How to get to the top of Google in 2020

How to get to the top of Google in 2020

Author – Tim Cameron-Kitchen and the Exposure Ninjas

Profitable social media marketing
101 ways to get more customers from the internet
The ultimate guide to content marketing and digital PR
Usability Engineering

💰 Optimizing page titles can bring very quick ranking improvements.
💰 Adding more text and a website that is mostly image-focused is another low-hanging fruit opportunity for quick wins and start to notice your ranking improve rapidly.

🔑If spending a lot of time on a certain task turns you off, you are not alone. Your competition are thinking exactly the same thing. That’s why they’re not doing it-and that’s why you should.

4 free ways to appear on the first page of Google

  1. Google organic results
  2. Featured snippets
  3. Google local
  4. Using other people’s websites

How does Google decide which website to rank first?

3 broad ranking pillars:

  1. A website’s relevance to the search
  2. The popularity and authority of the website across the internet
  3. The quality of the website

Google is obsessed with understanding what people are searching for and giving them exactly what they need.

🔑 You should build lots of pages on your website.

Websites with thin content, poor-quality writing, or pages with little to no text at all-always struggle to rank. Improving and increasing content is often the fastest way to boost a struggling site's ranking.

Which phrases do you want your website to rank for?

  1. Brainstorm keywords
  • Start by writing down the names for the core product/services your business sells.
    → These keywords are the “seed” keywords.
  • Consider which phrases you would use if you were looking for these products/services.
  • Use Quora or Reddit to research keywords.
  • You want to match the language you use to your audience’s experience level.
  • Aim for a minimum of 10 keywords in your rough starting list this is likely to be much longer if you sell a large range of products.
  • Each product category will have its own group of keywords.
  • Start with 3~4 of your most popular or most profitable product categories.
  1. Download keywords from Search Console
  • If you already have a website, you can check Google Search Console for keywords that you’re already gaining traffic from or ranking for.
  • “Search traffic” and “Search analytics” will show you some of the searches that your site has shown up for, and many of these will make good keywords to add to your list.
  1. Use SEMrush to find keywords
  • Drop any website address and see the keywords that it’s ranking for.
  • Pick out any that look like they’re relevant to your products/services and add them to your keywords list.
  1. Check competitor keywords
  2. Find your most profitable keywords
  • Now that you have a huge list of keywords sort them into a manageable list of 10~50.
  • Ranking top for any single phrase is likely to bring you around 40% of the traffic from that search.
  • High-competition phrases tend to have the highest commercial intent.
  1. Google keywords to check the search results are relevant
  • Traffic quality and conversion rate tends to be lower the broader your keywords are.
  1. Now you’ve got your keywords, find your key pages
  • Key pages are pages on your website that you want to focus on driving traffic to and improving rankings for first.

The quickest way to find these additional key pages is to use Google Search Console:

  • log in to Search Console
  • select “search traffic” and then “search analytics” from the left menu
  • select “pages”
  • check the boxes for Position, Clicks, and CTR
  • note down pages and blog posts from here that have clicks to the website or a high search position

Pick the key pages that represent your top-selling product/service categories.

Analyze your key pages:

  • Does this key page mention each of its target keywords at least once?
  • Is there more than 300 words of text on this page? Blog posts should aim for more; 500-1,000 words is a good start, but feel free to go even longer if the topic justifies it.
  • If a searcher using this phrase found this page, would they have their questions answered?
  • Does the layout mean that the page is clearly relevant to each of the keywords, without the searcher having to dig or scroll around?
  • Do the page headline and subheadings contain the target keywords or variations?

🔑Remember that keyword research is never “done”.

💡 Bonus tip
If you business is seasonal or trends driven you can use Google Trends to see how interest has changed over the last year for search terms. It can often be well worth targeting a keyword with low search volumes, if it’s on an upwards trend, and stealing a march your competition, dominating a valuable keyword before they even notice they should be going after it.

  1. Savvy competitors can save you work by showing you what you should be doing. If you do more of what they do than them, you can win.
  2. Less savvy competitors can highlight serious gaps in their approach which you can exploit to leapfrog them.

Questions to ask when reviewing your competition:

  • Who is ranking well for this search? Is it direct competitors to your business? Is it large information sites like Wikipedia? If it’s information sites, that’s an indication that this phrase might be more ‘informational’ than ‘commercial’. You’ll need detailed content on your site to beat sites like Wikipedia.
  • Are any of your competitors are showing up more than once?
  • Are there a lot of Google adverts for this keyword?
  • Are any of your competitors using these adverts?
  • Does Google suggest related searches at the bottom of the page? Should some of these be added to your keywords list?
  • Are the sites that show up small businesses or large businesses?

