When you are looking for information on how to rank on Google, you either are new to SEO or have trouble beating your competition.
Either way, it's critical to understand the best practices to rank in the top 5 spots on the first page of Google SERP.
Why top 5? Because a majority of clicks come from the top 5 results of Google SERP.
Image via Backlinko
But is it easy to rank on the top 5 spots or even on the first page of Google SERP?
Let’s find out.
When on the topic of how to rank on Google via SEO, the general opinion is that it’s a slow process that might take months to be productive. And it's partially true.
Of course, the holistic SEO approach will consume time, but there are some shortcuts that’ll help you to rank on Google. In this article, we’ll cover both strategies on how to rank on Google.
Before we move forward and discuss how to rank on Google, you need to understand how the Google search algorithm works.
Here’s how.
Disclaimer: This content contains some affiliate links for which we will earn a commission (at no additional cost to you). This is to ensure that we can keep creating free content for you.
With the amount of information available in the form of web pages on the internet, it is nearly impossible for someone to find the correct information without external help.
Search engines like Google exist to mitigate such issues. They sort through trillions of web pages to find the most relevant information for their users instantly.
That’s not all. Search engines have to rank the web pages on their results pages. And this is where the algorithm comes in.
Look at the below screenshot for an uncommon search term. Google found 7,820,000,000 results.
Image via Google
But are all of them relevant to you?
Of course not.
The top 10 or 20 results are what matter to a common searcher. This is why Google’s ranking system is a lifeline for most internet users.
But how does it work?
Google’s ranking system is made up of a series of algorithms. The search engine considers several factors before giving you the most relevant information. The factors used to rank on Google include the relevancy of web pages to the search query, source expertise, location, and user’s search settings.
The weight applied to these factors depends on the search query.
For example, the freshness of information will play a crucial role in ranking if the user's search intent is to find the latest information.
Following are the top four ranking factors that Google explicitly confirms.
After the users search on Google, the search engine analyzes trillions of web pages to find the ones that contain the information the user is looking for.
As per Google, the basic signal that a page is relevant to a user’s search intent is whether or not the web page has the same keywords. If the keyword is present in the title and headings, the information provided on the web page is more likely to be pertinent and Google is more likely to rank it higher.
Image via Google
The other ranking factors for Google are the expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness of the domain. Google’s systems are designed to identify sites that are trusted by users for similar queries.
This is where PageRank comes in. PageRank includes the factors that help Google identify whether a page is trusted. And one of these factors is how many other prominent websites link to that specific page.
When deciding the rank on search results, Google considers the “ease of use” as a factor, other things being equal. Their goal is to rank pages that are more usable.
The Google algorithm analyzes whether
In addition to the search query, users’ location, past search history, search preferences also help Google personalize the results and identify which pages to rank higher.
Search result personalization is the new norm for Google, and the search engine is getting better at it each passing day.
For example, if you’re in Ohio and search for “football,” the search engine is more likely to show you American Football in the results.
Image via Google
Whereas if you’re in Paris and search for the same keyword, you’ll get results about soccer. See for yourself.
Image via Google
Let’s discuss how to rank on Google.
It's time to show you exactly how to rank on the first page of Google with primary keywords. This process is a holistic SEO approach that ensures long-term SEO reliance and results.
So without further ado, let’s get started.
Searching for the right keyword is the first and the most crucial step in the quest to rank on Google.
In the previous section, we discussed search queries. Well, they are also known as keywords. But you don't want to rank for just any keyword.
Ideally, you should focus on keywords with the same intent as your buyers' personas. For instance, if the webpage you want to rank for is about selling products/services, you should prefer keywords that are of transactional intent.
Based on the users’ intent, keywords are categorized into four types:
SEOs utilize most of these keyword types to rank on Google and funnel maximum users to their website. However, the web page content can be different for each specific keyword type.
While starting with your website SEO, you’d want to funnel the users searching for keywords related to your products/services or content.
But how would you find the right keywords for your niche?
Here are some tips:
In addition to the tricks mentioned above, you can also use the best SEO tools, like Google’s keyword planner, Semrush, Ahrefs, Moz, etc., to find keywords in your niche.
For instance, this is how you can search for keywords for your shoe brand on Semrush:
Sign up for Semrush's 7-day free trial and start with a basic search that your potential customer would search for in order to buy or explore shoes – “running shoe.”
