SEO
5 Ultimate SEO Hacks To Get A First-Class Flight To Google’s First Page
How do you get on the first page of Google?
Many of our prospects, clients, even friends, keep asking this question when it comes to SEO.
The main reason behind this question is that the first page of Google is probably the most coveted place globally nowadays. Everyone wants to be on Google’s first page.
Millions of websites are furiously combating to rank higher on search engines.
Google receives over 63,000 searches per second daily.
SEO has never been this competitive as it is in 2019, with Google’s algorithms perpetually morphing.
Back in 2006, all you needed were a couple of keywords; squeeze them into your half-baked article and voila, you are on the first page! Today, it is much more difficult.
The big boys in your industry have loads of pounds or dollar wads allocated to their SEO. As a medium-sized business, you possibly don’t have such financial luxury. Therefore you have to strive for maximal results from every hard-earned dollar you invest in your SEO.
Here is a 5-step guide to enjoying a first-class flight to Google’s first page.
1. Focus on Keywords with High Organic Click-Through-Rate (CTR)
SEO is strategically built on keywords. You may be a dazzling blogger.
However, if you don’t optimise your content around strategic keywords, only your parents would visit your website (mainly to encourage you not to give up).
To enjoy maximal digital visibility for your content via SEO, you must leverage on keywords with high-organic click through rates.
Ahrefs is a fantastic SEO tool to discover such valuable keywords with attractive organic CTR in whatever niche you choose. The ideal keyword should show substantial search volume and click percentage.
“An average person conducts 3–4 searches every single day.”
These stats show that many of your targeted readers are searching for this kind of keywords on Google. Therefore, the more consolidated your chances are of popping up in their search results.
If you thought that is all the work involved, then I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed — this is only the beginning.
2. Study What’s Working on Google’s First Page
So you have identified a very promising keyword with loads of search volume. Congrats! The work just began. Although before you start writing, we have to scrutinise Google’s first page for that specific keyword rigorously. When you input the keyword into Google’s search bar, take time to explore the first ten search results.
What is working? Could you spot a content approach of case studies, guides, or list articles? What you see will give you a more accurate idea of the winning formula. Now you can adopt or tweak inventively.
As a small and medium-sized enterprise, you need to consider the keyword difficulty as well. The keyword difficulty score indicates the relative intensity of the competition for that keyword. It refers to the bulk of SEO labour required to rank efficiently for that designated keyword. This score runs from 0 to 1.
Where we have a keyword difficulty score of over 0.8, it may be a nut too hard to crack. The competition is energetic and dense, thus breaking into the top pages would be quite an arduous task.
Therefore, we will cut our coat to our cloth as smaller brands and aim for keywords with a difficulty score of 0.5 or lower. Here the “bouncers” preventing you from getting into the top search engines are less unfriendly.
On the overall, here are the stipulations of our keyword optimisation constitution:
- monthly searches for a keyword should exceed 5,000
- The keyword difficulty must not exceed 0.5
- The search engine results for the first page should have minimum one website with domain authority lesser than 50
- The search engine results should have changed however slightly in the last five months
Great, now that you have the ideal keyword. It’s time to start writing.
3. Put Effort into Your On-Page SEO Optimisation
If there is anywhere a distinction that matters most, it is here in your content! Here is the truth: Google loves its readers. It wants to feed them to stupor with valuable content! The first page is reserved for the best. Don’t mix with the crowd, STAND OUT! Your content needs to sparkle with uncommonness; do it better!
The skyscraper technique has been winning it for quite a while now. Here you deliciously load your content with lots of actionable information enough to be a “balanced diet” for any reader.
It is crucial to building your on-page optimisation. For years, we have heard about internal links. And yes, they still work – so long you are not messing things up!
There might be some of your website pages that have accumulated many backlinks boasting high authority.
You can share a bit of the vibe to other pages by linking that high-authority page to the page for which you are now seeking to amplify its authority.
Don’t forget that in your internal links, you have to leverage more on keyword-rich anchor texts.
It would interest you to learn that in SEO, Google loves shorter URLs than longer URLs. Accordingly, ensure the pages you are interlinking have shorter URLs, preferably the primary keyword each page is built on.
Your on-site SEO page optimisation is very connected to your site speed. Make sure you are using a sleek and responsive contemporary website design, not some appalling 1998 theme.
Also, if it is possible, start your titles with your keywords. More importantly, ensure that the keyword for that page is smartly integrated into the first 100 words.
Now you may be curious about how you can accumulate links to your page. We will discuss this shortly.
4. Create Visually Appealing Content for Your Website
Who doesn’t love beautiful things? Everyone does! It is thus unsurprising that Google loves this kind of content as well.
Despite the overwhelming value of your content, you should also optimise it visually for your readers’ eyes.