If you are a local business, as well as the above, notice:

  • Is a map showing up in the search results? If so, how many map results are showing up?
  • Do the map listings have a lot of reviews? If competitors are showing up with few reviews, that can be an indication that they’re ‘accidentally’ ranking for this phrase. Good news. If the listings have a lot of reviews, they’re either extremely popular or (more likely) actively working hard to pick up those reviews. You’ll need to be at the top of your game to beat them.

Once you’ve absorbed all the information from this page, choose another of your target keywords:

  • Does the same competitor show up in the top position for this search?
  • How many of the positions for this keyword are taken by competitors that showed up in the previous search?
  • Are the same companies advertising as before?
    Repeat this exercise with 3~5 of your top keywords.

Compare their other information:

  1. Choose 3 main online competitors from the sites that you’ve noticed ranking well.
  2. Pick your number one competitor and search for the keyword that makes them rank highest.
  3. Notice the title of their listing on Google.
  4. Look at the description underneath the title of their listing.
  5. Notice what sorts of titles and descriptions you can see on the page.
  6. Click on the link to their site.
  7. Notice which page opens when you click on the link.

🔑On the sites with the best SEO, you’ll notice that the address of the page that opens contains the keywords you searched for.

Look to see how many times the phrase you initially searched for shows up on your competitor’s webpage.

🔑Right click on the side of the page, away from the text and picture content and click View Source and analyze their meta tags.

Google tends to truncate at around 170 characters for the description tag.

🔑It’s generally good practice to have a separate page targeting each of your main keywords.

🔑Remember that Google likes websites that have a lot of links pointing at them because this indicates that they’re popular and authoritative.

Anchor Text

  • The reason that anchor text is important is that it’s one of the measures Google uses to establish the topic of the linked page.
  • A good idea is to use your keywords as anchor text.
  • When building links, it’s a good idea to use descriptive anchor text as long as you’re being natural.

Your website structure, the text on each page, optimization of titles and metatags, and usability factors like speed and mobile friendliness all impact the website’s ranking.

URL

  • Your website’s address or URL can have a significant impact on its success, both from ranking and branding perspectives.
  • As a rule, Google treats all TLDs equally.
  • Keep in mind that the general public is extremely unfamiliar with non-traditional TLDs, so they could struggle to find or remember your URL.
  • Alternate TLDs from .com gives people the a key perception difference impression that it’s second rate.
  • As a rule, avoid the use of hyphens in your domain. It can be seen as a spam indicator.
  • The age of your domain can have an effect on your ranking, although Google has publicly declared that the effect is minimal.
  • Length of the domain, Google has confirmed that this has no impact on ranking.

🔑Think of your menu like the aisle signs in a supermarket.

🔑You need to be building quite a few pages for your website. Rejoice in the effort this takes, because this is the effort that will set you apart rom your competitors who don’t invest in doing what it takes to get to the top of Google.

The ideal approach is to have a separate page for each of the services you offer.

Sitemap

  • It’s a good idea to build a sitemap. And submit it to Google.
  • XML sitemaps are designed purely for search engines.
  • The sitemap is just a friendly guide to help Google understand your website and find any pages it might have missed through crawling.
  • HTML sitemaps are intended for human consumption.
  • Usually an HTML sitemap is unnecessary unless the navigation of the website is so poor.

Promoting one single site across multiple locations can make a lot more sense.
⇒ That way, links and content boosting the authority of this one awesome site will benefit all of the individual locations.
⇒ This website automatically detects the country each visitor is in and shows them the local prices for the products, the local contact information and uses their native language.

🔑In most SEO cases these days, it makes sense to combine, rather than divide.

If it’s possible to logically combine everything onto one website, that’s the easiest and most efficient way to do it. However, if the customer groups are distinct or the messaging needs to be difference, niche microsites can still be the best way to go.

Google’s Panda Algorithm

  • This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites-sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites-sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.

🔑An approach that you can use to write authoritatively about any topic, and we’ll use the solicitor as an example:

  1. Describe the thing you are selling in detail. For example, what does a divorce solicitor actually do?
  2. Describe how it works, or the process that your clients or customers go through.
  3. Step 3: Answer the top questions that people ask you about the product or service. For example, how long does a divorce take?
  4. Discuss why your clients or customers buy from you, rather than your competitors.
  5. Answer the top objections that potential clients or customers have about purchasing. For example, will contacting a family lawyer make my divorce inevitable?
  6. Describe the next step that someone should take to buy from you.

