How to Get Your Website on Google First Page
3.5 billion searches occur on Google every day, and 71.33% of users find the answer they are looking for on the first page. 67.6% of these views get their sites in the TOP-5 organic search results. Another 15% is paid advertising (PPC). Only 5.59% of users go to the next page. This means that if your site crashes on the 3rd page of Google or beyond, it remains near invisible.
Each young brand is facing serious competition unless you have launched a completely unique startup. Most niches have experienced players who have spent a lot of time and money gaining top SERP positions. For more information on the topic, see What is the SERP in 2020? However, this is not a reason to give up. There are proven ways to get listed first on a Google search even with a recently launched project.
Why Is It Difficult for a New Website to Get on Top
After publishing your site, you might notice that it is missing from the search. Many people think that the Google sandbox is to blame. In reality, this is due to the peculiarities of the work of a spider or search robot. Read more about algorithms in the Algorithms That Affect SEO article.
Indexing a new web resource can take from one day to a week. However, the site may be absent from the search even after this period. This is because of the mistakes that were made during its creation.
In a highly competitive environment, only the best sites are in the Top 5 search results. These sights are those that meet the requirements of the Google algorithm, that includes over 200 criteria. Among them are the following:
- The relevance of the content to the user’s request
- Uniqueness of content
- High-quality link mass
- Number of pages
- Website page loading speed
- Web resource security
- Consistency of the structure
- Adaptability for mobile devices
- Traffic
There are also behavioral factors that don’t directly affect rankings. They determine whether the site is visually attractive to the user by ease of use and completeness of information. If a client likes you, they are more likely to stay on the site and come back for a second purchase. An increase in active time on the site for Google is a positive signal that the content is relevant. Therefore, the site may be positioned higher.
In order to accelerate getting to the top, you should use sitemap.xml. It contains information about all pages of the site and speeds up their crawling by a search robot. Read the related article – Sitemaps XML : Best Tricks, Tips, and Tools.
For the search robot to start crawling site pages, you need to add robots.txt to the Search Console. The robots.txt file instructs the robot on how to crawl the site correctly and which pages to show in search. It additionally contains information where the sitemap.xml is located. More information in the article – Robots.txt : How to Create the Perfect File for SEO.
Let’s take a closer look at each factor.
Relevant Content
This is a priority ranking factor. Google is constantly improving its algorithms and using new tools for the machine learning of artificial intelligence. This allows search engines to better understand the context and generate a more relevant search result. Each update can affect the position of the site in SERP in both positive and negative directions. For current content recommendations, see the Google Webmaster Blog page.
Google is committed to providing users with the most reliable information. First of all, it is the content created on the basis of the E-A-T principle, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Higher positions receive materials from accredited experts in their industry with original studies or reports. They should be based on confirmed facts, and they help users better understand the issue. This is especially true for YMYL sites. The tips posted here directly affect the health and well-being of users, so the requirements for filling them are more stringent.
Naturally, the content should be unique, interesting, and well-structured. Make sure that the text is easy to read and that the illustrations are correctly displayed on different types of devices. Also make sure that the content on your site is placed in the correct spot by using the Website Content Audit article.
In addition, it is necessary to use SEO optimization and LSI searches.
How to Get on First Page of Google by Using Long-Tail SEO
Competition for short key phrases is extremely high. It is just as difficult for a novice brand to compete with market leaders on popular searches. Most of the best keywords are already taken. Long-tail keywords are less commonly used, but they are a great way to improve conversion rates for a developing website. If you ever wondered how to get on top of Google search, this is a common way to do it.
How Long Tail Key Queries Work
Imagine a diplodocus. His head is a metaphor for high-frequency calls that are always on the surface. These are short, obvious phrases that users enter to get general information or get acquainted with products. Despite their popularity, they do not often lead to real purchases.
Long Tail (LT) are searches with a lower frequency but higher semantic relevance. They are not designed to attract casual visitors and traffic growth. However, with the help of LT, those who are really interested in your products or services will find out about your site. If the user clearly understands how to get the right thing googled, they is more likely to make a purchase.
How to Choose LT Keywords to Promote a New Site
In order for long-tail searches to bring the site to Google first page, you need to choose the right semantics for your niche. In the Long Tail Keywords article, we talk in detail about how to select long-tail keys. You can also use the basic methods:
1. Using the SEMRush Keyword Magic Tool. Enter the search on the basis of which you want to build LT and specify the estimated number of components (3 or more) in the Words Count filter.
You can also use the toggle button to view a list of keywords in a question format.
2. Analyze competitor experience in the SEMRush SEO Toolkit. Enter the domain of the site whose promotion strategy you want to analyze. In the toolbar on the left, select Organic Research. Open the Positions tab. Set the filters Top 20 Positions and specify the number of words in advanced filters.
