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5 Proven Ways To Increase Your Google Rankings

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5 Proven Ways To Increase Your Google Rankings

Many things have changed in SEO since Google first came online in 1998.

The one thing that hasn’t changed is this: Your organic traffic is directly related to your search engine ranking positions.

If you have a prolific number of keywords in the Google index and they appear at or near the top of the search results, boundless traffic will follow.

Conversely, if you have a great website, but no visibility in the SERPs, you are destined to have little if any organic search traffic.

In this post, I’m going to break down the steps needed to boost your Google SERPs. That said, I know you are equally interested in knowing the following.

How Long Does It Take To Improve Google Rankings?

I’m going to go out on a limb here and give you the definitive answer, “It depends.”

While I recognize this is frustrating and seems like a copout, it’s the truth. SEO doesn’t happen in a vacuum and every situation offers a unique set of variables.

Skill, budget, the level of competition, and how your website stacks up can all play a role in how quickly one can move the dial.

So, bearing that in mind, let’s break it down in a more quantifiable sense and review what you can do to make things happen sooner, rather than later.

During an episode of AskGooglebot in June of 2021, John Mueller, a Google search rep, said it can take “several hours to several weeks” for Google to index new or updated content. He also warned that just because a page gets indexed, doesn’t mean that it will rank for anything right away, if ever.

Due to the number of factors in play, rapid changes in SERPs should not be expected.

Mueller has said in the past that even if you make drastic changes to your website’s design and functionality, it could still take a couple of months or even a year to have an impact.

This, however, doesn’t mean that you should just sit and wait after you upgrade your site. He mentioned some specific ideas for speeding up indexing, which included:

  • Preventing server overload by making your server and website faster.
  • Prominently linking to new pages.
  • Avoiding the use of unnecessary URLs, like category page filters.
  • Taking advantage of user submission methods like uploading sitemap files, and utilizing the URL inspection tool.

Finally, Mueller reiterated the best way to get ranked is to create high-quality content that searchers will find useful. In his words, make your site “fantastic.”

How To Improve Your Google Rankings

To reach the top 10 SERPs in less than a year takes lots of hard work, skill, and sometimes luck.

And this takes us back to the topic of today’s discussion on how to improve your Google ranking.

So, if you want to boost sales and conversions by taking your website to the first page of Google, here are five steps you should take.

1. Start With A Sound Foundation

Poor website structure and information architecture can doom even the best SEO campaigns.

If your website is difficult for users to navigate and Google to crawl, your rankings are likely to suffer. Pay attention to Core Web Vitals.

Perform A Technical SEO Audit

The Google algorithm incorporates thousands of signals, plus machine learning and AI to determine search rankings.

That said, attending to the basics, even today, will give you an advantage over many competitors. Here are the need-to-know steps for conducting an SEO audit.

2. Deliver A Great Page Experience

Google defines page experience as “a set of signals that measure how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page beyond its pure information value, both on mobile and desktop devices. “

Core Web Vitals

Whether it’s a mobile or desktop site, you must continuously monitor the speed and keep improving it. Specifically, Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).

File Size

For file size, use your favorite image editing program.

Before uploading, you can further optimize the size of the file with apps like Optimizilla, Image Recycle, and Kraken.io.

Lastly, always confirm that the dimensions of the image fit into the reserved image space to retain a clean, structured look of your live webpage.

Browser Caching

When a web browser loads a page, it loads a number of resources. Browser caching stores these resource files locally on the users’ computers.

That way, when a user navigates to a new page, those resources need not be loaded again.

For most, the best way to enable caching is by adding code to the web host/server .htaccess file.

For WordPress, there are free plugins available to accomplish this, like WP SuperCache.

Script Handling

Before loading countless JS and CSS files to enhance your site, make sure that you need those extra augmentations as they end up slowing down your website.

You can also minify your files by stripping comments, for instance, to keep things running fast.

And if it’s possible to merge several scripts into a single file, go for it. That way, there will only be one retrieving call to the server to load all the scripts.

Here are some tools that can help you measure and monitor Core Web Vitals.

Mobile Friendly

With the evolution of search and the mobile-first index, your website needs to pass the Mobile-Friendly Test.

According to Google “… our crawling, indexing, and ranking systems have typically used the desktop version of a page’s content… Mobile-first indexing means that we’ll use the mobile version of the page for indexing and ranking…”

To avoid mobile ranking problems, you should double down on search intent and performance.

HTTPS

Check if your site’s connection is secure. If the page isn’t served over HTTPS, learn how to make it secure.

No Intrusive Interstitials

Intrusive interstitials are page elements that obscure content from the view of users, typically for the purpose of promotion.

