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Who doesn’t aspire to secure top-notch rankings on Google? It’s a universally accepted fact that the higher your website ranks on Google, the more traffic you draw, amplifying your online presence and credibility. However, the process of “ranking higher” is relative, diverse, and depends on numerous factors. This comprehensive guide aims to unravel the complexities of achieving top Google rankings and illustrates various strategies in a beginner-to-advanced sequence. Whether you’re a novice or a seasoned professional, this guide will serve the purpose of enhancing your understanding and proficiency in SEO.
Basics of Google Ranking
This section primarily unravels the rudimentary elements of SEO for those who are venturing into the world of SEO. It’s crucial to understand and implement these fundamental strategies if you’re aiming to climb the Google ranking ladder.
1. Identifying Appropriate Keywords
The initial step in your SEO journey involves determining the keywords you aspire to rank for. These keywords should be relevant to your business and should align with your potential customers’ searches. To identify suitable keywords, you can employ various keyword research tools.
Here are some factors to consider when identifying the best keywords for Google ranking:
- Volume: The frequency of the term being searched monthly.
- Competition: The difficulty level to rank for the particular keyword.
- Your domain authority: The domain authority of your website influences how effortlessly you can rank for keywords. If your site has been operational for a significant duration and has consistently published high-quality content, it becomes easier to rank.
- Relevance: There is no point in ranking for a keyword that won’t drive qualified traffic to your site.
Pro Tip: If you’re initiating your SEO strategy, it’s recommended to start with keywords that have low volume and low competition. This will help you gain momentum and gradually build your SEO strategy.
2. Understanding Keyword Intent
Keyword intent can be divided into four primary types: informational, commercial, transactional, and navigational. For SEO purposes, you’re primarily looking at informational intent keywords. However, it’s crucial to delve into the exact nature of information the person is seeking when they search that keyword.
3. Creating Lengthy, Detailed Content
The key to high Google rankings lies in generating in-depth, lengthy content on the keyword you’re targeting. This is most evident with blog posts, but you can also implement this for landing pages.
Pro Tip: Google isn’t a fan of thin, insubstantial content. So, skip the superficial elements and focus on creating substantial, insightful content.
4. On-Page SEO Practices
On-page SEO forms the backbone of high Google rankings. Here’s a quick checklist:
- Keyword placement: Your keyword should appear in your meta title, meta description, at least two H2s, image file names, image alt text, the URL, and naturally in the body of your page.
- Internal linking: Add links to the page from at least three other pages on your site.
- External linking: Include 1-3 links on your page to relevant, trusted pages.
- Optimize meta description: Keep it within 155-165 characters and communicate the value the reader will gain by clicking on your page.
Implementing Long-Tail Keywords
Once you’ve mastered the basics of ranking on Google, the next step involves enhancing your current standing. This is where long-tail keywords come into play.
5. Targeting Long-Tail, Question Keywords
Long-tail question keywords serve as a bonus because they provide opportunities to appear higher than the top results for broader, high-volume keywords–through the “People Also Ask” section.
Pro Tip: Don’t target “People Also Ask” questions solely for the purpose of ranking on Google through them. Instead, target long-tail question keywords primarily for ranking for that keyword, with the secondary goal to gain some extra ranking through the “People Also Ask” section.
6. Making Your Information Easily Digestible
In the current scenario, Google is focusing on providing answers rather than just a list of pages. To optimize for this, make your content easy to skim. This way, Google can extract snippets of your content to build answer-y results like with the Featured Snippet, Passage Ranking, and even meta descriptions.
7. Making Clear Statements
When you’re targeting question keywords, ensure you have a clear statement in your post that provides a distinct answer while restating the question.
8. Including Valuable Visuals
Including images on your page can help it rank higher in several ways. However, for blog posts that you want to rank higher, generic stock images and empty graphics won’t suffice. You need images that illustrate concepts, add value, and align with the keyword’s intent.
Pro Tip: Make a title card image if you see that such images are appearing in search results.
9. Including a Table of Contents
A table of contents is an easy element to add to your blog posts that Google seems to appreciate. Often, Google adds those links directly to a post’s meta description.
10. Making Your Meta Titles Straightforward
Your SEO title, or meta title, is the title that appears on the actual SERP. Google doesn’t give you much room for creativity here. More often than not, a title similar to what’s already ranking on page one is the way to go.
Achieving Highest Google Rankings
For achieving even higher rankings or improving your rank for really hard keywords, consider the following strategies.
11. Garnering Backlinks
A backlink is a link to your page from another website, and these are a heavily weighted ranking factor.