Image via Semrush
The Semrush keyword overview tool will provide you with an overview of the keyword. You can explore the monthly search volume, keyword difficulty score, top-ranking webpages for the keyword, cost per click, and many other factors that help you decide the value of the keyword.
Image via Semrush
Generally, you should aim for keywords with low difficulty scores (aka, competition) and a higher search volume.
This helps you know the value of a particular keyword that you have in your mind. What if you want to grab more keywords similar to the one you’ve searched?
Every SEO tool, including Semrush, Ahrefs, and Moz, gives you an option to search for related keywords. For example, to find relevant keywords on Semrush, just head to the ‘keyword magic tool’ within the Semrush dashboard and search for a relevant search query for your products/services.
Image via Semrush
You’ll get a list of relevant keywords. We recommend you export the list in .csv or excel format and filter out the keywords that match the search intent you want to target for your webpage to rank.
Another technique to find keywords in your niche is to analyze competitors. To start with this approach, identify competitors that are doing great with SEO and rank for the keywords you want to rank for.
Copy the URLs that rank on Google into Semrush’s Organic Research tool. Here, you’ll find the list of keywords the particular page is ranking for. You can use some or all of the keywords in your focused keyword list to rank on Google.
Image via Semrush
Now when you have the list of keywords, make sure that you don’t try to focus on too many keywords per page. May SEO experts make the mistake of focusing on more than a dozen of keywords per page to rank on Google.
However, the best foot forward is to focus on one main keyword and 3 to 4 keyword variations per page.
Now that you’ve researched the most relevant keywords in your niche and categorized them in terms of search intent, priority, and specific web pages, it’s time to build content around them.
Here is a 5-step process to create SEO-friendly content to rank on Google:
First, put your main keyword at the beginning of your title tag (H1). This technique is called frontloading your page with a keyword.
Does this work?
Although Google hasn’t explicitly commented on this, so far, we’ve seen that pages with a frontloaded keyword tend to perform better than those who aren’t.
Our primary keyword for the article you’re reading is“how to rank on Google.” You can see that the page is frontloaded with the keyword in the title.
And this is one of the reasons why we rank high on SERP.
Secondly, keep your keyword density to 1.5%.
You might’ve heard from other SEOs that the keyword density should be around 3%. But in reality, 1.5% is enough to have your page rank high on Google SERP. But only if you do it right.
Here is how to optimize keywords on your web pages.
Suppose that your keyword is “how to rank on Google.”
It would be tricky to have such a long keyword term in the content repetitively.
What you should aim for is to achieve a 1.5% density of each individual word in the keyword.
This article that you’re reading is the perfect example of keyword density in a general sense. Try to find out how we optimized the keywords in this article.
Before you ask, LSI stands for latent semantic indexing.
LSI keyword optimization is the advanced on-page SEO technique to beat the heavy competition on the SERP and rank higher.
LSI keywords are the phrases and words related to your primary keyword or the topic of your page.
Image via Google
For instance, the following are the examples of LSI keywords for the keyword “how to rank on Google:”
If you think about how we could come up with these many LSI keywords for our term “how to rank on Google,” these are just the tip of the iceberg.
Don’t fret.
We didn’t come up with these manually. Instead, we used a tool called Surfer SEO to optimize the content of this blog.
Surfer provided us with LSI keywords that confirmed to Google that this page is the answer to your query, “How to rank on Google.”
To be noted that we aren’t promoting Surfer SEO; we have used this SEO audit tool for this article.
Now it should be clear to you how to optimize LSI keywords on a web page.
The next on the list of efforts to rank on Google is the length of your webpage/blog content.
Long-form content tends to rank higher on Google. The reason behind this is that long-form content covers a topic in-depth and delivers more value to the readers.
It also helps in terms of content optimization perspective. You get the opportunities to add your main and LSI keywords to more headings and subheadings, allowing Google to see that your content is very relatable to the search query (keyword) you’re targeting.
Also, long-form content tends to generate more backlinks than short blog posts.
Image via Backlinko
Although there isn’t a straightforward formula to decide the length of webpage content, you can consider looking for the top 10 results for your target keyword and analyzing their domain authority (DA). Pick the domains that have higher DA than you and the most lengthy content. Then, aim to write lengthier content than that.
Don’t forget you’re competing with other web pages on the SERP for the same keyword.
