How To Improve Google Rankings: 9 Major Steps To Rank Higher in Google Search

In this article, we will discuss:

☛ What are ranking factors?

☛ Types of Google ranking factors

☛ 9 Major Steps To Rank Higher In Google Rankings

☛ 2 Major Methods That Can Help You Rank In Google

Let’s start…

How will your customers find you?

For modern-day businesses, the answer is just simple: they go online. In specific, they go on search engines such as Google.

While paid search ads seem to be a great way to get instant exposure on this go-to search engine, you should also be working to establish your organic rankings also. you can increase your visibility by having a presence in organic search results- and no matter what your business is, having visibility on search engines is complicated if you are planning to attract more customers and enhance revenue. Therefore, it’s important that you consider a professional link building company in UK.

What Are Ranking Factors?

Search engine optimization is the method of optimizing your site to rank as high as possible in organic search engine results. When it’s the matter of search, people use the term “organic” to refer to search results that are unpaid. This is varied from pay-per-click advertising, which is a technique that aims at paid traffic generation.

Both organic and paid ranking on Google is analyzed by algorithms that take into consideration different metrics and characteristics considered by Google to be essential- and these are your ranking factors. We will never know all of Google’s ranking factors, but people do know many of them according to what Google has showcased to you and what you find through empirical practice.

People also know that while ranking factors and algorithms may change, the characteristics Google is trying to parse out through them are trustworthiness, quality, and of course performance. This might made you understand what does link building mean in your website ranking process.

Types Of Google Ranking Factors

Before you get into the top 9 Google ranking strategies around which you can rank your website higher, let’s first go over the various types. Marketers generally talk in terms of on and off-page ranking aspects, but there are actually three groups:

a)- Off-page ranking factors: These are being analyzed by Google elsewhere from your website, and mainly involve backlinks.

b)- On-page ranking factors: These are majorly related to the keywords and informational quality of your pages.

c)- Technical ranking factors: These are also analyzed on your website, but have more to do with it is entire performance as a whole, as opposed to individual pages.

It is essential to note that there is not one single ranking factor that will make or break your SEO. It is the combination of all your on-page, technical, and off-page efforts that work together to establish an SEO-friendly website.

9 Major Steps To Rank Higher In Google Rankings

1. Find Underperforming Keywords

Most SEOs, preach getting your page two rankings, then thriving hard to push them to page one.

That looks logical, but there are two different reasons why this is not a great idea:

It is not always convenient to improve ranking by 10+ spots.

Merely ranking on page 1 should not be your aim if you want more traffic.

That first point should be quite self-explanatory. Think of it like this:

It is convenient to win the match from two goals behind than it is from ten behind.

As for that second point, go through the average CTR curve for the first couple of pages of Google results:

You can view that via click through rate lessens exponentially as you go down the ranks. Also, you can take help from experienced link building specialists.

This means if you can go higher in the search engine by just one position from 5 to 4, you will see a greater traffic increase than moving up ten positions from 20 to 10.

It is not a small difference either!

If your main target keyword gets 10,000 searches each month, then the numbers seems quite like this:

• Position 5 to 4 = +210 visitors/month
• Position 20 to 10 = +8 visitors/month

SIDENOTE: This is according to the average CTR. Actually, this varies on a keyword.

So, what you require to do is get the keywords for which you already rank on the 1st page in positions 2 to 10 and aim almost exclusively on these.

To do this, type the domain into Ahrefs Site Explorer, then go to the “Organic Keywords” report, after filter the report to show the keywords for which you currently rank among 2 to 10 positions.

Site Explorer > type domain > Organic search > Organic keywords > include filter

2. Take a look at the “Queries” report

First, let’s find out the phrases that you are almost ranking high for. It is in Google Analytics in the report:

Acquisition > Search Console > Queries.

Note: if you are not able to access this report, you likely have not connected your Search Console account to Google Analytics. There is a video here that represents how to set this up.

This report represents:

✓ All the phrases you try to rank
✓ The number of times you have been in Google
✓ The number of times your webpages have been landed from these phrases
✓ The number of times your audience have visited your pages from these phrases
✓ How high you can go with these phrases.

Furthermore, to make everything accurate, you should properly learn the link building methods.

3. Get to Know the Google Algorithm

You can jump right into a few actionable SEO plans to utilize on your website right now.
But I want to set you up for long-term success so you are not penalized each time a new update comes. Some professionals confirm Google constantly varies its algorithm, even though most of these alterations are not publicly announced.

