How to Rank Higher on Google (Step-by-Step Tutorial)

Key Takeaways

there's nothing more frustrating than ranking on the first page of google yet getting little to no traffic but the thing is there's always a reason and the solution in most cases is to rank higher on google so today i'm going to show you how to rank higher on google and get more number one rankings in a systematized fashion stay tuned [Music] what's up seos samo here with ahrefs the seo tool that helps you grow your search traffic research your competitors and dominate your niche today is all about getting more number one rankings because number five through 100 just aren't cutting it with that said let's get to the process of improving your google rankings step one is to find keywords that are performing decently but not great now i'm sure you've heard advice to get your page two rankings to the first page of google but what about those page one rankings that aren't in positions one and two now in many cases it's easier to improve your ranking position by one spot rather than ten in fact moving your first page rankings just the spot or two higher can impact your search traffic a lot if you look at the ctr curve you'll see that click-through rate decreases exponentially as you go down in the ranks and to put this into perspective let's assume that you're ranking in position 4 for a keyword that gets 10 000 searches per month according to this ctr curve you'll get 6.18 percent of clicks from desktop devices that's 618 visits to your page now the click-through rate for position 3 is 9.89 on desktop devices so that's 989 visits to your page so on average just by improving your rank a single position you can get an additional 371 monthly search visits or a traffic boost of 60 for that single keyword and to illustrate how this translates into search traffic for a real keyword check this out in the traffic share by page report in ahrefs keywords explorer you can see that the first ranking page for the keyword youtube seo gets nearly four times the search traffic as our page which is currently in position six to find these underperforming keywords go to hr site explorer and enter your domain i'll be analyzing our blog keyword rankings next go to the organic keywords report to see all of the keywords your website ranks for now to find keywords that could use a bump in rankings set a positions filter to only show keywords that rank in positions 3 through 10. if you don't have ahrefs you can get the average estimations from google search console's search results report just set the position filter to show keywords with an average position of less than 10. then sort the list by ctr in ascending order now that we have a list of keywords and data it's time to move on to the next step which is to choose a keyword you want to improve on now obviously you won't be able to improve your rankings for every single keyword so at this point you need to prioritize keywords based on the value to your business here are a few things to look out for when searching for keywords to improve in general the more criteria it fits the higher the priority you should assign to that keyword first look for queries that have business value there's no point in driving organic traffic to your website if your visitors won't convert into leads or customers so you'll want to focus on keywords that your target customers would likely be searching for for example keyword research and keyword tool would be good ones for us since we have a keyword tool that helps people do keyword research then we have a website traffic checker and some variants these would be good too since we show organic traffic estimations for any website or url in site explorer something like find email address might be tempting but there's very little business value in that for us people who are new to link building may look for this topic but there aren't any direct ties to ahrefs seo tools so that would fall somewhere lower in my list of priorities next are keywords that don't have serp features above you sometimes google shows cert features like features snippets people also ask boxes and video carousels in the search results in hs we count these features as having a ranking position after all they take up a ton of real estate so rather than going after these keywords you may want to go after ones where serp features aren't dominant in the organic results if you have ahrefs you can click on the surf button and you'll see if any serp features are ahead of you and if you don't have ahrefs then just google the keyword and look for them quick side note there are ways to go after cert features like featured snippets but that's a story for another day if you want to see a video on featured snippets then let me know in the comments and maybe we'll try and create our own case study of some sort so the last thing to look for are keywords that are already generating search traffic let's go back to our organic keywords report to identify these keywords you can compare search volume and ranking position with the estimated search traffic just go down the list and if anything pops out to you then you can investigate its traffic potential more clearly this one on seo tools surprises me even though we're in position 8 we're still getting around 400 monthly search visits now to get a better understanding of the traffic potential for this keyword i'll click on the search button to see the top 10 ranking pages next i'll open up a new tab for the top two ranking pages to see how much search traffic they're getting from the keyword seo tools and it looks like they're getting around three and five times more search traffic for this keyword because they're in the top two spots so seeing as this keyword has a lot of business value to us this might be one worth prioritizing the third step is to find out why you're being outranked many people including us have studied various ranking factors and found three things to correlate highly with rankings and traffic time and time again these are the number of referring domains pointing to a page page level authority and website authority now these aren't the only ranking factors to look into and i'll even argue that there's a bigger ranking factor which is why i mention it in nearly every video i create and that's search intent which basically means the reason behind the searcher's query google tries to provide the most relevant results for any given query so your job as a content creator is to ensure that your content matches the reason why people are searching for that query in the first place aka search and type to identify search intent just google the keyword you want to improve and analyze the top ranking pages now to systematize this process look for the three c's of search intent the first c is content type this can be divided into four main buckets blog posts product category and landing pages the second c is content format and this applies more to blog posts and landing pages a few common blog formats you'll see are how-to's step-by-step tutorials list posts and opinion