3. Optimize Your Pages For Google

It goes without saying that you must write great content that will keep readers engaged so that they can read to the last paragraph.

To quickly win them over your target audience, start with a quick summary intro that tells the readers what they expect to find in that post.

Now, to make your content friendly for Google, some of the best strategies you can implement are:

Tell Google What Your Pages Are About

Do this by adding structured data throughout your site. That way, Google can easily understand what your content is about.

Schema.org is the format preferred by Google. Schema types include recipes, businesses, products, authors, and more.

Keep Your Titles Short

Apart from turning off your readers as it will be impossible for them to get the full info at a glance, extra-long titles will also hurt your keywords’ SEO impact.

To properly fit the SERP length, keep your titles between 135 and 159 characters. SEO plugins can help you identify titles with excessive characters.

Craft Unique Titles & Meta Descriptions

Even though titles and meta descriptions don’t have a direct impact on your website’s ranking, they are quite significant in portraying your content’s value from the SERP.

Thus, if done right, they can boost your click-through rate and subsequently increase your traffic.

So, make sure that you write unique titles with a simple and attractive description that also contains a target keyword.

Additionally, you should also know that if you don’t write your own unique and vivid meta descriptions with target keywords for your pages, Google will auto-generate them.

Obviously, the auto-generated ones won’t be as effective for your site as the ones you have properly crafted. Still, you should also be careful not to stuff your titles and descriptions with keywords.

Be Specific In Your Internal Anchor Text

Get straight to the point if you want your content to rank for a specific keyword.

Many websites out there unknowingly use vague and elusive anchor texts to link to other pages within their site.

This is a huge mistake because it will not be a clear enough anchor to your visitors and even the search engines.

4. Optimize For Search Intent

The evolution of modern search has its roots in Hummingbird, later supplemented by Rankbrain and then BERT.

The end game for Google is to better understand the context of a search to serve up results that match the intent of a given query. In fact, Google’s continued success depends on it.

Four common types of search (a.k.a. user) intent are:

  • Navigational – a search for a particular website.
  • Informational – a search for knowledge.
  • Commercial – a search for data (like reviews) to make an informed purchase decision.
  • Transactional – a search to make a purchase (where to buy).

How To Optimize For Search Intent

  1. Check the SERPs for the keyword phrase that you are interested in ranking for. If the top results don’t align with your page, you aren’t going to rank. In other words, if Google has decided the intent of a search is informational and your page is transactional, that page will not rank well.
  2. In cases where a page does not match the top results/search intent, you have two choices:
    • Edit your page to match the intent.
    • Create a new page to match the intent.

5. Optimize Internal Links

The links on your website must be placed strategically, and you must ensure that all the links are working properly as well. Here are a few tricks to polish your link game.

Link Architecture

The page depth of your site shouldn’t be more than three clicks; an efficiency hack that sometimes people forget.

A proper internal linking strategy will mean that your best pages appear on the first level.

An effective way of doing this is creating a home page section that links directly to your ‘Best-Selling Products’ or ‘Top Categories’.

Fix Broken Links & Duplicates

Some website owners have a habit of ignoring broken links because they don’t realize the impact of the poor user experience they create.

By running a crawl on your site with tools like Sitebulb, you can easily spot the 404 errors and fix them in a jiffy!

Reclaim Your Site Mentions

Reclaim the mentions of your site by setting a Google Alert that will help you keep track of your brand mentions across the internet.

And in case any of the mentions come without being linked back to your site, contact the webmaster and request them to link back!

Takeaway

SEO can seem overwhelming. It’s easy to get caught up in the paralysis of analysis and do nothing.

That said, it’s important to remember that even in 2022, simply paying attention to the basics, as outlined above, will position you for online success.


Featured Image: Kaspars Grinvalds/Shutterstock

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State Of Marketing Data Standards In The AI Era [Webinar]

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State Of Marketing Data Standards In The AI Era [Webinar]

Claravine and Advertiser Perceptions surveyed 140 marketers and agencies to better understand the impact of data standards on marketing data, and they’re ready to present their findings.

Want to learn how you can mitigate privacy risks and boost ROI through data standards?

Watch this on-demand webinar and learn how companies are addressing new privacy laws, taking advantage of AI, and organizing their data to better capture the campaign data they need, as well as how you can implement these findings in your campaigns.

In this webinar, you will:

  • Gain a better understanding of how your marketing data management compares to enterprise advertisers.
  • Get an overview of the current state of data standards and analytics, and how marketers are managing risk while improving the ROI of their programs.
  • Walk away with tactics and best practices that you can use to improve your marketing data now.