🔑Every page on your website needs to be capable of functioning like a landing page, introducing visitors to your and setting the scene.

🔑Write unique product descriptions for each and every product.

🔑(h1) status is given to the page’s main heading. There should be only one!

🔑A lot of work needs to be done writing good quality content, so the key here is to prioritize.
Prioritize the product categories that are most profitable, most popular, or that you have a head start in selling.

🔑Create a Knowledge Base or FAQ section.
⇒Use the information to bring people in, then have a clear call to action to turn the visitors into buyers. It’s so simple and so effective.

☕Mot underperforming websites find that their homepage is the page which ranks for the most keywords.

Identify the content topics that you’ll be building your Knowledge Base around.

  • Even if you start with a 5~10 page Knowledge Base focusing on one area of expertise is a good start.
  • Slowly working through your product/services categories for written content, you can start to build the sort of content base worthy of making your site dominant in its market.
  • Rather than treat your blog as a newsfeed, treat it as a place to answer audience questions and give them useful information that they genuinely care about.
  • If you choose the right questions and write a genuinely awesome post, it’s actually pretty easy to get these posts ranking well.

Which questions to find and write about for your business?

  1. Brainstorm topics
    Start off by thinking about what your area of expertise is.
  2. Find the questions people are asking.
    Go to answerthepublic and type in your specialist area and it’ll show you the most common questions.
  3. Check search volumes
    Don’t let the data overrule your gut feeling and knowledge of your business.
  4. Plan your post.
    Just like writing a book, it’s a good idea to start with headings.
  5. Write your post.
    Imagine that you’re going to be on stage in front of a room full of potential customers reading this post out to them.
    Remember: Google wants to show the best content prominently in its results.
  6. Optimize and publish.
    Tried and test Formula:
  • Does this blog use only one H1 heading? Remember that this is the heading type to give your main blog title
  • Are the other post headings properly assigned H2, H3 tags etc.?
  • Are there clear calls to action (CTAs) at the end of the post and throughout, so readers know what they need to do next if they want to buy from you?
  • Does the blog link out to other websites where necessary? (although best not to link to competitors or low-quality websites)
  • Do these links open in a new tab? You don’t want visitors closing your site when they click on your blog links.
  • Does the blog use internal links to point readers to your product or service pages?
  • Is relevant anchor text used on all links?
  • Is your main target keyword or key phrase found a) in the title, b) in at least one heading, c) in the first 100 words of the text?
  • Does the post use related keywords as well?
  • Does your blog post include interesting images? Pure text blogs can be pretty boring to read. These images should have titles and alt tags
  • Is the spelling and grammar mistake free as checked by Grammarly.com?
  • Is the blog clear and easy to read, as checked by the Hemingway app?
  • Have you added optimized page titles and meta descriptions?

🔑Word for word, page titles are the most important SEO element of your entire site.

Every page on your website should have a page title.

Usually your page title and page headline should not be the same.

In Google search results, a page tile longer than about 57 characters will be truncated.

Meta Descriptions

  • Google announced in 2009 that meta descriptions did not contribute to rankings.
  • Even though Google doesn’t analyze keywords used in meta descriptions, you’ll still want to include your target keywords, because these are likely to be the terms that the searcher used to find your site in the first place.

From an SEO perspective, Google rewards speedy sites with better ranking.

If anything, our attention spans have actually shortened, so these numbers could be slightly generous!

  • 0.1 second is the threshold for website users to feel that the site or application is responding to them in real time
  • One second is the limit for the user’s thought flow to stay uninterrupted. They’ll notice the delay, but they’ll approximately be in the same place they were when you left them.
  • 10 seconds is the limit for keeping their attention. Thoughts will have wandered or they might start doing other things, so for delays as long or longer than 10 seconds, we need to provide visual feedback to let them know when the site will be loaded.
    One-second page loading is the target to aim for so that we’re keeping maximum engagement with the site.

Google’s PageSpeed Insights
(https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights)
Website Speed Test
(https://tools.pingdom.com)

Most common problem areas:

  • Leverage browser caching
  • Reduce server response time
  • Optimize images
  • Prioritize visible content

The first thing you’ll want to do is submit your sitemap.
⇒ Your XML sitemap isn’t linked to from anywhere on your website, other than your robots.txt file. Without manually submitting it to Google, the Googlebot will have no idea where to look at it.

