Connect with us

SEO

How to Get on the First Page of Google in 2023

Published

on

How to Get on the First Page of Google in 2023

If you rank on page two of Google or beyond, you’re practically invisible.

In fact, almost all of the traffic to our blog comes from first-page Google rankings:

93% of our blog traffic comes from first-page Google rankings

Unfortunately, nobody can guarantee first-page Google rankings. But you can improve your chances of getting them by following a logical process.

Here it is:

How to get on the first page of Google

Let’s go through it step by step.

Sidenote.

If you run a local business, read our guide to local SEO instead because there are two main ways to rank on the first page.

Advertisement

1. Make sure your page aligns with search intent

Google wants to rank the type of pages that searchers are looking for. Unless your page aligns with the searcher’s intent, it’ll be near impossible to rank on the first page.

Unfortunately, it’s impossible to say for sure what searchers want. But as the point of Google is to rank the most relevant results, you can get a good idea by looking for the most common type, format, and angle of the pages ranking on page one.

Content type

The results you see ranking on the first page will usually be one of these: 

  • Blog posts
  • Interactive tools
  • Videos
  • Product pages
  • Category pages

For example, all first-page results for “days between dates” are interactive calculators:

A few of the interactive calculators ranking on the first page for "days between dates"

For “sweaters,” they’re all e-commerce category pages:

A few of the e-commerce category pages ranking on the first page for "sweaters"
How to Get on the First Page of Google in

Content format

This applies mainly to blog posts. If you’re mainly seeing this content type on the first page, check to see which of these formats appears the most: 

  • Step-by-step tutorials (i.e., how to do x)
  • Listicles
  • Opinion pieces
  • Reviews
  • Comparisons (e.g., x vs. y)

For example, you can tell that most results for “how to get on the first page of google” are step-by-step tutorials from the page titles:

Examples of "how to" guides ranking on the first page for "how to get on the first page of google"

For “best chrome extensions for seo,” on the other hand, they’re mostly listicles:

Examples of listicles ranking on the first page for "best chrome extensions for seo"

Content angle

This is harder to quantify than type and format, but it’s basically the most common unique selling proposition. 

For example, almost all first-page results for “best savings account” have 2023 in their titles:

Examples of fresh results on the first page for "best savings account"

This indicates that searchers are looking for fresh information.

On the other hand, most first-page results for “blogging tips and tricks” are aimed at beginners:

Advertisement
Examples of beginners' guides on the first page for "blogging tips and tricks"

Can’t align your page with search intent?

It’s best to switch gears and target a more relevant keyword. If you try to force an irrelevant page to rank, you’ll be fighting a losing battle.

2. Make sure your page covers the topic in full

Having content that broadly aligns with search intent isn’t enough. It also needs to cover everything searchers want to know or expect to see.

For example, every first-page result for “mens sneakers” has a size filter:

Every first-page result for "mens sneakers" has a size filter

This is because searchers will inevitably want to filter for shoes that actually fit. 

Similarly, all first-page results for “best mens sneakers” break down recommendations into categories like the best for walking, running, or cross training.

Advertisement
Every first-page result for "best mens sneakers" breaks recommendations into categories

This is because the “best” sneakers depend on the activity you need them for.

Here are a few ways to find what searchers may be expecting to see covered on your page:

Look for commonalities among first-page results

This is a manual process where you open and eyeball the pages that rank. 

For example, many first-page results for “best running shoes for flat feet” talk about the best budget option: 

Many first-page results for "best running shoes for flat feet" talk about the best budget option

Look for common keyword mentions on first-page results

Here’s how to do this with Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer:

  1. Enter your keyword
  2. Choose your target country
  3. Go to the Related terms report
  4. Toggle “Also talk about”
  5. Toggle “Top 10” 
Finding common keyword mentions on first-page results with Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

For example, many first-page results for “best running shoes for flat feet” mention “arch support” and “muscle weakness”: 

Common keyword mentions across pages ranking for "best running shoes for flat feet"

These are obviously problems that folks with flat feet care about, so your content should address them.