Semrush
How to Pick Up LSI Keywords
Another way to circumvent the inefficiency of high-frequency queries for a young site is to use Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). Search robots use this method to better understand the meaning of texts. Instead of formal keywords, they respond to synonyms of the main search that are similar in meaning to words and phrases from related topics. Texts with LSI keys are better perceived by users because you speak their language. This is the surest way on how to get website on Google first page.
LSI is based on the mathematical theory of transitive relations. Do not be afraid because now, there will be no complicated formulas. If word A is contextually related to word B, and word B is synonymous with word C, one can infer that words A and C are related in meaning. This example is even clearer: a birthday is associated with a holiday, and on holidays it is customary to give gifts. Therefore, “Birthday” and “gift” are interconnected by the LSI method.
When creating content for a site, it’s enough to take the main keyword and find synonyms for it. You can do this in the Google search bar. Start entering the main keyword. You can also use hints with different options for continuing the phrase that can be used as LSI keys. More information in the article – Latent Semantic Indexing and Keywords.
Grow Your Blog to Stay Ahead of the Competition
Unfortunately, the tactics of long-tail requests still have a disadvantage. It is unlikely that it will be possible to place more than 1-2 keywords in one article. The logical solution is to create more posts. The more materials you publish, the more search query options you can cover, and the more internal links to promoted pages are available. A dynamically developing site is becoming increasingly interesting for Google. In addition, new thematic materials are always unique and important in social networks.
Avoid boring press releases and internal company news. The audiences of young brands are just starting to take shape. They are unlikely to be more interested in the interior kitchen of your project than fans of experienced brands. More information in the article – Blog Optimization: A Guide to Increasing Traffic.
How Often Should the Content be Replenished
There is no definite answer, however, you can focus on the strategy of direct competitors. If we are talking about a site with many years of experience and hundreds of publications, it can be hard to catch up with it. Analyze how often experienced players in your area update their blogs. You need at least the same activity as them in order to keep up. The more indexed articles there are on the site, the more traffic they will attract. The publication of quality texts is an investment in the future of the project. Analyze search trends with Google Trends. You can use this in your writing. It is important that the topic overlaps with your project. Read the related article – How to use Google Trends for SEO in 2020: Tips, Trends and Traffic.
What Content to Focus On
Try to make articles as useful to the user as possible. It can be step-by-step instructions, guides, or practical tips. Do not forget about examples, pictures, videos, or infographics. Visualization improves the perception of materials by users and search engines. A logical hierarchy of subheadings, metadata, lists, and links to navigate the pages will also be useful.
To promote a service site, add evidence of your expertise. These can be real cases, infographics with results, or video customer reviews.
It is also worth posting PR content that informs about your achievements and introduces the team.
Avoid clickbait headers and teasers. If you are lucky to post really sensational news, make sure it is reliable. Google does not like to disappoint users. Read more to understand this topic in the article How to Write a Great Blog Post in 2020.
Content Uniqueness
Only the pages with completely unique content will go to the first page of the search results. Uniqueness means that any phrase longer than 3 words has never been found except in your text. Uniqueness can be technical and semantic. Technical one takes into account repetitions of words. This is what anti-plagiarism services check. Previously, search robots only focused on the technical uniqueness of the text. Now, search spiders take the exclusivity of content by meaning into account.
There is a unique selling proposition in marketing. The same should be true for the texts on your site. The user must discover something radically new for oneself. In addition to website promotion, this will help to increase sales.
You can check the uniqueness of the texts using antiplagiat, quetext.
Quetext
High-Quality Link Mass
When reputable sites link to your site, it increases the search engine rankings. Avoid sites that use massively purchased links, have doorways are phishing, or use other blackhat SEO elements. If Google convicts them of spam, usage of black methods of promotion, or provision of false information, this may adversely affect the search reputation of your resource.
External links increase the credibility of the site and benefit from ranking. On the other hand, Google strongly discourages the use of purchased or hidden links. They should appear naturally and have the corresponding dynamics of growth. If a blog that had just launched suddenly gets a response from thousands of sources, it may look suspicious. The integrity of the link mass is closely monitored by the Penguin algorithm. It can catch a site in spam and impose sanctions for link abuse. More information about algorithms in the article Google Algorithms That Affect SEO.
Post links to your site on social networks including Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Twitter, and in industry directories of enterprises.
Barnacle SEO: How to Make Yourself Known through Ratings on Third-party Resources
There is one lifehack on how to get on top of Google search without buying ads and long organic promotion. Barnacle SEO is a way to express yourself with the help of already pumped third-party sites. It can be TripAdvisor, Yelp, Avvo, or other large fish. In different business niches, you can find suitable sites based on user-generated content such as industry catalogs, directories, or message boards.
