and what users are doing once they get to your site, you can start making informed decisions about improving your site. For example, if the average time spent on your about us section is 2 minutes long, but your average blog post reader is gone in less than a minute, you might consider spicing up your blog content to make it more engaging. We'll discuss how to create engaging blog content later on in this article.

Here is a step by step guide for getting started with Google Analytics

Unique visitors

How many people visit your site each day? Look for this listed under "daily unique visitors" in Google Analytics. You can also gauge success by tracking how many visitors return to your site within the same month. These reports are listed under "Returning Visitors."

Understanding how bounce rate affects search engine optimization

Bounce rate is a metric that measures the percentage of visitors to your website who leave your website without clicking on any pages or staying for more than 10 seconds. To improve your Google rankings in 2021, you need to optimize your site to encourage users to visit other parts of your site.

It’s important to remember that bounce rates are highly dependent on user behavior and response time due to various factors like whether they like what they see on your site, how comfortable they feel browsing through the content on your site, etc. User expectations also play a role in determining bouncing rates because people typically want to get in and out of a site in the least amount of time possible.

Additionally, if your bounce rates are too high when compared to other sites in your industry, you might end up suffering the effects of Google’s Panda algorithm update, which we discussed above. According to Google, "bounce rate is one signal we use for ranking search results."

Ultimately, the more relevant content you have on your site, the more likely your visitors will stick around and explore your site. But we'll dive more into creating content later in this article.

What is Google Search Console?

Google Search Console is a web application that allows you to take a deep dive into your performance on Google's search engine and understand how Google views your site.

What's unique about Google's Search Console is its ability to find out exactly what issues or errors are causing problems with your search engine rankings. For example, if you publish a new article on your blog, Google Search Console might find errors that aren't showing up in Google Analytics. It's a great way to find the specific issues that are causing you problems in organic rankings.

By getting the inside scoop from Google about your site's SEO performance, so you can identify and fix issues before they have a significant impact on your rankings.

Get started with your Google Search Console account by clicking here

Step #4: Optimizing for mobile search

More than ever, people are relying on their mobile device to find the content they're looking for.

In fact, Google has said explicitly stated that from now on, each of its search engine algorithms updates will be based on "mobile-first indexing." This is a fancy way of saying that Google is judging websites by their performance on mobile devices.

This means that designing and building mobile pages for your site needs to be an essential part of your on page SEO strategy.

What is responsive web design, and why should you care?

Responsive web design is a technique used to create websites that work well on every device. A website that is not responsive will look different on a desktop, tablet, and mobile phone. This can be problematic for users who are accessing your site on a variety of devices.

How to check if your site is mobile-friendly

Once again, Google has a handy free tool that crawls your entire site and grades its mobile performance.

Visit Google's Mobile-Friendly Test by clicking here, then plug in your URL and see how Google ranks your website.

The vast majority of website builders (such as WordPress and Squarespace) have responsive web design built-in to their templates, which means that if you used a template to build your site, you're probably in good shape. But don't skip this step: every site has room for improvement, and improving the look and responsiveness of your site needs to be an important part of your SEO efforts.

Bonus: accelerated mobile pages (AMP)

The fastest way to load a mobile-optimized version of your page is with Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP for short. You've probably seen these as new articles at the top of Google's search results.

While you can create these for your own site, I wouldn't get too stressed about getting these made.

Step #5: Connecting to local search to power up your search engine rankings

Google My Business

Google My Business is how you manage your business's public profile. It gives you control over how you present your business online so that people can find, connect with, and get directions to your business easily.

Why Google My Business is important

80% of local searches convert. This means that when someone searches for something like "dentist near me," 80% of the time, they go to the dentist.

Moreover, nearly half of all Google searches are for local businesses.

Simply put, strong local rankings on search engines like Google means your business is showing up in front of people who are ready to buy.

It shouldn't come as a surprise then that Google's search engine algorithm considers Google My Business profiles when determining its rankings.

How Google chooses to rank sites in its search results is becoming more and more intertwined with local results.

If you haven't created or claimed your Google My Business Profile yet, get started by clicking here.

Step #6: Nailing your keyword research

Keyword research is essentially figuring out which keywords and search queries people are using online.

This really gets at the core of search engine optimization because, at the end of the day, search engines discover answers - their primary function is to find the websites that give people what they're looking for.

Finding your keywords

So how do you find out what keywords your audience is using?

The first step is to identify your target audience and why they would be interested in your page. You may know this already, or you can learn it by researching your own website or competitor sites.

To answer the question of "why," think about your company's business goals and who needs your product. Then imagine what they might be searching for online.

These thought exercises can get us going in the right direction, but they're just the tip of the iceberg.

Keyword research tools

One of the most powerful tools for keyword research is AHREFs. It's an SEO software suite that helps you find relevant keywords, research competitor websites, and understand where your web pages appear on Google's search results page.

Its keyword explorer tool lets you identify your relevant keywords, understand which websites are ranking for your target keywords, how many clicks they get per month, and much more.

AHREFs has a seven-day trial that will let you pull all of this information, even without signing up for a monthly contract. I strongly recommend you demo their platform.

There are other keyword research tools out there as well, such as SEMRush and SpyFu.

Compiling a list of keywords

Now that you've got some creative juices flowing and some help from a keyword research platform, it's time to create a list of your most important keywords.