Moz observes there are 500 to 600 Google algorithm changes every year!

While Google utilized to share major update announcements, the actual inner workings of the algorithm are still unknown. Most of the information is just speculation from industry experts.

After all, if everyone knew accurately how to rank in the 1st position without penalties for shortcuts or black hat SEO strategies, Google would not succeed in ranking only the profitable results. Anyone could hack their path to the top without putting in the work. The perfect way to get higher in the rankings is through prominent manual link building.

Not only would this make it difficult for an honest individual like you and me to become successful in this, but it would also seriously compromise Google’s mission statement:

Google’s aim is to organize the world’s detail and make it universally accessible and beneficial.

The best knowledge professionals have of Google’s algorithms comes in the form of top algorithm updates such as:

☛ Mobile-first update (July 2019): Googlebot now goes through all sites as a smartphone, prioritizing website that works well on mobiles.

☛ Mobile-friendly update (April 2015): Preferring sites with mobile-friendly versions and setting the stage for coming penalties if websites do not comply

☛ Pigeon (July 2014): Worked to integrate local search results such as Google maps.

☛ Hummingbird (August 2013): Focused to know the context and intent behind a user’s search instead of just viewing the literal words they typed.

☛ Penguin (April 2012): Aimed spammers and websites that purchase unnatural links to increase their rankings.

Not to mention Panda, Private Blog Network, and Google EMDs de-indexing updates. Then there is phantom, which first appeared in the month of May 2013 and is believed to have been updated 4 times- but has never genuinely been confirmed by Google. That’s why it’s important to know major Google search statistics.

How you can keep track of all these Google updates?

There are few great resources to assist. Moz’s Google Algorithm Change History is a database that shows updates. Go through Google Webmaster Central also.

Now that you know the basics of the algorithm, let’s get down to those actionable plans as mentioned earlier.

4. Track rankings

It goes without saying that if your aim is to rank higher on a search engine, then you have to track your rankings. Otherwise, you have no other way of knowing whether your efforts are moving the needle.

For that, you require a rank tracking tool such as Ahrefs Rank Tracker.

You can track up to 10,000 keywords in Rank Tracker (according to your plan). We generally just track the main target keyword for every page. Adding to that, there are different types of SEO through which you get help.

To set up your keywords in Rank Tracker, choose a project, hit “Add keywords, paste or type the keywords you need to begin tracking, choose the countries you need to track, then hit “Add keywords”.

Rank Tracker > Project > “Include keywords” > Type keywords > Choose tracked countries

5. Check The URL structure

It may look simple, but the method you structure your page URLs does have some impact on your search engine ranking. A jumbled URL with different mixed characters does not do a good job of assisting search engines to learn about the page.

On the other hand, a URL that follows a simple structure is concise and adds the target keyword- now that is an SEO-friendly URL or you can also use cost-effective SEO services for getting such URL.

Poorly structured URL:
https://www.linkbuildingcorp.com/blog/?pageid=4035/
Properly structured URL:
www.linkbuildingcorp.com/blog/skyscraper-technique/

6. Go through the guest post on relevant blogs

The perks of guest blogging are really clear:

You gather backlinks from authority sites.

People look to you as a professional.

Aimed referral traffic comes to your website.

a)- Getting blogs to guest post via Google search strings:

Mentioned-below is some search strings:

– write us “your topic.”
– your keyword + “guest post by.”

Imagine your topic is the virtual assistant.

Consider Google and search for “virtual assistant” + “guest post by”

Additionally, you can utilize Google reverse image search, use Google and Twitter to get more posts.

b)- Researching your focused bloggers is vital when you have to separate the winners from the losers and get close to them by engaging them on Facebook or Twitter or through emails. Furthermore, if you use the best guest posting for SEO then it would be easier to rank higher.

c)- Find a prominent topic to write a guest post about. For instance, a cloth shopping post on a sports equipment shopping blog site is going to get rejected so it is essential to know what you are dealing with.

d)- Try to have a great pitch ready to persuade bloggers to permit you to write for the guest post for them.

e)- The last step is to follow up on any and every comment appropriately.

7. Enhance the page and show the relevance for the phrase

It is one of the most perfect link building strategies. SEO is all about highlighting relevance. People highlight relevance utilizing on-page SEO best practices, which people will summarize here.