Look for common keyword rankings among first-page results

Here’s how to do this with Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer:

  1. Enter your keyword
  2. Choose your target country
  3. Go to the Related terms report
  4. Toggle “Also rank for”
  5. Toggle “Top 10” 

For example, the first-page results for “best running shoes for flat feet” frequently also rank for keywords related to support:

Common keyword rankings for pages ranking for "best running shoes for flat feet"

This is clearly an important quality that flat-footed searchers are looking for in a pair of running shoes.

If you’d prefer to see common keyword rankings for specific top-ranking pages, use the Content Gap tool in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer. The quickest way to do this is to enter your keyword in Keywords Explorer, scroll to the SERP overview, and then: 

  1. Select which first-page results to include in the gap analysis.
  2. Click “Open in” and choose “Content gap.”
How to send top-ranking pages for a content gap analysis from Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

For example, these three pages all rank on the first page for “best brooks for flat feet”:

Example of a common keyword ranking for three of the top results

This tells you that some searchers are looking for the best options from this brand (Brooks), so you should probably include them in your post.

Advertisement

3. Make sure your page is optimized for on-page SEO

Google looks at things on the page itself to help decide if it should rank. This is where on-page SEO comes in. 

Most on-page signals are only small ranking factors. However, as most of them are quick to change and fully within your control, they’re worth optimizing. 

Let’s look at a few easy things you can do to improve on-page SEO.

Mention your keyword in the URL

Google says to avoid lengthiness and use words that are relevant to your site’s content in your URLs. This doesn’t mean that you have to use your target keyword. But it makes sense, as it’s short and describes your page. 

For example, the target keyword for this post is “how to get on the first page of google,” so that’s what we used for the URL.

Advertisement
Example of a URL used with the target keyword in mind

Mention your keyword in the title tag

A title tag is a bit of HTML code that wraps around the page title. You’ll often see it displayed in search engine results, social networks like Twitter, and browser tabs.

The title tag shows up in browser tabs

Google’s John Mueller says it’s only a tiny ranking factor, but we think it’s still a good place to mention your keyword. Just make sure to do it naturally.

Wrap the visible page title in an H1 tag

H1 tags are HTML code used to mark up page titles.

How H1s look in the code vs. on the page

Google is a bit unclear on the importance of H1 tags. John is on record saying that they’re not critical for search ranking, but Google’s official documentation says to “place the title of your article in a prominent spot above the article body, such as in a <h1> tag.”

Our advice is to use one per page for the page title and to include your keyword where relevant.

Use subheadings to improve readability

Google uses subheadings to try to better understand the content on the page. 

This doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a ranking factor, but they improve your content by making it easier to digest and skim. That can have an indirect impact on SEO.

Our advice is to use subheadings for important subtopics.

Subheadings improve readability by creating visual hierarchy

Showcase the author’s expertise

Google wants to rank content written by experts, so it’s important to demonstrate that expertise on the page. 

Here are a few ways Google suggests to do that:

Advertisement
  • Provide clear sourcing
  • Provide background information about the author
  • Keep the content free of easily verified factual errors

Here’s a great example from Healthline:

Example of how to showcase the author's expertise on the page

4. Make sure your page is internally linked

Internal links are backlinks from one page on your website to another.

Generally speaking, the more of these a page has, the more PageRank (PR) it will receive. That’s good because Google still uses PR to help rank webpages.

Let’s look at a few ways to find relevant internal linking opportunities. 

Use the Internal Link Opportunities report in Ahrefs’ Site Audit

This report finds on-site mentions of words and phrases your page already ranks for. It’s free to use with an Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT) account. 