Chris Comstock, Chief Growth Officer at Claravine, will show you the marketing data trends of top advertisers and the potential pitfalls that come with poor data standards.

Learn the key ways to level up your data strategy to pinpoint campaign success.

View the slides below or check out the full webinar for all the details.

Join Us For Our Next Webinar!

SaaS Marketing: Expert Paid Media Tips Backed By $150M In Ad Spend

Join us and learn a unique methodology for growth that has driven massive revenue at a lower cost for hundreds of SaaS brands. We’ll dive into case studies backed by real data from over $150 million in SaaS ad spend per year.

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GPT Store Set To Launch In 2024 After ‘Unexpected’ Delays

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GPT Store Set To Launch In 2024 After 'Unexpected' Delays

OpenAI shares its plans for the GPT Store, enhancements to GPT Builder tools, privacy improvements, and updates coming to ChatGPT.

  • OpenAI has scheduled the launch of the GPT Store for early next year, aligning with its ongoing commitment to developing advanced AI technologies.
  • The GPT Builder tools have received substantial updates, including a more intuitive configuration interface and improved file handling capabilities.
  • Anticipation builds for upcoming updates to ChatGPT, highlighting OpenAI’s responsiveness to community feedback and dedication to AI innovation.

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96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here’s How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023]

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96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023]

It’s no secret that the web is growing by millions, if not billions of pages per day.

Our Content Explorer tool discovers 10 million new pages every 24 hours while being very picky about the pages that qualify for inclusion. The “main” Ahrefs web crawler crawls that number of pages every two minutes. 

But how much of this content gets organic traffic from Google?

To find out, we took the entire database from our Content Explorer tool (around 14 billion pages) and studied how many pages get traffic from organic search and why.

How many web pages get organic search traffic?

96.55% of all pages in our index get zero traffic from Google, and 1.94% get between one and ten monthly visits.

Distribution of pages by traffic from Content Explorer

Before we move on to discussing why the vast majority of pages never get any search traffic from Google (and how to avoid being one of them), it’s important to address two discrepancies with the studied data:

  1. ~14 billion pages may seem like a huge number, but it’s not the most accurate representation of the entire web. Even compared to the size of Site Explorer’s index of 340.8 billion pages, our sample size for this study is quite small and somewhat biased towards the “quality side of the web.”
  2. Our search traffic numbers are estimates. Even though our database of ~651 million keywords in Site Explorer (where our estimates come from) is arguably the largest database of its kind, it doesn’t contain every possible thing people search for in Google. There’s a chance that some of these pages get search traffic from super long-tail keywords that are not popular enough to make it into our database.

That said, these two “inaccuracies” don’t change much in the grand scheme of things: the vast majority of published pages never rank in Google and never get any search traffic. 

But why is this, and how can you be a part of the minority that gets organic search traffic from Google?

Well, there are hundreds of SEO issues that may prevent your pages from ranking well in Google. But if we focus only on the most common scenarios, assuming the page is indexed, there are only three of them.

Reason 1: The topic has no search demand

If nobody is searching for your topic, you won’t get any search traffic—even if you rank #1.

For example, I recently Googled “pull sitemap into google sheets” and clicked the top-ranking page (which solved my problem in seconds, by the way). But if you plug that URL into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, you’ll see that it gets zero estimated organic search traffic:

The top-ranking page for this topic gets no traffic because there's no search demandThe top-ranking page for this topic gets no traffic because there's no search demand

This is because hardly anyone else is searching for this, as data from Keywords Explorer confirms:

Keyword data from Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer confirms that this topic has no search demandKeyword data from Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer confirms that this topic has no search demand

This is why it’s so important to do keyword research. You can’t just assume that people are searching for whatever you want to talk about. You need to check the data.

Our Traffic Potential (TP) metric in Keywords Explorer can help with this. It estimates how much organic search traffic the current top-ranking page for a keyword gets from all the queries it ranks for. This is a good indicator of the total search demand for a topic.

You’ll see this metric for every keyword in Keywords Explorer, and you can even filter for keywords that meet your minimum criteria (e.g., 500+ monthly traffic potential): 

Filtering for keywords with Traffic Potential (TP) in Ahrefs' Keywords ExplorerFiltering for keywords with Traffic Potential (TP) in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

Reason 2: The page has no backlinks

Backlinks are one of Google’s top three ranking factors, so it probably comes as no surprise that there’s a clear correlation between the number of websites linking to a page and its traffic.

Pages with more referring domains get more trafficPages with more referring domains get more traffic
Pages with more referring domains get more traffic

Same goes for the correlation between a page’s traffic and keyword rankings:

Pages with more referring domains rank for more keywordsPages with more referring domains rank for more keywords
Pages with more referring domains rank for more keywords

Does any of this data prove that backlinks help you rank higher in Google?