For example, we’re writing this guide to rank on the keyword “how to rank on Google.” Here, to decide the content length, we’d analyze the SERP for the keyword to identify the domains having higher DA than us.
During our analysis, we found that Moz is the one with the highest word count, around 6K, and a higher DA than Attrock.
Image via Google
Hence, for this article, we’re aiming to write more than 6K words of content. How would we do that? Simple, by providing more information to help you rank on Google. Hope you like it!
Let’s understand this with an example.
While searching for ‘how to rank on Google’ or a similar term, what is your intent? Are you looking for an agency to help you with your SEO? No, right?
With ‘how to rank on Google,’ you’re basically looking for a step-by-step process to rank high on SERP, which means that the keyword is of the ‘informational intent.’ The content we’d build around this keyword should guide you to rank on Google. And that’s what relevance and search intent are all about.
Readability is a crucial part of user experience. If you don’t make your content easy to comprehend, your visitors will bounce despite your web page's relevancy to the search intent.
Hence, it’s imperative for you to improve the readability of your content by structuring it the right way and including visuals:
Structure Your Content to Improve Readability
You’re writing long-form content, which is often hard to read through.
So how do you make the content easy to read and engage?
Here are a few tips that will help you structure your content to improve readability, helping it rank on Google:
Your content should be scannable. The point is to ensure that the users can easily find what they’re looking for.
Use Visuals to Improve Readability
In addition to making the content look interesting, visuals also help in improving your webpage SEO. You can optimize your images to rank on Google Image Search, which generates additional organic traffic for your website.
To help your images rank on Google Image Search, use relevant keywords in your image alt text.
For most of the websites in 2023, technical SEO isn’t a significant issue. Still, if you don’t monitor it, it can be disastrous for your website's SEO.
Here is how you can easily maintain a healthy technical SEO for your website.
Google’s guidelines clearly state the significance of an optimized page experience. Hence, it’s essential for you to ensure that your web pages are compliant with this.
But how do you optimize your page experience to rank on Google?
Here is how you can do that.
First, cross-check if your web pages are 100% optimized for mobile devices.
You can use several SEO tools to test this. However, the most reliable one comes from the house of Google itself – Google Search Console.
Image via Google
Put your URL in the search box and click on “Test URL.”
The tool will analyze your page, and within a couple of minutes, you’ll get your report ready.
Image via Google
If your page is optimized for mobile devices, you’ll get a green signal. Otherwise, you can ask your developers to work on making the web pages mobile-friendly.
Second, make sure that your web page loads in a reasonable time.
Google has made it clear that Page Speed is a ranking factor when other parameters of the web pages are identical or similar.
Image via Google
Although the significance of Page Speed in SEO isn’t very high, it makes sense to get your page to load quicker to reduce bounce rate and improve user experience, ultimately improving your rank.
But how do you know the Page Speed of your web pages?
Google has a couple of tools for this too.
The search engine has provided you with tools like webpagetest.org and PageSpeed Insights so that you can make your sites more user-friendly.
They’re free and easy to use.
If you’re into SEO, you already know what an XML sitemap is and how to make the most out of it.
In case you don’t know, XML sitemaps tell Google about your website structure and convey what to index in the SERP.
An optimized sitemap should include any new content that you add to your website (blog, landing page, products, etc.) and not more than 50,000 URLs.
The XML sitemap directly affects your website coverage, which is an important indicator of your website’s technical SEO health.
Image via Google
You should use the Search Console to check your website's coverage regularly. Then, if the search engine is having trouble indexing your web pages, you’ll know it in the console itself.
If you find any error, the easiest way to fix it is to remove the URL with the issue from your sitemap and resubmit the sitemap.
Many times SEOs deal with duplicate content without even realizing it. An example is when you create two separate URLs for the same page by mistake.
It won’t make a difference for the user, but for the search engine, it can be considered a malicious activity to manipulate search rankings.
So make sure that you check all the live URLs and look for duplicacy via tools like Copyscape or Screaming Frog.
A poor website structure can result in poor UX for both Google and humans. For example, if you’ve linked a source within your content, make sure that the link works properly and directs the users to the original source.
Many times, links get broken due to several reasons, like the target domain’s webmaster changing the particular page’s URL or the page no longer being active. In such cases, it’s imperative for you to fix these outbound links.
Moreover, in addition to the outbound links, your internal links might also be broken as you have also changed the linked pages’ URLs.
