6 Ideas for Getting Great on Google
Do you struggle to bringing people to your website at high enough volume to support the attainment of your company’s revenue objectives? When buyers do their research, they go to Google. While becoming great on Google takes time, if you’re in it to win it, you need to make the commitment to becoming great. Here are 6 ideas for becoming great on Google.
It all starts with SEO
Search engine optimization means taking a piece of online content and optimizing it so search engines like Google show it towards the top of the page when someone searches for something. For example, when someone types “BBQ chicken recipes” into Google, they’re likely looking for a recipe, ingredients, and instructions on how to make it. If you wrote an article about making BBQ chicken, you’d want people to find your recipe. For anyone to find it, you need to rank above all the other websites with recipes for BBQ chicken.
1 – Produce great content
On-page SEO is about building content to improve your rankings. This comes down to incorporating keywords into your pages and content, curating high-quality content regularly, making sure your metatags and titles are keyword-rich and well-written, and dozens of other factors. Off-page SEO is the optimization happening outside your website itself, such as earning backlinks. This part of the equation involves building relationships and creating content people want to share. The bottom line is that your content needs to solve a problem or provide a solution to whatever brings the reader to your post. If it doesn’t, they’ll quickly click away from your page, telling Google your piece of content isn’t solving anyone’s problem.
4 ideas for producing great content:
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- Understand user intent: You need to know what the reader wants to accomplish when they land on your page.
- Develop a customer persona: You also need to know who you’re your reader is, what they like, what they dislike, and why they’re there.
- Break up the text: People have short attention spans, and writing giant walls of text doesn’t work anymore; you need to break it up with plenty of headers and images.
- Make it actionable: There’s nothing worse than reading a piece of content and not getting everything, you need to accomplish something. Your content should be thorough, but it also needs to answer the question, Will the reader have everything they need when they finish your article?
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2 – Keyword Research and Selection
Keyword research and selection is important to rank on Google and create relevant content. Keywords can often open the door to inspiration by telling you exactly what people want to know based on what they’re searching for. Choosing the right keyword is also about avoiding competition through long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are––long keyword phrases that get super specific. They’re often easier to rank for, and they bring you targeted traffic.
You can find them easily using a keyword research tool like Ubersuggest. But you can also use the related searches at the bottom of Google’s results page.
3 ideas for selecting the best keywords
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- Use tools to help: You can’t do the best keyword research without tools to help you. Tools like Ahrefs provide insight into your competition and make your life easier.
- Learn the intent: You must know the intent of the keyword. Understand there is a big difference between what a buyer will type into Google and what a researcher will put into Google. If your content answers a question, you don’t want a buyer. If your content sells something, you don’t want a researcher.
- Spy on the competitors: One of the best ways to perform keyword research is to see what your competitors are doing and follow their lead. If someone is ranking number one for the keyword you want, use your tool, input their URL, and see what keywords they’re using.
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3 – Effectively implement HTML
Your site’s HTML is an important piece of the SEO puzzle. Without proper tags, headers, and descriptions, Google will have a hard time figuring out what your content is about and why it should rank higher than the competition.
3 ideas for making the right HTML improvements
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- Use tools to help you: The various SEO marketing tools out there are worth the investment because they will help you identify HTML issues with your site. For example, Ahrefs tells you if a site has duplicate title tags or how many articles are missing meta descriptions.
- Piggyback on the competition: Use your top-ranking competitors for inspiration. If you’re struggling to figure out what you should use for your title tag or meta description, see what the competition is doing.
- Never stuff keywords: There’s nothing worse than a keyword-stuffed meta description that reads horribly.
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4 – Develop a Solid Site Architecture
A good website architecture leads to a great user experience, which is important for your SEO strategy. It focuses on things like fast loading times, a safe connection, and a mobile-friendly design.
2 ideas to improve your site architecture
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- Make sure you understand Web metrics: The most important piece of the puzzle are your website’s metrics. You need to understand what these are, how they impact your rankings, and what you can do about them.
- Get a sitemap: Use the WordPress sitemap plugin (or something similar) to create a sitemap. This is essential for large websites.
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5 – Build Trust
TrustRank is a way for Google to see whether your site is legit or not. For example, if you look like a big brand, Google is likely to trust you. Quality backlinks from authoritative sites (like .edu or .gov domains) also help. Elements of Trust on Your Site. There are two parts to building trust: authority and bounce rate.
Authority
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- Google determines the overall authority of your site by a mix of two kinds of authority you can build: You can use this tool from Ahrefs to check your authority on a scale of 1-100.
- Domain authority, which has to do with how widespread your domain name is. Coca-cola.com is very authoritative, for example, because everyone has heard of it.
- Page authority, which relates to how authoritative the content of a single page (for example, a blog post) is.
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Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is a measure of how many people view only one page on your site before immediately leaving. Content, loading times, usability, and attracting the right readers are all key to decreasing bounce rate. The highest quality website visitors spend more time on a site that loads fast, looks good, and has great content.
6 – Properly leverage Links
Links are one of the most important ranking factors on Google. If you choose to take the long-term strategy and build links the right way, it might take longer, but you’ll thank yourself down the road.
3 ideas to improve your link profile
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- Don’t take shortcuts: There are no shortcuts in link building; you need to take the time and build them the right way. This involves having conversations with people, pitching yourself, and telling them how you can provide value to their site.
- Remove hazardous links: Google has something called the Disavow toolthat allows you to remove links that might be hurting your ability to rank.
- Internal linking: If in doubt, aim for about 2-4 internal links in every blog post.
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