Secret SEO tips: how to get your business ranking on page 1 of Google

Every business dreams of ranking on page one on Google. This highly coveted real estate means an increase in audience reach and engagement, earns your brand trust, and puts your business in front of your competitors. So, why wouldn’t you want your brand to be number 1? Here’s our search engine optimisation secrets for ranking on the first page on Google

Secret SEO tips: how to get your business ranking on page 1 of Google

They say the best place to hide a dead body is on page 2 of Google search results, and while this is a humorous approach to the importance of search engine optimisation, it certainly packs a powerful message. There’s a huge difference between page 1 and page 2 rankings in terms of lead generation – it’s safe to say page 1 is the prime place to be.

While there’s no guaranteed way to get to the number 1 spot on Google, there are definitely some strategies you can implement to have your business claim a position on that first page. This involves incorporating both onsite and offsite optimisation to help increase your Google ranking:

• Offsite Optimisation refers to what you can do to improve your position on a search engine results page (SERP). This includes linking as well as social media marketing.
• Onsite Optimisation refers to all the things you do within your website. This includes title tags, headings, meta descriptions, images, and content.

Here’s a few offsite and onsite SEO tips that you can apply to increase your audience reach, web traffic and website visibility – all of which will help you rank on page 1 on Google:

Secret SEO Tip 1: Write great content and do it regularly

This is one of the most powerful ways that you can promote your brand and increase website traffic. Writing a blog and regularly refreshing it with relevant, interesting and well-written content is a sure-fire way for Google to recognise that your brand is an authority in its field. Users want to read content they can connect with so it’s important to tell your brand’s story. However, while blogging seems like a simple enough task to implement, you’ll be penalised (meaning that your website will be pushed into obscurity) if your articles aren’t unique, don’t read well, and are stuffed with keywords.

Short on time or not a modern-day Shakespeare? You can hire a professional blogger to write your content articles for you (after all, these kind of jobs are best left to the experts.)

Secret SEO Tip 2: Choose the right keywords

Let’s be honest: if you optimised a page for “bubblie wubblie dolly,” you could grab the top spot in no time for this search term. But nobody searches for these keywords.

This is why when you’re creating your digital marketing campaign, you research realistic keywords and queries that are relevant to your brand and that you know real people are actually searching for. When you’ve used them (sparingly) in your website content, these keywords will be what Google bots look for when crawling your site. This in turn will help boost your rankings as they can see your information will be relevant to other users.

Secret SEO Tip 3: Make your website Google-friendly

Now that you’ve got your chosen keywords, focus on using them in your URLs, title tags, headings (h1, h2, etc.), image tags and captions, and throughout your content.

These elements show Google what your page is all about as well as whether your subject matter is relevant to a visitor’s interests. To put it simply: think of a H1 as the book title, and the H2 as the chapter headings. Visitors will spend about ten seconds on your website, and if there’s no heading tags to tell them what your page is about, they’ll bounce off it quickly. Google will use this information to determine what your site is about, and how well it should rank – so avoid a high bounce rate by giving users what they want to see.

Secret SEO Tip 4: Build links

Link building is still one of the most popular and effective ways to get your website to rank on the first page of Google. This is because by building external links to your site, you’re essentially trying to gain ‘votes’ that will enable you to rank higher than your competitors.

But it’s not enough to just ‘build’ links. In fact, it’s much better to have natural links from other sites that point to your website. This is achieved by website owners or bloggers liking your site and naturally linking it to their blog. So, how do you get these links without paying for them? Easy: write interesting and relevant content that people will naturally link to.

More: Maximising Your Marketing Strategy: The Importance of Repurposing Content

Secret SEO Tip 5: Have strong social accounts

If getting to the first page of Google is starting to sound like a popularity contest, you’re not wrong. There’s a reason why having strong social media accounts is essential to helping you rank: a website that has high quality content and is useful is more likely to have mentions on Facebook and Instagram, and is more likely to be bookmarked and shared among like-minded consumers. This is beneficial because it is like telling Google and other search engines that your page has great information – and others will benefit from it, too.

So, once again, it’s essential to have great content that is share-worthy. In a world where social media handles are the new business cards, it’s also a good idea to have active social media pages that look good.

Let us get your business ranking on page 1 of Google. Speak to us at JTB Studios for a digital strategy that will put your business ahead of your competition.