You can find broken links for your domain via Semrush’s Backlink Audit Tool. Just put your domain in the Semrush and run the audit. You’ll find broken links in the Analysed Backlinks section. Just click on them, and you’ll get all the info.
Image via Semrush
Moving forward, if you have to change any URL within your domain, make sure that you redirect the older URL to the new one. This way, you can avoid internal broken links.
Building backlinks for your web pages is as crucial as creating high-quality content and optimizing your website.
Ahrefs found that 90.63% of the content on the internet gets no traffic from Google. The study reveals a positive correlation between the traffic a web page gets from google and the number of backlinks it has.
Image via Ahrefs
You cannot publish your content on your website and pray for people to find it and link to it.
Irrespective of the quality of your content, you need to give it an initial backlinking boost to start seeing rank improvement and an increase in organic as well as referral traffic.
But before you move forward, you need to understand what types of backlinks you should create and what factors affect a backlink profile?
Following are the factors that affect a link profile:
Alright, now you know what a high-quality backlink looks like. But how do you obtain them?
Following are the proven techniques for building links to a web page:
Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is one of the most promising techniques of link building that drives results. Instead of asking people to give you links or paying them to get a backlink, you can publish content on different domains to earn backlinks to your website naturally.
Image via Unbounce
However, guest blogging is only effective if you have a team of writers that can write quality content.
Here is how you can get quality backlinks via guest blogging:
Participating in Conversations and Community Forms
Forums and conversations can prove to be the most effective way of building links if you know how to do it.
This doesn’t just earn you backlinks, but you also get a lot of referral traffic through this medium.
But how to do it?
Find conversations and answers in your niche and start contributing. The best place for forums and discussions are Quora and Reddit. You can contribute your answer to the ongoing discussions or even ask questions.
Image via Quora
Your answer on such platforms should be meaningful and educate readers.
You can link to your choice of web pages within your answer. See the image above, for example.
The key to the success of a backlinking strategy via forums is continuity. Also, make sure that your subject matter experts answer the questions on these platforms.
Replicating Competitors’ Backlinks
Spying on competitors is the most common and effective link-building technique that definitely drives results.
You can make use of SEO tools like Ahrefs and Semrush to find the domains where your competitor has made backlinks.
Image via Semrush
When you analyze your competitors’ URLs that rank for your primary keywords, you’ll find a lot of domains where you can build backlinks via several content types, including guest posting, infographic submission, forums, etc.
Broken Link Building
This link-building technique is an expansion of replicating competitors’ backlinks to rank high on Google.
Here is how you can build links via broken links:
Start with running a backlink audit for one of your competitor’s sites on Semrush and tick the box near Target URL Error in the Advanced filters. This filter shows you the target pages of your competitor that weren’t crawled due to an error.
Image via Semrush
You’ll get a list of target pages of your competitors that are not crawling but have been linked as a source.
Image via Semrush
Once you have the list of such pages, contact their source domain’s web admins to inform them that they’ve linked to a target page that doesn’t work. This will give them a good reason to replace the target URL with the link you specify.
Unlinked Mentions
You might not be aware of it, but a lot of websites mention your brand but do not link to your domain. You can contact these website admins and ask them to link to your domain.
Image via Semrush
We recommend you use Brand Monitoring Tool by Semrush, which will provide you with a real-time feed of all your brand mentions on blogs, social media, and other platforms. You can dig through this information to find linking opportunities.
Build Links via Business Directories and Local Citations
Using directories link building to rank on Google is great if you’re running a business or providing local services. Although you can only get nofollow links via these websites, this strategy has a positive impact on your Google rankings.
The reason behind the effectiveness of link building via directory submission is that it gets you potential customers that are already interested in your brand.
You can use Semrush’s Listing Management Tool to build links via business directories and local citations. The tool requires you just to input your name, address, and phone number, and it’ll automatically create listings for your business.
Image via Semrush
Help a Reporter Out
HARO is an online service that provides journalists with a powerful database of sources for their work. Journalists seek experts in different domains, and it can be a great chance for you to gain backlinks by helping them with your niche expertise.
As you provide the journalists with the source of information from your domain, you have a great chance to earn backlinks.
Here is how you do it:
Expert Roundups
A roundup is simply a blog post including several experts on a particular topic. These roundups provide a great opportunity for you to get exposure for your brand and build backlinks to improve your SERP rank for target queries.