pieces for a landing page that might be a tool or calculator the third c is content angle this is the unique selling proposition of your content it's basically a unique hook that entices a searcher to click on your result for example if you search for a link building in google you'll see that the content type of pages are blog posts the content format are guides and the majority of the content angles are taking a for beginners approach by educating searchers on what link building is now if you don't think search intent is as powerful as i'm claiming let me show you proof with a couple of real examples here you'll see that our blog posts on on-page seo used to rank in the top 10 but continue to plummet to as low as position 80 despite gaining a ton of quality links well this post used to be a data study now after assessing search intent we saw that the majority of top pages were guides so we updated our page to an actionable guide and jump from position 40 to 6 in a matter of days in the same thing happened for our landing page targeting the quarry backlink checker we originally had a landing page showing the features of our backlink checking tools but after looking at the search results for this keyword you'll see that all the top ranking pages are free tools so we created our own free backlink checker and we jump from position seven to two in one week and now ranked number one on google the moral of the story is to always check if you're matching search intent to the best of your ability before analyzing other factors which we'll get into now after checking search intent the next thing you should look at are the number of referring domains pointing at the top pages looking at some of our underperforming keyword rankings you'll see we rank in position 6 for the keyword youtube seo so i'll click on the search button to see the seo metrics for the top pages now if you look at the referring domains column you'll see that it's quite clear that we just haven't gotten enough links to the page to me it's pretty clear some link building needs to be done another culprit of lower rankings could be page level authority google's ranking algorithm is built on something called page rank which basically measures the backlink authority of web pages and google confirmed that page rank still plays a role in the ranking algorithm despite the fact that they discontinued public page rank in 2016. but we have a similar metric in ahrefs called url rating which represents the overall strength of a page's backlink profile much like page rank url rating takes into account both the quantity and quality of backlinks and internal links to the page and we found a clear positive correlation between ur and search traffic meaning in general pages with a higher ur rank better and get more organic traffic looking at the serp for the query keyword research you'll see that the two pages ahead of us seem to have much higher url ratings the next thing to analyze is website authority there are mixed feelings about website authority as a ranking factor in the seo community in a tweet here suggests that google doesn't use website authority yet in an interview with john mueller a webmaster trends analyst at google they do look at some metrics that map the similar things so what's the verdict at ahrefs we have our own proprietary metric called domain rating which represents the overall strength of a website's backlink profile and we found a small correlation between a website's domain rating and the number of keywords it ranks for overall i think that seos would agree that google seems to favor websites with high authority and it's pretty clear for a lot of popular keywords for example looking at the top 10 results for how to lose weight you'll see that all of the ranking websites are from high dr and reputable websites and for a query like designer dresses you'll see that the top 10 results all come from reputable stores and they all happen to have high domain ratings too while i wouldn't rely super heavily on dr it's worth scanning the top results to get a better understanding of the competitive landscape especially if you have a low dr site alright the next step is to beat the other pages where it matters most this step is pretty straightforward focus on solving problems that attribute why you're not ranking higher rather than other so-called ranking factors if you have a search intent issue like we did for a couple of our pages then update your content so it matches the reason why searchers are looking for the query in the first place now if your rankings are being held back because your competitors pages have way more referring domains then go and get more unique websites to link to you two great link building strategies to use are guest posting and the skyscraper technique and i'm not going to go any deeper into these techniques because we have step by step tutorials which i'll link up in the description now if you have a page level authority issue then the quickest and best option would be to look through relevant pages on your site where you can add internal links and a good way to do this is to search for a query like site colon yourdomain.com and then a keyword that's relevant to your page then visit the pages and add internal links on relevant anchors it can also be helpful to use ahrefs seo toolbar when doing this so you can see the url of each page and get a better understanding of the pages that can pass authority to pages you want to rank if you don't have any authority pages then you're going to have to build more backlinks across your site now if you truly believe that the only reason why you're not ranking is because of a website authority issue then this is where things can get a bit frustrating you can still win in the serp and rank by building more links to your page than your competitors and a happy by-product of this is that it'll help you increase your domain rating so it becomes easier to rank for more competitive keywords over time alright step five is to track your rankings if you're going to be making optimizations to your web pages then you'll want to know whether they're actually working now there are two things that i recommend doing number one use a rank tracking tool like ahrefs rank tracker to automatically measure your ranking position over time this way you'll know whether the changes you made had an impact on your position and number two keep a log of the changes you've made in a document or ad annotations in google analytics so you can accurately attribute gains and search traffic to your page level optimizations now it's just a matter of rinsing and repeating this process for all of the keywords you want to boost now if you found this video to be helpful make sure to like share and subscribe so you don't miss out on any of our actionable seo and marketing tutorials and if you have any questions about any of these steps hit me up in the comments and i'd be happy to help out so keep grinding away focus on the things that will move the needle for your rankings and i'll see you in the next tutorial