🔑The 3 most important elements in SEO are content, links, and ranking.

With Google’s final Penguin update in September 2016, it announced that bad links would no longer bring a ‘penalty’ as such, but would instead simply be ignore. Since this update, low-quality links should not have the extreme negative impact that they did.
→Most website owners who believe that their sites are being penalized are mistaken.

Google looks at the rank-ability of each page, not the entire domain.

The most effective adverts focus on the customer and the benefits of your product or service, and a press release or article should be no different.
The stories with the highest chance of publication are those that provide a new insight, recommendations or advice for readers or viewers, a timely survey, or perhaps analysis on a trending topic.

Some questions that we use when working with clients to dig out the most interesting nuggets:

  • Have you noticed a particular trend in your customers’ buying patterns? What are the fashions that are emerging?
  • Do you have some recommendations for your audience to avoid some common mistakes, thus positioning your business as the helpful expert?
  • If you are announcing a new product, service or business, what sort of interesting stories can you tell about why you are launching it, or the need it serves?
  • Is there a large unmet need which you seek to meet, or is there something that places you perfectly to help a particular type of customer solve this need?
  • Do you personally have a story that others would find motivational or inspirational? Careful with this one, though—you’ve probably noticed that our own stories can be disproportionately fascinating to ourselves.

I started building a lot of websites for tradesmen. The marketing funnel here was:

  • Article written in a trade magazine read by my target audience (e.g. Plumbing Heating and Air Movement Monthly).
  • The article would be called something like “5 Ways to Increase Your Website’s Leads” and would give readers some great tips to increase their website’s visibility.
  • At the end of the article, I’d offer readers a free DVD (remember those?) which showed them the things I was talking about live on the screen. To get the DVD, they just had to text their address to a phone number.
  • This DVD would pitch our website service, and that’s how we’d sell the websites.
    This was basically free advertising, as these magazines were delivered right to my target audience. Rather than paying an ad fee, I just wrote a killer article.

We find that it’s almost always only through the follow up that we get a response from the editor, so it’s important to be diligent about it.

eCommerce Data Outreach Example
eCommerce businesses can produce interesting survey data by reporting on trends and public attitudes to particular products. For one of our clients, we ran a survey asking the public what they thought of the health benefits and risks of e-cigarettes. We organized the survey through YouGov, who put our questions to over 2,000 members of the public. We published the results on our client’s blog.
The study got picked up by 266 different publications, with a total audience of over 80 million people.

If you’d like to build your own survey from scratch, here are the basic steps:
1.   Think of the headline that you’d like to generate.
2.   Is the headline related to a current trend and your area of expertise? If so, continue.
3.   Think of a question you could ask the public that could create that headline.
4.   Consider targeting your survey by demographics (location, sex, age, etc.)
5.   Run a test survey in the office with a couple of mates. Fix any errors you uncover!
6.   Use Google Surveys or YouGov to get your survey results.
7.   While you’re waiting for the results to come in, identify journalists who you can pitch.
8.   The results are in! Write up a blog that analyses the results.
9.   If you have a designer, ask them to make your dry data into something beautiful. Infographics can be a great way of collecting links.
10.  Send the results to the press, both via individual pitches and a formal press release.
⇒ The aim is to make something shareworthy here. It needs to be simple, surprising, and worth talking about.

☕According to a Hubspot study, 75% of people don’t accept advertising as the truth, but 71% say they are more likely to buy something if they’re referred from social media.

Create a list of bloggers and/or influencers who are likely to have a target audience which matches your perfect ideal customer.
⇒For the purposes of SEO, you really want to focus on targeting influencers that have their own blogs, as this will be how you get the links that increase your website’s authority.

How can you create a win-win offer?

  • send a free product
  • send many free products
  • suggest content ideas in your pitch
  • send them a free product and one extra to giveaway to their audience
  • set up an affiliate link scheme
  • give them exclusive discount codes for their followers
  • share the influencer’s post on your social media
  • invite the influencer to an event
  • invite them to join your community of influencers
  • consider offering the influencer a Brand Ambassadorship
    ⇒ When you pitch to influencers, be upfront about what you’re offering and what you’d like in return.

☕Some of our most successful and profitable SEO clients have fewer than 1,000 Facebook likes and almost no interaction across any of their social channels.