No, because correlation does not imply causation. However, most SEO professionals will tell you that it’s almost impossible to rank on the first page for competitive keywords without backlinks—an observation that aligns with the data above.

The key word there is “competitive.” Plenty of pages get organic traffic while having no backlinks…

Pages with more referring domains get more trafficPages with more referring domains get more traffic
How much traffic pages with no backlinks get

… but from what I can tell, almost all of them are about low-competition topics.

For example, this lyrics page for a Neil Young song gets an estimated 162 monthly visits with no backlinks: 

Example of a page with traffic but no backlinks, via Ahrefs' Content ExplorerExample of a page with traffic but no backlinks, via Ahrefs' Content Explorer

But if we check the keywords it ranks for, they almost all have Keyword Difficulty (KD) scores in the single figures:

Some of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks forSome of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks for

It’s the same story for this page selling upholstered headboards:

Some of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks forSome of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks for

You might have noticed two other things about these pages:

  • Neither of them get that much traffic. This is pretty typical. Our index contains ~20 million pages with no referring domains, yet only 2,997 of them get more than 1K search visits per month. That’s roughly 1 in every 6,671 pages with no backlinks.
  • Both of the sites they’re on have high Domain Rating (DR) scores. This metric shows the relative strength of a website’s backlink profile. Stronger sites like these have more PageRank that they can pass to pages with internal links to help them rank. 

Bottom line? If you want your pages to get search traffic, you really only have two options:

  1. Target uncompetitive topics that you can rank for with few or no backlinks.
  2. Target competitive topics and build backlinks to rank.

If you want to find uncompetitive topics, try this:

  1. Enter a topic into Keywords Explorer
  2. Go to the Matching terms report
  3. Set the Keyword Difficulty (KD) filter to max. 20
  4. Set the Lowest DR filter to your site’s DR (this will show you keywords with at least one of the same or lower DR ranking in the top 5)
Filtering for low-competition keywords in Ahrefs' Keywords ExplorerFiltering for low-competition keywords in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

(Remember to keep an eye on the TP column to make sure they have traffic potential.)

To rank for more competitive topics, you’ll need to earn or build high-quality backlinks to your page. If you’re not sure how to do that, start with the guides below. Keep in mind that it’ll be practically impossible to get links unless your content adds something to the conversation. 

Reason 3. The page doesn’t match search intent

Google wants to give users the most relevant results for a query. That’s why the top organic results for “best yoga mat” are blog posts with recommendations, not product pages. 

It's obviously what searchers want when they search for "best yoga mats"It's obviously what searchers want when they search for "best yoga mats"

Basically, Google knows that searchers are in research mode, not buying mode.

It’s also why this page selling yoga mats doesn’t show up, despite it having backlinks from more than six times more websites than any of the top-ranking pages:

Page selling yoga mats that has lots of backlinksPage selling yoga mats that has lots of backlinks
Number of linking websites to the top-ranking pages for "best yoga mats"Number of linking websites to the top-ranking pages for "best yoga mats"

Luckily, the page ranks for thousands of other more relevant keywords and gets tens of thousands of monthly organic visits. So it’s not such a big deal that it doesn’t rank for “best yoga mats.”

Number of keyword rankings for the page selling yoga matsNumber of keyword rankings for the page selling yoga mats

However, if you have pages with lots of backlinks but no organic traffic—and they already target a keyword with traffic potential—another quick SEO win is to re-optimize them for search intent.

We did this in 2018 with our free backlink checker.

It was originally nothing but a boring landing page explaining the benefits of our product and offering a 7-day trial: 

Original landing page for our free backlink checkerOriginal landing page for our free backlink checker

After analyzing search intent, we soon realized the issue:

People weren’t looking for a landing page, but rather a free tool they could use right away. 

So, in September 2018, we created a free tool and published it under the same URL. It ranked #1 pretty much overnight, and has remained there ever since. 

Our rankings over time for the keyword "backlink checker." You can see when we changed the pageOur rankings over time for the keyword "backlink checker." You can see when we changed the page

Organic traffic went through the roof, too. From ~14K monthly organic visits pre-optimization to almost ~200K today. 

Estimated search traffic over time to our free backlink checkerEstimated search traffic over time to our free backlink checker

TLDR

96.55% of pages get no organic traffic. 

Keep your pages in the other 3.45% by building backlinks, choosing topics with organic traffic potential, and matching search intent.

Ping me on Twitter if you have any questions. 🙂



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