How To Get To The Top of Google (Rank #1)

Key Takeaways

all right so you want to get your website at the top of google which makes a huge amount of sense because google traffic is incredibly well qualified imagine that there are people out there searching for exactly what you do and looking to buy the thing that you offer it's no surprise that getting traffic from google is still such a big priority for businesses no matter what goes on with digital marketing no matter what happens with social media no matter what happens with email and crazy different ad tech getting to the top of google for many businesses is still their number one digital marketing priority because the traffic is so awesome so in this video we're going to share the strategies that we use for our clients here at exposure ninja and that we've broken down in our best-selling books and all of our podcasts and all this type of stuff as well if you want one video that kind of gives you an overview of how to get your website to the top of google today this is it enjoy okay so the first thing we need to do is understand how google actually works if we can get into google's mind then we've got a much better job of reverse engineering exactly what we need to do to get that ranking so first thing google crawls websites and it's really looking to show the sites which are the best answer to the searchers problem now this best comes with a bit of an asterisk because what is the best answer to a search's problem well the truth is that best changes the best answer for someone looking for a quick piece of information is very different to the best answer for someone who's looking for an in-depth well-researched piece of content so the first thing to understand is the user intent of the particular term that you're trying to rank for basically we want to create the content that best satisfies the searcher in fact in fact while we're on definitions let's define how google really works and understand the business model because actually that gives us even more context so google makes about 40 billion dollars a year because you click on ads yes when you click on those ads google makes the money which pays for all of the random stupid stuff that they come up with so google needs to keep you hooked on its search engine to keep you clicking on those ads now in order to keep you hooked on the search engine it needs to give you the answers to your questions very very quickly and a question could be a question or it could be just someone typing in a phrase it needs to give you the responses that are most useful to you as soon as possible otherwise you're going to go somewhere else so that's why google cares about the best not because google has some deep purpose like organize the world's information it cares because it needs to keep you hooked using its search engine so it can monetize your sweet clicks now i want to talk a little bit about user intent in more detail because this is a really fundamental concept for seo if somebody types in red shoes free delivery the intent there is typically to buy something okay over time google's going to understand this and it's going to be showing pages where there is a commercial outcome on that page or you can buy a product from that page if someone searches for how to clean red shoes that is an informational search so that's going to bring up a completely different set of search results mostly focused around longer form content it's going to be information rich because that's what the searcher is using for it's really important whenever you're trying to rank your website or a particular page for a term to check what google thinks the intent of that search is so is it showing really informational pages in the search results if google's showing really informational pages on the search results you know that in order to rank for that term you're going to have to produce something which is informational if on the other hand it's showing really commercial pages for that term i.e whether you can buy or you can become a lead then that's what you need to do so it's important not to try and fight google but try and identify what it's already doing and then put yourself in alignment with that okay so obviously to get a website ranked or a web page ranked we need to give google exactly what it needs to do that if we play the game we get the results so this also means that google doesn't have rules like every page that ranks on google needs to have 2 000 words it's much more sophisticated than that like we said if someone's searching for something which can be answered very quickly then the best answer might be something that is very quick if someone's looking for something much more in depth then the best answer is going to be longer so it's all context dependent the approaches that we take on pages with different user intent are completely different but they always need to match the user's intent all right great so loads of concepts no answers yet okay okay all right let's talk about how to rank these pages then first thing understand that it's not just your homepage that ranks this is really important every single page on your website can rank and in fact for many websites actually it's the home page that shouldn't be ranking for the majority of its keywords remember that google wants to serve the best answer to its visitors and quite often your home page is just basically an introduction to your business or an introduction to your website and actually the deeper more useful information is on your subpages so whether these are service pages if you're a service or lead generation business or whether they're products or category pages if you're an e-commerce business so the first thing to do is to get away from thinking of getting your website ranking and start thinking about your web pages ranking this is good news by adding lots of well optimized pages to your site not only do you increase the chances that you rank for those relevant terms but also you increase the number of relevant terms that you can rank for there are basically four things that you need to think about firstly relevance you're never gonna see a page ranking on google that isn't relevant for the term that you've searched for so if you're trying to rank content on your site for things that you're not actually relevant for you're not actually offering it's gonna be a bit of an issue second thing popularity if you're not being talked about if you don't have that credibility of being mentioned in other places on the internet why should google take a punt and trust you as being the best solution third thing authority how well regarded are you in the space that you're in