✓ Utilize the key phrase in the page title

This is the h1 tag, which is usually the headline on the webpage. For doing it more professionally, you can consider reliable website SEO

✓ Use the phrase different times in the body

There is no magic number for keyword frequency, but high-ranking web pages are usually long, with 1500-2000 words. Keep in mind, Google is a research tool established by library scientists.

If your web page is 1500 words, it is probably that 4 to 6 instances of the phrase feel natural. If the webpage is short, do not try hard to fluff it up by including length. But ensure the phrase showed at least once, all together as a “bonded” keyphrase.

8. Keyword Targeting

Keywords are at the center of an efficient SEO plan. Basically, keywords are one of the effective link building tools. These are the search terms that people utilize when they go on a search engine to get what they are searching for. Before you can begin developing content for your site, it is complicated to conduct keyword research.

In a recent survey conducted by Directive, 78% of marketers analyzed keyword research as a high-impact practice for boosting new traffic. The research method permits you to better understand what your audience is looking for and generating content that directly addresses these search queries.

Before you make content for a page or write an article, analyze 4 to 5 related keywords that you need to aim for. Add these keywords whenever they fit organically into the text and insert them into other on-page elements, which you will cover next. Also, make sure to look after links too with content as powerful links important for SEO.

The keywords in the ending paragraph are “natural”. Always write for the reader, not at all for the search engine.

Search engines are smart, and they can analyze when marketers try to unnaturally fit keywords onto a page only for SEO. This is known as keyword stuffing, and your site can be penalized for doing it.

Do not compromise the quality of your content as you need it to rank higher. Quality is a priority of Google, so concentrate on generating content that is compelling and convenient for your audience to understand.

9. Go For Image alt-text

If you have ever searched for anything on Google images, you can probably guest that there is an SEO component to images as well. Each image on your website comes with alt-text, also referred to as an alt-tag.

This text serves different tasks:

• It makes your site easily accessible to visually-impaired audience who depend on screen readers to browse the internet.

• If your image fails to load, the alt-text will come in its place.

• It assists search engines to know the image and index it appropriately.

Properly optimized alt-text has the power to move your images to the first page of image search results, providing you an additional shot at a higher ranking. To grow, your business need backlinks efficiently.

2 Major Methods That Can Help You Rank In Google

1. Guestographics method:

Another link-building method utilizes infographics. With this process, instead of publishing an infographic and begging some other people to share it, you are pushing them to release it on their website in exchange for unique content.

The complete steps are listed below:

Step 1: Post an infographic on your website
Step 2: Find websites that write on your infographic’s topic
Step 3: Present your infographic
Step 4: Provide them fresh content
Step 5: Get your contextual backlinks

2. Broken link building:

The broken link-building technique is about analyzing broken links on sites from your business. The main target is to get the broken link replaced with an active one pointing to your content.

This method develops an important opportunity for SEO link building as nobody wants to have broken links on their site.

If you find any broken links on topically related sites, you can instantly contact the site owners and inform them about it. Since you will do him a favor by highlighting a broken link, you can also request a replacement with a link to your relevant resource. Obviously, the replacement- your article must be beneficial and informative for their audience.

Now, the question arises, how to automate the method of getting broken links? You require a tool to do this. According to professionals, the best free tool to utilize for top notch broken link building is the prominent Check My Links.

It is a simple Google Chrome extension. Firstly, install the extension in your Google Chrome browser. Once installed, it will showcase as a little checkmark icon beside your address bar. When you click on it, it will instantly begin scanning all the links on a specific web page. If a link is dead or broken, it will be reflected in red, and the error will be shown right beside the text.

Let’s say you have a site on “virtual assistance”. Go to Google and search for the following search strings.

• virtual assistant intitle:resources
• virtual assistant inurl:resources
• virtual assistant inurl:useful links
• virtual assistant + “useful links”
• virtual assistant + “resources”

To analyze broken links, open all the results and scan every page utilizing the Check My Links plugin. Once you find one, write an email to the site owner regarding the dead link and request to replace it with your active page.

Conclusion:

As Google continues to close the door on spammy methods and schemes, anyone serious about digital marketing requires to take a long view. The methods mentioned above are not new. They do however, need work and a continual investment of resources. And here Professional SEO experts from LinkBuildingCorp can help. They have enough experience to help you rank your website high in SERPs.

To know more about our services, contact us now.

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