How to Get Higher Google Rankings [New Checklist]

Key Takeaways

in this video I'm gonna show you how to get higher Google rankings fast in fact one of my readers recently used the checklist from this video to increase his organic traffic by eighty eight point three percent i'm brian dean the founder of backlinko the place where marketers turn four high rankings and more traffic and in this video you're going to see the checklist that i use for all of my SEO clients you'll also learn why you might want to delete yes delete half the pages on your website and a simple trick you can use to improve your Google rankings fast keep watching a few months ago I sent out a newsletter to my email subscribers this email listed out some of my all-time favorite traffic hacks and out of the blue the founder of proven calm Shawn Falconer replied to that email he said dude I've tried all these techniques before and they helped us get more traffic and when I looked at Shawn's site I saw that he was doing a solid job with his content marketing and SEO but I also noticed a few mistakes that were holding him back from Google's first page that's when I sent him this message a few hours later Shawn got back to me after executing the checklist that I'm about to show you Shawn's organic traffic shot up by nearly 50% in 21 days and once a checklist had time to kick in proven straf ik increased by a whopping eighty eight point three percent three weeks after that with that let's dive into the checklist that Shawn used to get higher google rankings your first step is to find and eliminate what I call zombie pages I used to think that Google rewarded sites that publish lots and lots of unique content but I was wrong today I know the truth and the truth is that Google doesn't want you to publish content just for the sake of publishing content in fact a Google employee recently stated that they prefer websites that publish fewer high quality pages and this quality over quantity approach is one of the secrets behind my blog success in fact backlinko gets over a hundred and fifty thousand unique visitors per month and unlike most blogs I only publish every four to six weeks but when I do I make sure each and every post is awesome in fact at the time of shooting this video backlinko only has thirty seven total blog posts fortunately Sean only published high quality content on his blog so that wasn't an issue the problem was his site had lots of zombie pages so what are zombie pages zombie pages are pages on your site that don't provide any value for example zombie pages are pages like old and outdated blog posts and press releases category and tag pages search results pages ecommerce product pages that don't get any sales thin content pages and pages with duplicate content in theory proven com shouldn't have a ton of pages after all proven as an online job board where job postings come and go despite that they had nearly 50,000 pages indexed in Google that's a lot as it turned out proven didn't automatically delete their old job postings so these pages stuck around even though the job had been filled years ago to make matters worse Google was indexing their search result pages which are classic zombie pages so I recommended that they delete their old job postings and at the no index tag to their search results and Shawn quickly took action thanks to these changes prove it now only has around 4,000 pages indexed which is 40,000 less than they had before step number two is to fix any technical SEO issues that your site has there are literally hundreds of technical problems that can impact your SEO and fixing them is one of the fastest ways to get hire Google rankings that said here are some of the most common technical issues that I see during SEO site audits how can you find these technical SEO issues on your site I recommend using the Raven tool site auditor or SEM Russia's site audit tool they'll crawl your site and let you know about technical problems that might be hurting your site's SEO fortunately proven didn't have too many technical SEO issues and that's mostly due to the fact that we deleted so many zombie pages fewer pages equals fewer problems the only problems I could find were some missing alt text on images and a handful of duplicate titles not a big deal but worth fixing as expected Shawn quickly took care of all these technical SEO problems now that we fixed proven coms technical problems it was time to optimize their content I probably don't need to tell you that on-page SEO can make or break your site's rankings that's why I dedicate an entire step of my SEO checklist to on-page SEO now because proven had thousands of pages I knew I couldn't optimize every single one so Shawn sent me his top ten most important pages now some ASEAN's most important pages were blog posts and others were commercial pages that sold his services so let's look at a quick example of a page that I optimized for Shawn a blog post called best questions to ask references the complete list Shawn's target keyword for this post was questions to ask references so it added that keyword to the top of the page why because Google puts more weight on words that appear in the beginning of your content so it's important that your keyword shows up there I also sprinkled in a few LSI keywords like business tips LSI keywords are terms that are closely related to your target keyword and when you include these LSI keywords in your content you'll get a rankings boost in fact my recent analysis of 1 million Google search results found that LSI keyword return tended to outrank content that didn't contain LSI keywords so how can use LSI keywords to get higher rankings well let's say you just wrote an article about coffee LSI keywords for coffee would be things like mug caffeine and Starbucks so you'd want to make sure that you include those terms in your content our fourth step is to