this is more important in certain niches than others but your authority is becoming an increasingly important part of why google is going to justify ranking your pages and then the final thing quality if the information on your site isn't great if it's not fact checked if it's full of mistakes and errors if your site takes a long time to load it's not mobile friendly it's full of broken links this is not a good sign by far the single biggest seo hack if you like and it's not even a hack where did all the seo hacks go what's happening to our industry is to create more great content on your website this is such a boring thing to be told i know you're watching this video because you want the hacks you want to know where which keywords to put in your page title and what the keyword density of your first paragraph should be and all this type of stuff i know here i am just saying more content i know it's really boring but it's also really true it's also really difficult to do okay creating lots of really good quality information on your site is a difficult thing it's a time time-consuming thing and it might cost you quite a lot of money and time to do that so in our experience just because you know that it's a good thing to do doesn't mean people are necessarily doing it so how do you actually go about this process so the first thing to do whenever you're planning to write more content is to brainstorm your keywords now you've got a few different types of keywords that you might want to write content for the first type of keyword is keywords that would relate to your product or service let's say that you're an accountant and you're for tax accountancy so you're going to have phrases that might be searched for by someone who's looking for a tax accountant for example tax accountant tax accountancy uh tax accountant for small businesses tax accountant for enterprise you know whatever it might be so you're gonna have keywords which relate to the thing that you do or the subset of the thing that you do okay these are going to be very commercial keywords these are going to be the keywords that you're going to be optimizing your core service pages your product pages for then you've got another category of keywords which relate to the problem that your audience has so a problem in the tax accountant example might be something like how to reduce corporation tax or how to save on company vat or how to plan for vat bills or something like this so that person has a problem which you can solve but they're not necessarily looking for the thing that you're offering yet okay so these people are further up the funnel they're not yet ready to buy from you maybe but they're the sort of people that you want on your website because they would make good potential customers the third type of keyword is even further up the funnel so this is anything that's searched by people that might indicate that they're a good potential customer for you so this could be if let's say we're a tax accountant um this might be things like how to scale a small business well an accountant is going to be an important component of that but that person isn't searching for an accountant in fact they're not even searching for a problem that indicates they need an accountant they're searching for something bigger so we've got these three different levels of keyword if you like we've got commercial which are the ones that are kind of i i need this thing then we've got the problem based so i probably need this thing but i don't know it yet and then we've got the really informational stuff which is really top of funnel and really broad now we might want to write content for each of these three different types because we're going to have core pages on our website that target the commercial terms tax accountant we're going to have blog posts that might target the problems how to save money on vat bills or how to save corporation tax or when you should be paying your tax and then we might have a knowledge base on our site which would be like the ultimate guide to small business growth which is designed to get us loads of business owners onto the site so that we can sign them up for email things and pitch them on accountancy further on down the line so once we understand that we've got these different types of customers we can see how we might actually want different types of content on our website and in fact we're going to need different types of content on our website because google is going to be looking to show different types of pages for each of those different searches so the first thing we do is collect all of these ideas and put them in a spreadsheet now usually you want to prioritize your commercial keywords because those are the ones that are most rapidly going to turn into money if you had to get any one of those individual customers onto your site obviously you would choose the person who's searching for a tax accountant looking for one right now okay so they are going to be your top priorities but your other types of keyword are going to be really useful for building up visibility of the site building up your credibility but picking up links as well which is going to help your authority and also building up your topical expertise to help your ranking for those core commercial keywords comprende so you've got what we call the key pages on your site so this is your home page your services pages so page for each of your different services if you're a service company or your product or category pages if you're an e-commerce business these are your core pages and these are the ones that you're going to optimize for your target keywords so for example using your target keywords in your page title using your target keywords in your headings on those pages making sure they've got a good amount of information on each page using those target keywords and related terms as well then you're going to want to create content for the keywords that target customer problems so this might be writing long in-depth blog posts it might be building out a knowledge base and then you might want to optimize previous content that you've written for these phrases if the targeting wasn't that clear now once you've created this content the next thing you want to do is optimize that content for how google is showing the information in the search results now you'll have noticed google showing featured snippets so these are like the bit of text that you see in the search results and for a whole bunch of different informational terms so sometimes if you search for you know best wordpress plugins you're probably going to get an unordered list which is just lifted from someone's website and