It’s not like our recommendations are everything you need to know on how to get on the first page of Google. But if you follow them it will be a great push to move in the right direction. We are talking about the frustration of seeing your website’s content somewhere at the bottom of the front page of Google after dozens of other search results. Why is it so important to rank higher anyway?
In this recent article, we can follow a shift to stressing a direct connection between SEO efforts and page rankings, with the latter being the indicator of effectiveness. After all, with more than 3.5 million Google searches each day, you now have to be as high as possible to attract visitors.
That’s basically what search engine optimization is about. The fact is solidly grounded on last year’s study by Sistrix, according to which more than 28.5% on average click on the very first organic result in Google. If it was yours, you could have been attracting more than a quarter of Internet users!
The global pandemic pushed companies around the world into brand new business models to operate. With whole industries being in lockdown, there was no way to continue selling goods and services as they got used to. Today, whenever people need something to purchase, they go online – that is a new reality. Knowing how to get your website on the first page of Google is like knowing a more crowded location for your outlet store.
What Determines Where You Show Up In Google Search?
To plan an SEO optimization strategy of how to get googled higher, first check the main influencing factors. WordStream categorizes them into three groups:
- Off-page factors. Although those are to be found elsewhere on your website, you may still influence them to push it higher to top search results
- On-page factors. Those factors mostly deal with your website’s content, including keywords
- Technical factors. Also on-site factors, but those are technical issues to be solved in order not to lose your standing on the 1 page of Google
Doing It Right: How to Get Your Website On The First Page Of Google
Let’s examine them in more detail and think of the main steps of a plan of how to get the website to the top of Google.
1. Backlinks to Get You on the First Page
Whenever it is not on your website, it is on someone else’s. Improving off-page factors is basically what backlink building strategy is about. Backlinks are often called “incoming links”, which more clearly describes them as paths leading new customers from external resources straight into your hugs.
Such a traffic boost is already a good thing. However, having more backlinks also makes you show up in Google search results higher since they generally serve as a guarantee of good quality of your website’s content. There are some nuances in that – for example, what also matters is domain authority – but other things being equal, the more backlinks lead potential customers to your website, the better.
SEO managers use numerous backlink building strategies, but one of the most common is searching for sites for guest blogging; follow this link for more details on how to have your backlinks placed there. Most social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, etc.) are free and may serve as perfect marketing tools to attract the target audience.
2. Top Search Results With Links Optimization
On-page factors are basically what the quality of your website’s content looks like. Although we may think of thousands of different qualitative and quantitative indicators, and in many cases, they will be entity-specific, one thing is common enough to make generalizations. We’re talking about keywords.
Working with keywords implies matching your content to what people search for when they use them. On the other hand, for even better correspondence with search intent, you may also add additional keywords to attract the target audience.
The story doesn’t end here, though. Back in the early days of search engine optimization, we had to repeat keywords many times to make search engines 100% sure it is precisely what the text is about. The good news is that the future is already here! According to Backlinko, what matters today are LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords, so working with on-page factors now has another dimension in it.
Modern strategies of keyword optimization don’t require high keyword density for Google to understand the content. Google has become much smarter and figures out
the content by LSI keywords that accompany “main” keywords.
For example, many years ago you would have to mention pancakes as many times as possible to make search engines think your article is really about that. Today Google analyses patterns and looks for words that commonly come together.
This doesn’t mean synonyms, though. If, for example, you post a new pancake recipe, it is expected to include mentions of butter, flour, and maybe even Pancake Week (an annual festival preceding Lent). However, it is not necessary to also include “slapjacks” and “crepes” in the text (for purposes other than making it more colorful, of course).
3. Solving Technical Issues to Be the First to Show Up In Google Search
Although this may as well be due to weaknesses of your website’s content, technical issues significantly increase the bounce rate. Just to remind the meaning of the bounce rate -it is the number of single-page sessions divided by a total number of sessions. People either can’t find what they are looking for or just don’t have the patience to wait until the page loads because it is taking so long. Likewise, they may “bounce” in frustration, finding a broken link that was supposed to take them where they wanted while it doesn’t.
Technical problems impeding your website’s appearance on the first page of Google take many forms:
- Low page/website speed. In the modern era, nothing frustrates more than losing time on waiting for something to happen.
- Incompatibility with mobile platforms. Another attribute of today’s reality: modern web surfers do that via mobile platforms on their way to the office or back home. No matter how great your website’s desktop version looks, you have to think of its mobile version as well.
- Broken/messed up internal links. Web crawlers analyze a website’s content by internal links, which is why it is crucial to have them functional and organized in a tight and logical structure.
Technical optimization may thus seem daunting for SEO managers as it is more of a professional field of technical staff. The bounce rate still has to be approached from that direction, so fixing technical issues should be the area of fruitful cooperation with developers.
In Summary: How to Get Googled
Getting your website to the front page of Google is not an easy job to do, but it is crucial for the business’s survival, especially in the modern era of e-commerce. More so after the global pandemic with lockdown conditions and new models of doing business.
Asking how to get on the first page of Google is a good start. As it was shown in brief, it all depends on three broad categories. This job requires close cooperation between three respective teams: content managers, SEO managers, and developers. Unless it is not the same person, it is advisable to start with “soft” – meaning communications – skill development to make further joint work nice and practical.