Here’s how to use it: 

Advertisement
  1. Go to Site Audit (and choose your project)
  2. Click the Internal link opportunities report
  3. Search for the URL of the page you want to rank on the first page, and choose “Target URL” from the dropdown
Using the Internal Link Opportunities tool in Site Audit to find internal links to add

For example, as our keyword research guide ranks for “keyword research,” the report finds unlinked mentions of that keyword on our site. We can then internally link those words and phrases to our guide. 

Use the Page Explorer tool in Ahrefs’ Site Audit

This tool shows all kinds of data about the pages on your website, but you can apply filters to find internal linking opportunities. It’s free to use with Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT)

How’s how to use it: 

  1. Go to Site Audit (and choose your project)
  2. Click the Page Explorer tool
  3. Click “Advanced filter”
  4. Set the first rule to URL Not contains [URL of the page you want to add internal links to]
  5. Set the second rule to Internal outlinks Not contains [URL of the page you want to add internal links to]
  6. Set the third rule to Page text Contains [keyword you want to rank for on the first page]
Using the Page Explorer in Ahrefs' Site Audit to find internal link opportunities

For example, the tool tells us that our pogo-sticking guide mentions the keyword “free keyword research tools” but doesn’t link to our list of free keyword tools

If we open the page and search for this keyword, we see a clear opportunity for a relevant internal link:

Example of an unlinked keyword mention on a page

Use Google

If you search Google for site:yourwebsite.com "keyword", you’ll see all pages on your website that mention the keyword. 

For example, it tells us that our keyword research guide mentions “free keyword research tools”:

Searching for internal link opportunities in Google

The problem with this tactic is that it doesn’t tell you whether there’s already an internal link. 

In fact, in this case, the internal link is already there:

Example of an opportunity that's already linked

This makes it time-consuming and inefficient compared to the previous methods.

Advertisement

5. Make sure you have enough backlinks

Backlinks are an important ranking factor. If you don’t rank on the first page of Google by now, it’s probably because you don’t have enough of them. 

But how many backlinks do you need, and how do you get them?

Given that some backlinks are more powerful than others, it’s impossible to say exactly how many you’ll need to rank on the first page. However, we do offer a rough estimate below the Keyword Difficulty score shown in Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer

Very rough estimation of how many backlinks you'll need to rank on the first page in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

Just remember to take this number with a very large pinch of salt, as it’s far from an exact science.

For example, Ahrefs estimates that you’ll need backlinks from ~53 websites to rank on the first page for “cardigan sweater.” But if you plug one of the first-page results into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer (or our free backlink checker), you’ll see it only has links from two referring domains.

Number of websites linking to the top-ranking result for "cardigan sweater"

This happens for two reasons:

  1. Backlinks aren’t the only ranking factor – There are other ranking factors that matter. 
  2. Some backlinks are more powerful than others – You’ll need fewer of these to rank. 

If you think you need more backlinks to rank, check out the resources below or take our free link building course. Just know that building backlinks can be challenging, so it may take a while to build enough to rank for competitive keywords.

Final thoughts

Following this process should help you rank on the first page of Google, but it still takes time.

Advertisement

How much time? It’s hard to say. But our poll of 4,300 SEOs revealed that 83.8% think SEO takes three months or more to show results.

Results of our survey asking how long SEO takes

It’s also true that unless you rank high on Google’s first page, you likely won’t get much traffic.

For example, we rank #8 for “what is affiliate marketing.” But despite having a monthly search volume of 30K, the keyword only sends us an estimated 885 monthly visits from the U.S.

Our current ranking position for "what is affiliate marketing," via Ahrefs' Site Explorer

So once you’re on the first page, your goal should be to rank #1. 

Following these two guides will help: 

Got questions? Leave a comment or ping me on Twitter.



Source link

Advertisement
Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address

SEO

How Compression Can Be Used To Detect Low Quality Pages

Published

on

By

Compression can be used by search engines to detect low-quality pages. Although not widely known, it's useful foundational knowledge for SEO.