put directly in the search results there so that google can show that information to the searcher without them actually having to go on the website now if you're playing this game if you're competing for search results where there's a featured snippet shown it's a good idea to try and use the same sort of markup that google is using to show those featured snippets because actually you do want those feature snippets now people get confused about feature snippets and think well i don't really want to get a featured snippet on google because then google's just gonna take the information from my site and show it in the search results so no one's gonna come onto my site oh contract actually you'll notice your click-through rate increasing from search results if you've got feature snippets because people can see that the information is good and they're going to want to read more detail about it as well the next thing that you want to do is optimize your metadata now the metadata on each page of your site guides what google shows in the search results so when you search something on google and you see the blue links and then you see the black text underneath the blue links are usually your page title so this is a piece of meta that you set behind the scenes on your site which basically gives every single page on your site a title this is also the thing that shows up in the tabs in your browser good idea to use your target keywords in your page title particularly at the start because then when someone has searched for that term they're gonna see your title being that phrase that they've just searched for if i've just typed in something that's what my brain is tuned to so i'm most likely to click on the thing that reflects what i'm looking for also want to write a compelling meta description so meta description is the black description text that google shows in the search results and some tips to make a compelling meta description firstly you're selling the page you're not selling your business you're not selling your product at that stage you're selling people on why they should click on the page so think about what you can do to boost the credibility of the information on that page to get that person to click you might talk about advantages that your page or your service or your offering is going to have over competitors in the search results because you essentially want to snap up more clicks through your meta description than any of the competitors listed on that search results page because that over time is going to show google that your page is more relevant because more people are clicking on it which is going to help your ranking so if you can do things like mention free delivery if you're selling product um fast delivery things like that are going to be the things that get e-commerce clickers clicking on your site if you're a service company talking about the area that you serve if you're for a free consultation any kind of initial incentive to get people to contact you then mentioning that in your meta description can be a good idea as well because that's a very compelling offering to people when they're scanning through that google search results page you want them seeing yours and going oh that looks good give that a click that's how you're going to get the traffic and that's also how you can start moving up in ranking let's talk about links here we are today still talking about links now when i first got into seo which was almost a decade ago and i started having a look around i found out that links made a difference and i was like surely not this seems a little bit basic this is going to get phased out here we are almost a decade later still talking about the importance of links whether it's going to go away or not in the future nobody knows but right now links are making a difference so what's the deal with links basically you need to get other websites to link to your website in order to show google that you're an authority in your area it's basically a popularity contest how do you know who's popular it's because you look at how many people are talking about each other you figure out who's talking about this person the most they're the most popular google to an extent is still a popularity contest okay the most popular sites have the most authority in google's eyes and tend to get the best ranking so you need to play this game as well now there's a few different ways of getting links that verge from extremely high effort on your part to extremely low effort on your part the high effort ones the great thing about them is they're predictable the low effort ones the great thing about them is that you don't have to do anything for example if we're gonna start by talking about the low effort ones the best thing that you can do to pick up links without putting in any effort at all is to make sure that your content the information on your site is link worthy if we think about the number of links that wikipedia gets for example people are linking to wikipedia because it has useful information people aren't linking to wikipedia because an seo company like exposure ninja is reaching out to them saying hey can you link to wikipedia please right they're doing it because it has the best information so the first approach you can take is to have the best information one of the things that we do a lot for our clients is we'll conduct studies and surveys and collect data about a particular topic this is a great way of picking up links because if you're the first person to put data around a certain topic which is trending which is popular in the media when publications talk about that topic they often need a data source to kind of back up their opinions and if you've got a really good source of data about that topic you can find that they start linking to you in this example we conducted a survey for one of our clients about the popularity of this loot box thing which is built into games and we conducted a survey across population of the uk to find out if people thought this should be illegal or not now we noticed that this article started to pick up some large media links including one from the guardian and it done this not through any outreach on our part but because this was a topic that people were talking about when a journalist talks about the topic they often need to link to something it can increase the kind of depth of their article if they're linking to official data so you can be the source of that data another thing that you can do to pick up links kind of accidentally is write the ultimate guide to whatever it is that you do if you write a really in-depth piece basically you write a book and just put it