For example, since my company is a digital marketing company based out of Seattle, I might want our keyword list to include things like "lead generation," "SEO experts," and "digital marketing" in the Seattle area.

Come up with 20-30 different keywords related to your business that want to appear on Google's search engine results page.

Any paid platform you're using for keyword research will save your lists for you and help you track your search rankings, but feel free to keep this data on Google Sheets or Excel.

Step #7: Creating high-quality content that search engines love

Now that you have your list of keywords, it's time to come up with some search queries. Search queries are what people are actually typing into Google when they search.

Remember, people use search engines because they are looking for answers - understanding your keywords and what people are searching for will help you create the content that people actually want to see.

By answering the questions that people are asking, your website becomes more and more likely to climb Google's search rankings.

How to use Answer the Public

Answer the Public is a handy tool for learning the questions that people are asking online.

Visit Answer the Public, plug in your keyword and country and click search to find some of the most popular questions related to your keyword. In this example, we chose paid advertising.

Writing high-value content for your website

Based on our keyword research and insight from Answer the Public, we can brainstorm some ideas for high-value content.

In our example of paid advertising, we might consider writing articles such as "what is paid advertising?" or "is paid advertising worth it?"

Start jotting down ideas and brainstorming topics based on your own research. Also, visit other websites in your industry, especially ones that show up as top search results.

By understanding what makes other websites successful, you can dial in your page's content with everything the search engines are looking for.

Remember: you need to create unique, original content. Google isn't looking for duplicate websites and will punish website owners who copy content removing their websites from the search results.

Some tips for writing your first blog post

• Be interesting and useful to the reader (i.e., useful information such as helpful tips, how-tos, reviews, etc.)
• Include keywords and phrases relevant to your industry so they can be found by people looking for information on those topics
• Be unique and free of duplicate content from other websites
• Include a header tag telling Google what the topic of your page is so it can include it in its indexing and help you rank higher
• Make sure your page's content is responsive (easy to read and navigate on desktop and mobile)

Pro tip

Search engine optimization is about more than just keywords. It’s about creating a site that people will want to visit, not only on the first page of Google search results but also within social media feeds and other places where they're finding information. That means it’s not enough to do keyword research so you can pepper your content with phrases like “Seattle SEO Expert Services” or “Best Seattle SEO Company.” Instead, you need to create engaging content that connects with readers by addressing their needs.

Internal linking

Internal links are used to link to related content on your website. So, for example, if you're a dentist and your article is about how to have whiter teeth, you can include links in your article to other informative articles you've written. This can improve your Google rankings by making your site more interactive and easier to navigate.

The URLs you’ve included in your article will not only help the reader find information that interests them but also improves Google’s understanding of what is contained on that particular web page and, thus, improves your online rankings.

Step #8: Link building (the dos don'ts)

What is link building?

Link building is the process of collecting referring links to your website from external websites. It's also one of the major off page ranking factors for Google's search engine algorithm.

When a page or website has many links pointing to it, Google recognizes that it's an authoritative page about a particular topic and boosts its ranking in its search results.

At the end of the day, the more confident Google is that you know what you're talking about, the more likely they are to rank your website and put you in front of more people.

Not all links are created equal

As you can imagine, Google doesn't treat every link the same. A referral to your website from a website with millions of daily visitors will come with a lot more clout than sites that see little to no traffic. This is why people pay for placements and features on popular blogs and news sites.

But some website owners make the mistake of buying low-quality links by the hundreds in hopes that that will boost their Google rankings. Don't fall for this trap: Google got wise to this game many years ago, and you're likely to get your site wiped off of Google completely if you start trying to game the system.

How to build backlinks the right way

To create a successful link-building strategy, you need to focus on quality, not quantity.

The first step is finding the right partner sites with an audience that matches your target market.

The second step is creating content for those partner sites like articles or videos about topics related to your business and linking back to your website in the process.

This type of search engine optimization can be time-consuming. Still, it's also one of the most effective ways to build backlinks because you're focusing on providing value rather than asking for favors (i.e., pay-for-placement).

You will likely come across popular websites that might try to charge a placement fee to link your article and website to theirs. While Google doesn't support this type of arrangement, it has become fairly commonplace.

Tracking your backlinks

AHREFs comes with a useful backlinks tool that shows you all of the sites that link to yours. This is a great way to track your progress and scope out potential backlinks for your business.

This business has Seattle's top spot for the search term "dentist in Seattle." Just imagine how much money they bring in each year just by appearing at the top of Google!

AHREFs allows us to take a look at how many links they have, what the links are, and give us some insight into how they've achieved Google's top spot.

Conclusion

If you are looking to improve your online rankings, it's important to take a strategic approach. You can't just focus on keywords or pay-for-placement alone; instead, you need a holistic approach that looks at the entirety of your web presence and creates engaging content that connects with readers by addressing their needs.

The steps I've outlined should help get you started thinking about how you can optimize your website and content to boost your Google rankings.

If all this sounds intimidating, or if you want some guidance on how to implement these principles into your own digital marketing strategy, click here to schedule your free strategy call with me.

If you don't feel more confident about your marketing after our call, I'll send you a $50 gift card for wasting your time.

- Connor Goulding-Miles, Founder | Goldsmith Marketing