The concept of Compressibility as a quality signal is not widely known, but SEOs should be aware of it. Search engines can use web page compressibility to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords, making it useful knowledge for SEO.

Although the following research paper demonstrates a successful use of on-page features for detecting spam, the deliberate lack of transparency by search engines makes it difficult to say with certainty if search engines are applying this or similar techniques.

What Is Compressibility?

In computing, compressibility refers to how much a file (data) can be reduced in size while retaining essential information, typically to maximize storage space or to allow more data to be transmitted over the Internet.

TL/DR Of Compression

Compression replaces repeated words and phrases with shorter references, reducing the file size by significant margins. Search engines typically compress indexed web pages to maximize storage space, reduce bandwidth, and improve retrieval speed, among other reasons.

This is a simplified explanation of how compression works:

  • Identify Patterns:
    A compression algorithm scans the text to find repeated words, patterns and phrases
  • Shorter Codes Take Up Less Space:
    The codes and symbols use less storage space then the original words and phrases, which results in a smaller file size.
  • Shorter References Use Less Bits:
    The “code” that essentially symbolizes the replaced words and phrases uses less data than the originals.

A bonus effect of using compression is that it can also be used to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords.

Research Paper About Detecting Spam

This research paper is significant because it was authored by distinguished computer scientists known for breakthroughs in AI, distributed computing, information retrieval, and other fields.

Advertisement

Marc Najork

One of the co-authors of the research paper is Marc Najork, a prominent research scientist who currently holds the title of Distinguished Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. He’s a co-author of the papers for TW-BERT, has contributed research for increasing the accuracy of using implicit user feedback like clicks, and worked on creating improved AI-based information retrieval (DSI++: Updating Transformer Memory with New Documents), among many other major breakthroughs in information retrieval.

Dennis Fetterly

Another of the co-authors is Dennis Fetterly, currently a software engineer at Google. He is listed as a co-inventor in a patent for a ranking algorithm that uses links, and is known for his research in distributed computing and information retrieval.

Those are just two of the distinguished researchers listed as co-authors of the 2006 Microsoft research paper about identifying spam through on-page content features. Among the several on-page content features the research paper analyzes is compressibility, which they discovered can be used as a classifier for indicating that a web page is spammy.

Detecting Spam Web Pages Through Content Analysis

Although the research paper was authored in 2006, its findings remain relevant to today.

Then, as now, people attempted to rank hundreds or thousands of location-based web pages that were essentially duplicate content aside from city, region, or state names. Then, as now, SEOs often created web pages for search engines by excessively repeating keywords within titles, meta descriptions, headings, internal anchor text, and within the content to improve rankings.

Section 4.6 of the research paper explains:

Advertisement

“Some search engines give higher weight to pages containing the query keywords several times. For example, for a given query term, a page that contains it ten times may be higher ranked than a page that contains it only once. To take advantage of such engines, some spam pages replicate their content several times in an attempt to rank higher.”

The research paper explains that search engines compress web pages and use the compressed version to reference the original web page. They note that excessive amounts of redundant words results in a higher level of compressibility. So they set about testing if there’s a correlation between a high level of compressibility and spam.

They write:

“Our approach in this section to locating redundant content within a page is to compress the page; to save space and disk time, search engines often compress web pages after indexing them, but before adding them to a page cache.

…We measure the redundancy of web pages by the compression ratio, the size of the uncompressed page divided by the size of the compressed page. We used GZIP …to compress pages, a fast and effective compression algorithm.”

High Compressibility Correlates To Spam

The results of the research showed that web pages with at least a compression ratio of 4.0 tended to be low quality web pages, spam. However, the highest rates of compressibility became less consistent because there were fewer data points, making it harder to interpret.

Figure 9: Prevalence of spam relative to compressibility of page.

The researchers concluded:

Advertisement

“70% of all sampled pages with a compression ratio of at least 4.0 were judged to be spam.”