🔑Whatever your business, you should have profiles on Facebook, Twitter, Google My Business, YouTube, and Instagram.

The only way to consistently pick up more reviews than your competitors is to completely automate the process.

A prioritized action plan at the end which you can follow to hit your 12-month sales targets

  1. Website review
    First place to start:
  • Is the website mobile friendly?
  • Does the site have separate pages targeting each of your main product or service areas?
  • Does each page have at least 300 words of text copy? This is a simplistic but useful definition of ‘enough text copy’
  • Does the website have a blog?
  • Is it immediately obvious—on every page of the site—what the business does and for whom?
  1. Keyword targeting
    Spend some time searching using the phrases that your customers are most likely to search for and observe:
  • Which are the keywords that your closest business competitors seem to be showing up for?
  • How aggressively are they targeting these phrases? Which pages on their websites are showing up (i.e. is it a blog post? Product page? Service page? Their homepage?)
  • How much text is on the pages that are ranking best?
  • Are the keywords you’re searching for included in the page titles and meta descriptions?
  • How much text is on their pages?
  • Are there lots of adverts showing up for these phrases? That can imply commercial intent and profit to be made.
  • Use a keyword tool and study the estimated search volume. If you could rank top, you might pick up 30-35% of that traffic. What sort of impact would that have on your business and would it be worth the fight?
    Run a PPC campaign in conjunction with an SEO campaign to get information about which are the phrases that are proving to be most profitable, because they aren’t always the phrases that have the highest search volume or the most competition.
  1. Competitor analysis
    Get to know their websites well:
  • Do they use different pages for each product or service, or is everything on one page?
  • How is the website structured?
    Are there a lot of pages all linked from the homepage, or do you go through different levels of pages to find more and more specialized content?
    Do they have pages at different levels (for example /shoes/women’s/flat-shoes), or is everything on one level (for example /flat-shoes)?
  • How popular are their social media channels? Don’t just look at follower numbers; how much engagement are they getting?
  • What do their meta descriptions, title tags and meta keywords say on their best ranking pages? Find these by right clicking on an empty area of the page and clicking ‘View Source’
  • How big is the site?
    Are there a lot of pages?
    Do they blog a lot? What sort of topics do they blog about?
  • What does their link profile look like? Use Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs or SEMrush to see what sort of links they have. Have they been getting talked about on lots of websites, and how high is the authority of these sites?
  1. Website optimization
    This covers things like:
  • Optimizing your page titles and meta descriptions on every page.
  • Increasing the amount of text copy, and adding unique text copy to product pages.
  • Making sure that your target keywords are in use throughout your website, particularly in page headings.
  • Checking that those headings use the correct H1, H2 and H3 tags.
  • Checking that you have a sitemap and that it’s submitted through Google Search Console.
  • Compressing website images using a plugin like Shortpixel.
  • Installing caching and compressing plugins to speed up your website, if necessary.
  • Adding additional pages, if required, to target more competitive or commercial phrases.
  1. Content Marketing
    For most businesses, content marketing will form the bulk of the ongoing SEO work, and is never ‘finished’ because there are always more publications and angles target.
  2. Topic research
  3. Compile a list of the websites you’d like to discuss getting published on
    If you’re not already blogging consistently, this is the time to start doing so. Remember that quality is more important than quantity.

Here are some questions to ask if you’re weighing up outsourcing your SEO or doing it yourself:

  • Are you or your team pressured for time?
    You will typically need to dedicate at least 10 hours per week to SEO if you plan to do it yourself. If you’re in a competitive or well-established market, this could rise to 25-50 if you’re planning to do content marketing as well.
  • Do you enjoy both technical and creative tasks, or does your team have a mixture of these skills?
    SEO requires both technical (analysis of keywords and search volumes, optimization of websites, etc.) and creative (content marketing, blog writing, planning outreach campaigns, etc.). One without the other will lead to results plateauing. We usually have a minimum of three people with complementary skill-sets working on each SEO campaign for this exact reason, so whilst it’s definitely possible to handle the whole thing yourself, you might find it easier (and more fun) if you have at least one other well-chosen person to balance out your skills.
  • Do you have a source of funding?
    This can be either sales or startup investment. Outsourcing SEO requires a period of investment before it pays for itself. If you only have the budget for 1~2 months of SEO work, it might makes more sense to keep it in-house, as very few companies will be able to bring significant improvement in that sort of timescale.
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