In order to appear on the Google front pages, you need to create a card for your company on the appropriate site. Indicate as much information about your business as possible, upload photos, share news and promotions, and motivate customers to leave feedback. This is a good way to increase brand awareness and communicate with users.
Crowd marketing is based on the same principle. Thematic forums, blogs, and communities on social networks are good platforms for advertising. With their help, you can popularize your product and set up targeted traffic to the site for free. At the same time, you are also increasing the link mass, the number of references to the resource, and increasing citation. Simply creating an account and posting links is not enough. Many sites can perceive such behavior as spam which is not helpful for your reputation. Your task is to engage users in a lively discussion, during which you can provide as much useful information as possible in an unobtrusive way. Read useful related articles: Pinterest SEO in 2020, Reddit For SEO, Secrets of Etsy SEO.
John Mueller, Google Webmaster trend analyst, points out that it is ideal when links from the home page lead to all pages of the site with one click.
Number of Pages
A one-page site will never make it to the top of the search results. This is because Google tries to show the user websites that are more likely to have the information they need. If there is only one page, then it is less likely that there will be a correct answer.
Relevance and quality of content is also important for Google. 10 pages with good text is better than 100 with spam and non-unique text.
Website Page Loading Speed
One of the main ranking factors on Google is the page load time on desktop and mobile. User experience is equally important. An optimal site loading speed is up to three seconds. If the page loads slower, users are more likely to look elsewhere for information of interest. Test My Site service will help to check site loading speed.
Recently, Google has been promoting Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), a single format for lightweight downloading of texts, graphics, and media materials for mobile devices. The AMP pages above are ranked and help convey content to the user as quickly as possible in an easy-to-read format.
The Test My Site and Page speed insights services will help to check the website loading speed.
In addition to assessing the speed of the mobile and desktop versions of the site, PageSpeed Insights show errors on the web resource and gives advice on how to speed up loading.
Website Security
Security is Google’s top priority. That is why compliance with the HTTPS protocol and the presence of an SSL certificate are key ranking factors. HTTP sites are marked as unreliable by search engines – the user sees a corresponding notification. Thanks to TLS / SSL encryption technologies, data is transferred via secure channels. A unique key is created for each connection to the site, which cannot be intercepted. This allows you to secure passwords, credit card information and other personal information.
More information on the topic in our article HTTPS vs. HTTP.
Structure Logic
The architecture of the site directly affects its perception by search algorithms and users.
The architecture of the site directly affects its perception by search algorithms. Group content uses a logical directory system according to specific topics. Remove duplicate pages and set up a redirect if necessary, so that you don’t waste your crawlers resource in vain. You will find how to deal with duplicate pages in Rel=Canonical Tag. Detailed information about redirects in the article is 301 vs 302 redirects.
Design your page structure. Use a single template for pages with a specific focus such as product items, blog posts, and reference information for customers. Use meta tags and a hierarchical heading system.
Meta tags are located in the header and contain information about the content. They are primarily scanned by a robot. The position of the site in the SERP depends on their availability and competent design.
These are elements such as:
- Title
- Meta-description
- H1, H2, and H3 headers
Title and Description are the first things that the user and search robot see before clicking on the link.
Here are simple secrets for how to move up to the first page of Google ranking using meta tags. Add a keyword as close to the beginning of the description as possible. Indicate your advantages and why the user should go to your site in the description.
The title tag must be unique for each page. It should not coincide with description and H1. Google displays 50-57 title characters, so basic information needs to be placed in this range. Among the headings, the most important one is H1. It must be present on each page once. The rest of the headings serve as subheadings and are not particularly valuable for promotion. It is worth including the keyword in H1. Read the important article on the topic – Meta Tags for SEO: Complete Guide for Beginners.
Friendly URL
The shorter the URL, the higher Google rates it when ranking. It is important that the page address is well-read. The same applies to the display logic of the directory structure. The page hierarchy should be easily traceable. User-friendly URLs are better remembered and will be associated with your brand in the future.
To increase attractiveness for crawlers, you can place the main keyword requests at the beginning of the domain name. Keywords in the subdomain also help to increase the rating.
Be Mobile-Friendly
According to SEMRush in 2020, mobile devices account for 66% of Google searches. Paradoxically, only 13% of online resources use the full potential of mobile search. Even if the site owners managed to reveal the secret of how to get on the first page of Google from the desktop, only 30% of them can count on similar positions on smartphones. Therefore, a door is open for properly optimized young sites.
Having a mobile version is an important ranking factor. From the Mobile SEO Guide you will learn the benefits of adapting a site to different types of devices, how it works, and what you need to consider when optimizing. How your site meets Google’s mobility criteria can be checked with the following tools:
- The Mobile-Friendly Test allows you to check the usability of a page by URL or code.