But they also discovered that using the compression ratio by itself still resulted in false positives, where non-spam pages were incorrectly identified as spam:

“The compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6 fared best, correctly identifying 660 (27.9%) of the spam pages in our collection, while misidentifying 2, 068 (12.0%) of all judged pages.

Using all of the aforementioned features, the classification accuracy after the ten-fold cross validation process is encouraging:

95.4% of our judged pages were classified correctly, while 4.6% were classified incorrectly.

More specifically, for the spam class 1, 940 out of the 2, 364 pages, were classified correctly. For the non-spam class, 14, 440 out of the 14,804 pages were classified correctly. Consequently, 788 pages were classified incorrectly.”

The next section describes an interesting discovery about how to increase the accuracy of using on-page signals for identifying spam.

Insight Into Quality Rankings

The research paper examined multiple on-page signals, including compressibility. They discovered that each individual signal (classifier) was able to find some spam but that relying on any one signal on its own resulted in flagging non-spam pages for spam, which are commonly referred to as false positive.

Advertisement

The researchers made an important discovery that everyone interested in SEO should know, which is that using multiple classifiers increased the accuracy of detecting spam and decreased the likelihood of false positives. Just as important, the compressibility signal only identifies one kind of spam but not the full range of spam.

The takeaway is that compressibility is a good way to identify one kind of spam but there are other kinds of spam that aren’t caught with this one signal. Other kinds of spam were not caught with the compressibility signal.

This is the part that every SEO and publisher should be aware of:

“In the previous section, we presented a number of heuristics for assaying spam web pages. That is, we measured several characteristics of web pages, and found ranges of those characteristics which correlated with a page being spam. Nevertheless, when used individually, no technique uncovers most of the spam in our data set without flagging many non-spam pages as spam.

For example, considering the compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6, one of our most promising methods, the average probability of spam for ratios of 4.2 and higher is 72%. But only about 1.5% of all pages fall in this range. This number is far below the 13.8% of spam pages that we identified in our data set.”

So, even though compressibility was one of the better signals for identifying spam, it still was unable to uncover the full range of spam within the dataset the researchers used to test the signals.

Combining Multiple Signals

The above results indicated that individual signals of low quality are less accurate. So they tested using multiple signals. What they discovered was that combining multiple on-page signals for detecting spam resulted in a better accuracy rate with less pages misclassified as spam.

Advertisement

The researchers explained that they tested the use of multiple signals:

“One way of combining our heuristic methods is to view the spam detection problem as a classification problem. In this case, we want to create a classification model (or classifier) which, given a web page, will use the page’s features jointly in order to (correctly, we hope) classify it in one of two classes: spam and non-spam.”

These are their conclusions about using multiple signals:

“We have studied various aspects of content-based spam on the web using a real-world data set from the MSNSearch crawler. We have presented a number of heuristic methods for detecting content based spam. Some of our spam detection methods are more effective than others, however when used in isolation our methods may not identify all of the spam pages. For this reason, we combined our spam-detection methods to create a highly accurate C4.5 classifier. Our classifier can correctly identify 86.2% of all spam pages, while flagging very few legitimate pages as spam.”

Key Insight:

Misidentifying “very few legitimate pages as spam” was a significant breakthrough. The important insight that everyone involved with SEO should take away from this is that one signal by itself can result in false positives. Using multiple signals increases the accuracy.

What this means is that SEO tests of isolated ranking or quality signals will not yield reliable results that can be trusted for making strategy or business decisions.

Takeaways

We don’t know for certain if compressibility is used at the search engines but it’s an easy to use signal that combined with others could be used to catch simple kinds of spam like thousands of city name doorway pages with similar content. Yet even if the search engines don’t use this signal, it does show how easy it is to catch that kind of search engine manipulation and that it’s something search engines are well able to handle today.