on your website you're going to find that people start linking to you because people always want to link to a really good source of further information if they can't be bothered to write the rest of the information about that topic or they just want a quick quotable thing that they can take from somewhere they will find your piece and they will link to it so you can get links passively by writing really good or really useful content for people now if you can put some effort in then obviously you're going to get more links let's say for example that you've conducted a survey or a study well you can now reach out to publications and journalists in your space and say hey look we've put this together do you think it's the sort of thing that would be interesting to your audience and some of them will write about it now i have to caution you when you start doing outreach to pick up links you are not going to get 100 success rate sorry your success rate is going to depend on who you are but it's going to be closer to 1 than 100 so be prepared to put in some serious time to this there's no other way around it and we would typically steer away from automated outreach tools because there's nothing more obvious than getting an automated outreach email you've had them before you know the ones another super cool thing to do if you're an absolute geek is to use journalist inquiry services so things like response source and gorkana when a journalist needs to provide some opinions or provide some data or expert advice to back up a story that they're writing they can either tap into their personal network time consuming who knows everyone or they can go to a journalist inquiry service like response or scorecard or help a reporter out and they can just type in their inquiry hit submit and it will get blasted out to millions and billions of people all of whom are going to contribute opinions and facts and journalists from very high authority successful publications that you would have heard of and you might even read use these services as a shortcut to get opinions so if you subscribe to these types of services then you can be that opinion we use this for clients to get featured in all sorts of spaces there's also a free version an alternative version using twitter yes twitter for business profitable if you follow hashtags like journal request hashtag pr request if journalists can't even face going to response source or corkana they can just use twitter and use the hashtag journo request they'll say looking for someone to give an expert opinion on how to turn your eyes inside out oh no they might say jonah request i'm looking for a health expert to talk about the benefits of onion squash for brain energy and if you're the onion squash brain energy expert then you can reach out and say hey here's my tips and real life journalists use twitter in this way so you can be their source this is a great way of getting links because when they write about you they'll often include a link to your website happy days now if you're a local business you can also list your business in local directories yes even this still works for seo crazy isn't it but you can list your business in good quality local directories and it will help your ranking locally if you do it properly maybe in five years we won't be talking about links and we won't be talking about local directory citations anymore but for now here we are so those are the main ways to get to the top of google firstly understand how google works and make sure you're playing google's game my number one tip above anything else to getting a web page ranked at the top of google is to make sure that page deserves to rank google isn't going to show your rubbish terrible website with three words of copy ahead of an amazing high authority publication that's written 30 000 words of copy if you don't deserve it so you need to deserve to rank that is the first thing to know second thing make sure you know the phrases that your customers are searching for both the things that they're going to be searching for if they're looking to do business with you the things that they're going to be searching for which indicate they've got a problem that you can solve and also just general things that they might be searching for if they are your sort of customer once you know those keywords write or optimize content on pages for those types of keyword and make sure that you're matching the intent of the keyword to the intent of the page so for example you're going to optimize your main core pages these are the commercial pages which result in a lead or sale for your commercial terms you're going to optimize blog posts and knowledge bases for informational terms okay these are phrases that people are searching for if they need an answer to a question then you're going to format your content to make the most sense to google so page titles and meta descriptions also any schema markup that you can use to help target those featured snippets then you're gonna go out and pick up some links we discussed a few different ways of picking up links including creating linkable content and also doing outreach to publications and journalists so i hope you found that useful and i hope you've learned at least something if you haven't learned anything then i hope you've enjoyed it if you haven't enjoyed it then if you haven't enjoyed it then thanks for watching anyway because all of the views help our youtube visibility don't forget if you want help with your seo then check out exposure ninja we're a digital marketing agency we do this stuff for clients all day long and we've helped clients grow from almost nothing to eight figures using exactly these strategies so if you want some help with your seo go to exposureninja.com and request the free website and marketing review this review is amazing one of the team will conduct basically an audit of your website they'll identify the ways that you can improve your website's ranking some of the keywords that you should be targeting they'll also have a look at what your competitors are doing as well they'll put all of this information into a 15 minute video which they will send over to you by email so that you can take all of that information and implement it yourself or implement it with your own agency or if you want to work with us then we can talk about how that might happen as well so go to exposureninja.com to request your free review today don't forget also like and subscribe this video share it with everyone that you know force them to watch it multiple times all of it increases the number of views which obviously increases our youtube visibility until the next video see you soon