Do you think your readers are going to read through about 2,000 words of text without some captivating graphics? In some cases, this might be even the case, but the majority wouldn’t. A staggering 32% of marketers claim visual images are fundamental for their company’s content creation.
Flavour Your Content with Images and Graphics
Infographic from OneSpot displays some statistics showing the power of visuals.
Here is another underrated weapon for winning the SEO competition: Infographics. They do very well online compared to any other content. Readers are 3x more likely to share your infographics. Why is that? According to MIT, 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual.
And a humongous 65% of humans are visual learners.
Infographics display current data in a fresh, compelling way, and they’re easy to consume. It encourages your audience to keep reading to the last sentence, and improves the overall user experience. Read more about actionable tips to improve user experience.
Have you ever wondered why you tend to forget the books you read last week but can still remember some scenes with Keanu Reeves’ in 1999’s Matrix? It is the overwhelming power of visuals.
Few bloggers have been able to maximise the enormous potential encased in infographics.
Allow us to sprinkle a tablespoon of statistics here to juice things up:
- Visuals with colour increase people’s willingness to read a piece of content by 80%
- Infographics can increase web traffic by 12%
- Posts that include images receive 650% higher engagement than text-only posts.
- Content with relevant images gets 94% more views than content without related images
Now, how exciting do you find these figures?
5. Speed Up Your Domain Authority (DA)
Increasing your domain authority is the fast and furious way of breaking into Google first page! We will dig into this more.
Domain Authority (DA) is a brainchild of MOZ, and it estimates how well your website will rank on search engines like Google or Bing.
If you have a high DA score of around 80, you are a celebrated website. Then your chances are very high of appearing in top search engine page results. A DA of 15-25 shows there is yet more work to be done. Your Domain authority also has a lot to do with the backlinks you have amassed for your website.
Before you jump on piling up backlinks to your website, ensure to start with a backlink audit. This audit will help to figure out if there are any broken or unhealthy links that Google may suspect to be malicious.
You can use SEMrush’s backlink audit for this expedition. After that, we can now talk about getting high-quality links for the website.
Now it’s time where strategic guest posting comes in handily. Many bloggers want to aggressively pump up their DA rating that they end up littering low-authority links on their website. This method will not help your cause. Backlinks from high authority websites are your best shot.
In reality, it’s very challenging to get websites with high DA to link back to your content on your website. If you don’t have a huge SEO budget to build your backlinks, you may want to establish strategic relationships with top influencers in your niche.
Keep in mind that you cannot jump on influencers and get them to linking back to your website at gunpoint. Here many bloggers get it wrong. They don’t build relationships; they almost stalk.
Relationships must be symbiotic and mutual. It must be a win-win scenario, although not entirely equal. At least, both parties must have a slice of fortune to gain from the relationship.
If we were going to accept a guest post from you to link to your blog, we wouldn’t take regurgitated content from you. Sadly, we keep seeing many websites publishing content that looks like scooped off the first pages of Google.
It would only be fair that as you build your domain authority via guest posts, you also contribute value to that website owner’s audience.
Come to think of it; it takes very long, and there is tons of work involved to build an audience. No sane website would want to feed their readers guest posts that are not adding any value to their audience.
This is the reason why we advocate that before you pitch your guest post to a website, take some brief time to walk through their recent blogs.
This way, the chances of replicating an already addressed topic are downsized.
Ideally, it wouldn’t be that easy landing a guest post on 90+ as a small business. This is because aside from the extraordinariness of your guest post, your credibility matters. However, it is possible to get guest posts on websites with DA of 50+.
There are a lot of websites in this DA category accepting guest posts as long your content is spot on and unique. Narrow them and pitch those websites who meet your criteria. Here is where you avoid that propensity to spam and bug.
When you pitch a guest post, try your best not to sound too generic or like a robot. One of the most irresistible elements of a captivating pitch is personalisation — appeal to individuals, not crowds. Everyone, especially website owners prefer that specific and individual approach.
Conclusion
Wow! There you are with an extensive hack of how to fly to Google’s first page with a first-class ticket.
These approaches are not some hypothetical works of imagination. They are tested and proven systems that work. These methods have been repeatedly deployed in speeding up the rankings of several websites.
So are you worried that your desired audience is avoiding your website as diligently as one avoids his creditors? Try out these valuable techniques and watch your monthly website visitors go up significantly.
You can expect great results from these hacks, but you also need to stay patient as it won’t happen overnight. Stay consistent. Start with finding high-value keywords in your industry. Optimise your content and make it visually appealing to your website visitors. Build your domain authority by publishing guest posts full of value on domains with high authority.
We have been using these techniques to rank our clients’ websites for some time now. And it works!
Do you think you don’t have time to all SEO & content marketing related tasks by yourself because someone has to run your daily operations? No problem, let’s have a friendly chat and see if we are a good fit for each other.