How to Rank at the Top of Google

Google receives approximately 63,000 searches per second on any given day, and while this is an average figure – this translates to at least 2 trillion searches per year. Ranking at the top of Google for certain keywords is a huge achievement. Despite what people often this, this isn’t an easy process either, a lot of background research goes into content that ranks highly on Google’s search engine. As marketers, we often dream of ranking highly on Google, after all it is the ultimate achievement. The reasons for this are clear, reaching the top means your site has increased traffic, and there is potential to have more sales to your business ahead of your competition.

But what does ranking at the top of Google require? There isn’t a simple SEO handbook to read to find out, unfortunately! There isn’t even a course you can take to learn all about ranking first on Google. However, what you can do is get advice and expertise from skilled and knowledge marketers who have a lot of excellent success stories of ranking highly on Google and learn from the best. Alternatively, you could hire an SEO agency to do all the hard work for you, but that’s entirely your decision to make!

Please keep in mind, there is no absolute way to guarantee that you will rank top of Google but with a lot of hard work, time and effort, we’re sure you will get there.

Start with a niche

If you’re just getting into SEO and trying to rank your website online then a large part of succeeding is understanding the competitive landscape. Anyone who is a small business owner, you don’t want to be competing with large organisation that have seemingly unlimited marketing budgets, start by understanding your niche and what is needed. A good start would be analysing the keyword density of your potential keywords. Long-tail keywords work a lot better for smaller businesses as they don’t have as much competition. Short-tail keywords are a completely different story. If you’re unaware of these different types of keywords, then let us explain –

• Short-tail keywords are the most common and will have a high volume of traffic going to them. Searches such as ‘best dresses’ or ‘cute outfits’ will have a lot of people Googling them all the time which means the likes of big ecommerce brands will already have the top spots here.

• Long-tail keywords are the lesser common keywords that are searched by a smaller volume of people but can still drive organic traffic to your website if you get a searcher with the right intention. For example, ‘cute dresses with blue floral patterns’ or ‘best restaurants to visit in the South of London during summer’ won’t have people Googling them everyday but if you can get your content ranking for these, they are most likely to rank highly, if not at the very top!

Optimise your content

In order to rank, your content has to be well-written, but it also has to be optimised using keywords you’ve chosen. Once you’ve done this then writing the content will be easy. Try not to overuse your keywords since this can seem spammy to Google. Plus, it’s also important to use them in a variety of ways within your content – not just in a similar sentence.

Acquire links

Links play a key role in terms of SEO and inbound links are the single most important aspect of achieving high rankings. There are various strategies to get links to your site and your content, guest posting is a popular way to do this or adding your site to local business directories can be a more affordable way to get links to your site without having to pay a large amount. However, remember that if you’re creating good content that is interesting and unique, it is likely that you will get organic backlinks anyway!