- Google Search Console presents the convenience of viewing pages and the presence of errors in tabular form data. From the report, you can learn about non-working plugins, incorrect values for the viewport meta tag, problems with the size of visual content, fonts, or interactive elements.
- PageSpeeds Insights identifies elements that slow down page loadings such as script, images, and cache data. For all items, you’ll get helpful information and links to troubleshooting tools.
To learn how to optimize the site for mobile devices, read the following article Mobile Search.
Traffic
The more unique users visit the resource, the higher it is in the search results. In addition to visiting, the search robot scans what content users viewed and how much time they spent on the site.
When the site is new, it naturally will not have a lot of traffic. To fix this, you can place links or advertisements on social networks. It’s also worth running ads on Google Adwords.
How to Turn AdWords Into an Additional Traffic Tool
In terms of website promotion, PPC and organic search have little in common. But if you look at advertising settings from a different angle, you can combine their functions and get an interesting result.
Google AdWords is a guaranteed Google first page with proper ad setup.
Analyze your searches carefully before launching your campaign. Choose the ones that are most relevant to your product. Do not use informational requests for advertising such as “how to make cupcakes.” This is the user’s intention to get information, not to buy baked goods from your website. You will end up getting rejected.
Add keywords to your titles. To do this, select the curly brace and follow the service prompt. Enter the keyword how it will be displayed. The keyword must be in the ad group keyset.
Create as many ad variations as possible and ask Google to choose the best ones on its own.
In the extensions, place information about delivery, a link to a catalog, any services, and other information that may be of interest to the user.
To increase positions, the suitable goal of advertising is traffic.
If you are new to setting up ads, start a Smart Campaign. It will choose the most optimal format for attracting traffic. You will need to make the correct title and description and add a banner and links to the site.
A company will need to upload a feed through the Google Merchant Center.
Monitor your optimization metric constantly. Ideally, it should be 100%. This affects the percentage of winnings in auctions and the frequency of display in the visible area.
Watch the CTR, the rate should be at least 10%. If it is lower, the advertisement is not attractive to the target client.
A well-tuned ad is a great way to get a website on Google first page for high-frequency keywords.
Read the important article on the topic – SEO vs. PPC.
Use the Potential of Google Maps to Advance in Your Region
Thanks to smartphones, users have the opportunity to search for the store, restaurant or business center they need on the go. Local searching takes into account the user’s location and shows the nearest relevant objects on the map. Any site can get presented in local SERP, no matter whether it is selling something or not. However, searching by maps is important for projects focused on interacting with customers offline such as retailers, private enterprises, restaurants, and service establishments.
When you optimize your page on Google My Business, make sure it meets the basic requirements:
- Describe the activities of the company as much as possible and describe how you can help the client now.
- Make sure the business category is spelled correctly. This item is important for both users and search engines.
- Indicate the working hours. If a potential client arrives at the desired address and sees the “Closed” sign, They are unlikely to want to try their luck again.
- Provide full contact information such as the addresses of branches, phone numbers, website addresses, and links to social networks. Make sure the landing page has driving directions. It’s better to embed a Google map, rather than a tag or picture. This will allow customers to lay a convenient route, add the location to their favorites or share it with other users.
- Indicate payment methods – do you accept cards or cash only?
- Post a photo of your offline representation.
- Check whether the coordinates and related information are displayed correctly from the desktop and mobile devices.
In order not to miss important optimization points, we recommend reading the article Local SEO Checklist 2020.
Google is only getting to know your site. Therefore, it is especially important that all pages are properly optimized. It’s better to take care of technical SEO before starting the project. This will allow you not to spend money on improvements in the future while still quickly take a favorable position in the SERP. Want to know how to go about this, read What is the Technical SEO Audit?
The test period is an excellent occasion to focus on the development of the site. It will help to regularly update content, boost the content on low-frequency searches, increase the link mass, and work on the brand’s reputation. In order to gain the trust of the crawlers and quickly climb to the first page of Google ranking, a young site needs to be different from old-timers. This does not mean that its value is unequal to the industry leaders. Analyze the experience of competitors along with their strengths and weaknesses. This will help you find your own special feature. Ideally, this is a high-quality service that includes communication with the user. The website should not only be stylish, but also UI / UX-friendly). For more information regarding qualitative analysis of competitors, see the article SEO Competitive Analysis.
The moment the site hits the first page of Google is very exciting. However, this is not a reason to stop. Top site positions are not assigned permanently. To keep your resource at the top, you should constantly pay attention to its optimization. Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket. SEO for first page Google brings better results if you combine several tactics at once.