You can look for expert roundups by using Google search operators like the keyword “roundup”.
Image via Google
Once you find some opportunities to participate, contact the author and seek permission to contribute. If they accept your participation, you can write the required piece while including a link back to your website. This indeed is an easy way to get high-quality backlinks with an aim to rank on Google.
Now you probably have started seeing significant organic traffic to your web page. You rank high for your primary as well as secondary keywords, and everything looks great.
Does it end here?
Of course not. SEO is an ongoing process where you put in high efforts in the beginning and comparatively lower after the success.
SEO is a game of SERP ranking, and your competitors know that they’ve lost ranking from you.
As soon as your competitors lose their ranking, they work on their web page SEO to an advanced level to beat you.
Hence, always keep a check on your main web pages’ rankings and traffic count. And make use of Google Analytics and Google Search Console to stay in tune with your performance.
You can track the following metrics to get started:
Alright, that was all about how to rank on Google with a holistic SEO approach.
But, some SEO experts already have the foundation ready and need to improve rankings and organic traffic in a highly competitive environment; the next section is about them.
Many SEOs struggle with their web page ranking on the first or second page, but they can’t get it to the first five.
However, improving the rank for already ranking pages is easy if you know the right trick.
Let’s discuss the shortcut to rank high on Google.
First, open your Google Search Console and go to the performance tab.
In the performance tab, click on the Pages column. Select the page you want to improve your rank for, and then go back to the Queries column.
Here, you’ll find a lot of search terms your web page ranks for. Then, sort the list by rank (low to high) and extract the queries in excel.
Almost every web page rank for some odd or irrelevant search queries, so remove them from your list.
Sort the queries you want to gain your ranking for.
Second, check the keyphrase usage within the web page with Ctrl + F test.
With our years of experience using this technique, we can indeed say that you’ll find many keywords not optimized on the web page but still rank for them on the first and second page.
This brings in an exceptional opportunity to gain organic traffic by ranking for these keywords.
We call them low-hanging fruits.
Use the keywords in the web page’s headings and content.
Disclaimer: Don’t stuff keywords in. It’ll reduce your content quality and makes a lousy impression on the visitor. Also, don’t remove any content from the page. Instead, add new sections to your web page.
Third, don’t just add keywords; add value to your page.
After all, SEO is all about the readers and if you want to make your page better, make it better for them.
Following are some of the things you can add to your webpage to make it worth visiting for your website visitor:
Lastly, load your web page with semantic SEO.
You need to find words and phrases that are semantically linked to your main keyword and page topic.
You can either find and add these keywords using tools like Surfer, which we’ve discussed earlier in the previous section, or do it manually.
In addition to Google suggestions and the “people also ask” box, you can find the semantic words and phrases within the SERP for your keywords.
Let’s suppose that your primary keyword is “how to rank on Google.” search for this term on Google and scroll to the bottom of the SERP.
Image via Google
You’ll find a lot of related terms that have a decent search volume. Include them on your web page to improve your rank for them.
The goal is not to rank for these keywords only but to tell Google what the page is about. Therefore, the better you rank for similar searches, the higher your chances of ranking at the top for your primary keyword.
Q1. How to rank a web page on the Google first page?
A. Following are the steps you need to follow if you want to rank on Google:
Those were the best practices to rank on Google’s first page. You can use them irrespective of your industry niche.
Q2. What are the top link-building techniques I can use to rank on Google?
A. Building backlinks for your web pages is as crucial as creating high-quality content and optimizing your website.
Following are the top link-building techniques to rank on Google in 2023:
You can indeed build tons of backlinks via these best practices of link building and improve your SERP rank.
Q3. How to optimize on-site SEO?
A. Here is how you can optimize your on-page SEO:
Q4. What are the top ranking factors for Google?
A. Most SEOs consider the following factors as the prominent to rank:
Q5. What are the types of keyword intent?
A. As per the user intent, keywords are of the following four types:
The information provided in this article should be enough for you to proceed with creating an SEO strategy for your website and starting to rank in SERP.
Your page will rank only when you start working on improving SEO. So before delaying it further, start with the first process of ranking on Google – the keyword research.
Meanwhile, if you find yourself stuck during any step of the SEO process, reach out to us.
We’re happy to help.
Disclaimer: This content contains some affiliate links for which we will earn a commission (at no additional cost to you). This is to ensure that we can keep creating free content for you.
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