Many small businesses approach us with the question; ‘How do I get on page on of Google?’. It can be frustrating, especially as a new or start-up business, trying to out-do larger, more established businesses online.
The good news, to get on page one of Google isn’t out of reach for any business. It just takes a little time and a well thought out SEO Strategy. In this article we’ll look at some of the key areas to concentrate on to get your business flying high on Google and drawing that all important website traffic.
A Winning SEO Strategy
There’s no point making random adjustments or attempting to copy websites that currently rank highly for your desired search terms. Google will penalise you for this. We need a well thought out SEO strategy.
Here’s the key points we look at when we originally review a website looking to get on page one of Google:
Keyword Analysis
The very first step in your SEO Strategy. Your keywords need to be selected, based on thorough research. You’ll need a keyword tool for this.
A great free option is Google Keyword Planner. You can search using relevant key words or use a Website URL to fetch relevant keywords. A high ranking competitor might be a good idea for this.
Use the tool to search for keywords relevant to your business and the products and services you offer. The tool with populate with suggestions based exact matches and search terms having similar terms. You’ll see an approximate monthly search volume for each term, and a low, medium and high rank for competition for the term.
Spend some time weighing up traffic vs competition to establish a handful of keywords to target. If you website is new, it would be sensible initially, to go for keywords with low competition. Otherwise your website pages will end up lost down the numerous Google search results pages.
Competitor Analysis
So, you’ve got your keywords to target within your website pages. And, you’ve probably got a good idea of the competition level for your main search terms.
It’s a good idea to have a deeper look into your competitor’s websites and see what approach has help them to get on page one of Google.
It’s important that at no point should you copy another website’s content. Simply view your competitor websites for an insight on how content, layout and navigation is used in the top ranking sites.
You can take your analysis further with paid SEO tools such as Ahrefs. This comprehensive tool, allows you to view a detailed profile of a competitor’s website, including which page receive the most traffic, and for what search terms.
Title & Content Optimisation
So, we know what keywords we will be targeting, and what our competitors are up to. We can put together a website and aim to get on page one of Google.
Page titles are massively important for SEO. They tell Google what the page is about, for the purpose of ranking.
Don’t dilute your page titles with too much information or keywords. Concentrate on one product or service per page.
Keep you page title under 60 characters (Google doesn’t display more than this).
Now let’s look at your page content. Generally, the more, the better, when it comes to page content. So long as it’s original, relevant and useful to the person viewing your page. Don’t add more purely to up your word count. Focus on one product, service per page, remembering to incorporate your chosen keywords and search terms.
Link Building
When you’ve got your website to a good standard, with quality and well researched titles and content, you’ll need backlinks. Backlinks are links from other websites, to yours. They show Google that your content is valuable, useful and worth linking to. It’s a major factor in ranking and is worth doing properly.
Google is constantly updating it’s ranking algorithms, and they are becoming more and more advanced, and capable of spotting people trying to cheat the system. Years ago, it was plausible to buy hundreds of backlinks to your website, and it wasn’t too much of an issue. Today, Google is advanced enough to know whether they are genuine and relevant to your business or industry.
Start with building profiles that will actually help promote your business independently, such as directories including Yell, Freeindex, Yelp and Google My Business. These all link to your website.
Moving onward from here, develop a strategy to establish relevant links back to your website from authoritative sources. These could be via guest posts on major blogs in your industry, press releases on sites such as PRweb, or recommendations from business partners or customers.
Get on Page One of Google – Conclusion
We’ve given you a brief overview of the key elements involved in getting on page one of Google for your business website. The steps above are a summary, when, followed and expanded on, will deliver great results in the Google search listings.
Remember to make your website relevant and useful to the person viewing it. Focus on humans, not search engines, and the results will start to come over time.
If you need any help with your page one website ranking or SEO strategy, don’t hesitate to contact us.