Here are the key points of this article to keep in mind:

Advertisement
  • Doorway pages with duplicate content is easy to catch because they compress at a higher ratio than normal web pages.
  • Groups of web pages with a compression ratio above 4.0 were predominantly spam.
  • Negative quality signals used by themselves to catch spam can lead to false positives.
  • In this particular test, they discovered that on-page negative quality signals only catch specific types of spam.
  • When used alone, the compressibility signal only catches redundancy-type spam, fails to detect other forms of spam, and leads to false positives.
  • Combing quality signals improves spam detection accuracy and reduces false positives.
  • Search engines today have a higher accuracy of spam detection with the use of AI like Spam Brain.

Read the research paper, which is linked from the Google Scholar page of Marc Najork:

Detecting spam web pages through content analysis

Featured Image by Shutterstock/pathdoc

Source link

Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address
Continue Reading

SEO

New Google Trends SEO Documentation

Published

on

By

Google publishes new documentation for how to use Google Trends for search marketing

Google Search Central published new documentation on Google Trends, explaining how to use it for search marketing. This guide serves as an easy to understand introduction for newcomers and a helpful refresher for experienced search marketers and publishers.

The new guide has six sections:

  1. About Google Trends
  2. Tutorial on monitoring trends
  3. How to do keyword research with the tool
  4. How to prioritize content with Trends data
  5. How to use Google Trends for competitor research
  6. How to use Google Trends for analyzing brand awareness and sentiment

The section about monitoring trends advises there are two kinds of rising trends, general and specific trends, which can be useful for developing content to publish on a site.

Using the Explore tool, you can leave the search box empty and view the current rising trends worldwide or use a drop down menu to focus on trends in a specific country. Users can further filter rising trends by time periods, categories and the type of search. The results show rising trends by topic and by keywords.

To search for specific trends users just need to enter the specific queries and then filter them by country, time, categories and type of search.

The section called Content Calendar describes how to use Google Trends to understand which content topics to prioritize.

Advertisement

Google explains:

“Google Trends can be helpful not only to get ideas on what to write, but also to prioritize when to publish it. To help you better prioritize which topics to focus on, try to find seasonal trends in the data. With that information, you can plan ahead to have high quality content available on your site a little before people are searching for it, so that when they do, your content is ready for them.”

Read the new Google Trends documentation:

Get started with Google Trends

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Luis Molinero

Source link

Advertisement
Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address
Continue Reading

SEO

All the best things about Ahrefs Evolve 2024

Published

on

All the best things about Ahrefs Evolve 2024

Hey all, I’m Rebekah and I am your Chosen One to “do a blog post for Ahrefs Evolve 2024”.

What does that entail exactly? I don’t know. In fact, Sam Oh asked me yesterday what the title of this post would be. “Is it like…Ahrefs Evolve 2024: Recap of day 1 and day 2…?” 

Even as I nodded, I couldn’t get over how absolutely boring that sounded. So I’m going to do THIS instead: a curation of all the best things YOU loved about Ahrefs’ first conference, lifted directly from X.

Let’s go!

OUR HUGE SCREEN

CONFERENCE VENUE ITSELF

It was recently named the best new skyscraper in the world, by the way.

 

OUR AMAZING SPEAKER LINEUP – SUPER INFORMATIVE, USEFUL TALKS!

 

Advertisement

GREAT MUSIC

 

AMAZING GOODIES

 

SELFIE BATTLE

Some background: Tim and Sam have a challenge going on to see who can take the most number of selfies with all of you. Last I heard, Sam was winning – but there is room for a comeback yet!

 

THAT BELL

Everybody’s just waiting for this one.

 

STICKER WALL

AND, OF COURSE…ALL OF YOU!

 

Advertisement

There’s a TON more content on LinkedIn – click here – but I have limited time to get this post up and can’t quite figure out how to embed LinkedIn posts so…let’s stop here for now. I’ll keep updating as we go along!



Source link

Advertisement
Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address
Continue Reading

Trending