12. Mining Your Search Queries
Search Console can tell you what queries are leading people to see your page in search results and which ones are leading them to click. This can help you find additional headings to add to a page and additional keywords to target with their own pages.
13. Creating Video Content
Video content is increasingly showing up on the SERP. For certain keywords, it could be the only opportunity you have to rank higher.
14. Targeting Pages Already Ranking
It’s sometimes easier to move a post from position nine to position four than from page nine to page four.
Pro Tip: Use an SEO tool like Ahrefs or Semrush to filter your organic keywords by position and see if you have any pages that fit this bill, then see if you can reoptimize it.
15. Conducting a SERP Analysis
If you’re really keen to rank at the top for a particular keyword, you’ll want to conduct a SERP analysis to see exactly what it will require–and if it’s realistic.
16. Adding Schema Markup
Schema.org markup isn’t a ranking factor, but it can help improve your visibility in search results and make your results more clickable.
17. Monitoring Your Technical SEO
There are plenty of page-level optimizations you can do to improve your ranking, like ensuring that your images are compressed and sized properly and that there are no indexation issues.
In-depth Understanding of Long-Tail Keywords
Long-tail keywords are specific queries that provide search engines with not just what words users want to know about but why they want to know them. They are less competitive than broader keywords, making it easier to rank for them. Moreover, they attract more qualified traffic to your website as they are more targeted, which can increase the chances of conversions.
Integration of Long-Tail Keywords in Blog Posts
What do you want from your content marketing? Traffic is probably the first thing on your mind, followed by conversions. Long-tail keywords can bring you both. By gradually replacing those paid clicks with organic traffic, not only do you save money, but you could see better results.
Factors Affecting Long-Tail Keyword Ranking
The answer is quite simple–relevance and specificity. Long-tail keywords that are more specific and targeted to these needs are more likely to match the searcher’s intent, making them more likely to rank higher in search results.
Effectively Incorporating Long-Tail Keywords
Long-tail keywords are essential for any business. It doesn’t matter how authoritative your site is; the sheer volume of long-tail keywords means they’re something you can’t ignore.
But how do you incorporate them into your content?
1. Setting Content Marketing Objectives
What do you want to achieve with your blog post? Your honest answer can help you create user-friendly blog posts that rank high in keyword search results.
2. Creating Buyer Personas to Understand User Intent
If you’re going to match user intent, you’ve got to understand the people searching for your products/services. Buyer personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers based on real data and research about your target audience.
3. Researching and Selecting Your Long-Tail Keywords
You have to be picky about your long-tail keywords. They may have lower search volumes than head keywords, but their conversion rates are usually very high.
4. Writing the Content
Your content is there to help your visitors answer questions and solve problems, and keywords firmly take a back seat to this.
Debunking Long-Tail Keyword Myths
Despite the plethora of success stories stemming from the use of long-tail keywords, there are still some misconceptions about them. Here are four of the most common myths:
- Target only long-tail keywords: This is not the best approach. If you over-optimize for either short-tail or long-tail keywords, you risk getting penalized by Google.
- Always use the exact long-tail keywords in your headline: This might seem harmless, but it’s not the best approach. Sure, there are several benefits to targeting this type of key term, but there are also drawbacks.
- Long-tail key phrases are less expensive: Most pay-per-click advertisers think this is true, but it’s not always so. Dig deeper, and you might find some expensive long-tail phrases.
- You should aim to be on the first page of Google results: Even though SEOs, bloggers, website owners, and content marketers want that No. 1 Google ranking for their most profitable keywords, that’s not a good goal to adopt.
Tools for Long-Tail Keyword Research
Manual SEO is a waste of time. You don’t have to build links with fancy tools, but you can research keywords and track ranking positions with helpful SEO tools. Here are some tools you can use to research long-tail keywords:
- AnswerThePublic: This tool gives you insight into real-life queries that users are typing into search engines, making it a goldmine of long-tail keyword opportunities.
- Google’s autocomplete feature: Just begin entering your head term into Google and see what autopopulates.
- KWFinder: This tool offers SERP analysis, rank tracking, SEO difficulty, and more, making it great for identifying long-tail keywords that your site can compete for.
- Semrush: Much like KWFinder, Semrush’s keyword research tool is great for identifying long-tail and short-tail keywords alike.
Conclusion
Search engines want to see you provide your users with the best possible experience. To do this, you’ve got to understand your target audience and how they search. Long-tail keyword research should be a big part of your content marketing strategy. Successfully incorporating these keywords into your content will enable you to match user intent and give your visitors a great experience.
When you boost your traffic and engage users better by using the language they use to search, it can bring significant results for your website.