off - your title and description tag for click-through rate you probably already know that CTR is a huge ranking factor right now think about it if people searching for a keyword click on your result more than others it tells Google that you're the best result for that keyword and you'll rank higher in Google in fact a recently published Google research paper states that click-through rate data has proven to be a critical resource for improving search ranking quality so it's clear that CTR is an important ranking signal the question is how can you optimize for it let me walk you through a real-life example one of Sean's best blog posts was a huge list of job boards considering how epic this content was it should have been ranking in the top 3 but Sean's page was stuck in the 5th spot and I had a feeling that the pages title and description was hurting at CTR and rankings here's what I did to turn things around first I looked at the AdWords ads that showed up when I searched for best job boards and other related keywords I noticed that almost every ad used a specific number and none of the ads used the term niche talent so I changed Shawn's title tag to this and his description tag to this and these changes boosted that pages organic click-through rate by 64 point one percent and Shawn currently ranks in the top three for his target keyword now that improves Shawn's click-through rate it was time to optimize his site around another important ranking factor - well time and that's what step number five is all about so what is dwell time and how can you optimize for it when someone searches for a keyword and clicks in your result two things can happen they can stay in your site for a long time or they quickly click away the amount of time someone spends in your site is known as dwell time as you might expect the longer your dwell time in general the higher your page will ranking Google here's what I did to quickly improve Shawn's dwell time first I move Shawn's content up so it appeared at the top of the page you see proven used to have huge gaps that push their content below the fold like this so I cut this gap down by about 50% Shawn's post also had giant images that push their content down even more I made these images smaller so they took up less room next I made Shaun's introductions more sticky here's the deal when someone comes to your site from Google your intro makes them stick around or click away in fact intros are so important that it spend more time on my intros than my headlines in Shawn's case I noticed that his introductions weren't formatted in a reader friendly way see how all that text is squished together that's really hard to read so I formatted his intro so there was only one sentence per paragraph I also cut out a few lines of text that were compelling or interesting overall these tweaks boosted that pages to all time by 12-point to 3 percent not too shabby okay so our second to last step is to improve your site's loading speed can making your site faster really improve your Google rankings definitely in fact our search engine ranking factor study found that faster loading pages tended to outrank slow pages here's how to quickly evaluate and improve your site's loading speed first head over to Google PageSpeed insights just enter your site into the tool and fix the problems that it tells you about next check out GT metrics just like Google's tool GT metrics will show you potential issues with your pages code but it also lets you know about server or hosting problems that can slow down your site for example in Shawn's case his images weren't compressed so they took forever to load and this single fix made a huge impact on his loading speed now that Shawn's site was optimized error-free and fast it was time for the last step which is to publish a piece of content using this skyscraper technique you've probably already heard about the skyscraper technique if you haven't here's the deal the skyscraper technique is where you find the best content in your industry and then create something way better so I sent an email to Shawn and asked them have you noticed any Content that's ranking in Google but isn't even that good he said actually everything I've seen written about job descriptions is pretty weak Shawn was right most of the content out there about job descriptions were simple lists of links to different examples of job descriptions and for whatever reason they all use the same lame stock photos so I work with Shawn to create something way better than what was out there how first instead of a list of links to other pages we listed each job description on a single page next Shawn added helpful information about each job like the average salary and education requirements finally he used quality images instead of lame stock photos in Shawn's Post did great it got a short-term surge in traffic after a went live today Shawn SkyScreamer content currently ranks in the top 5 for his target keyword and thanks to this content and the other techniques from this checklist Shawn's organic traffic increased by eighty eight point three nine percent there you have it my seven step checklist to improve you google rankings if you liked this video make sure to subscribe to my youtube channel right now that way you won't miss out on other actionable SEO videos like this one just click on the subscribe button below this video also if you want exclusive SEO tips that I only share with subscribers head of Rebecca comm and sign up for the newsletter it's free now I want to turn it over to you which tip from this video are you gonna try first are you gonna work on your dwell time or do you want to delete zombie pages let me know by leaving a comment below right now just spot did I say that right what's up I do that a lot alright yeah I didn't oh but it's okay man my acting skills sky sky okay that's a tough one how are we doing shine