Creating fantastic content that helps customers make better decisions and connect with your brand is only part of a successful content marketing strategy. The rest? Ensuring your target audience can easily find all that stellar content. That’s where thorough search engine optimization (SEO) comes in.
Although many shoppers begin a product purchase by heading straight for a specific vendor or marketplace (like Amazon, to name just one example), around 44% start with a Google search instead. And once they’ve gotten their results, most search engine users explore only the first few links, so the higher your content ranks on a given SERP, the better.
But knowing you’re after the highest Google rankings possible is one thing — achieving them is another. Not only are Google’s algorithms perpetually changing and evolving, but no one outside of Google itself knows with any certainty how they work.
What we do know is that search engines like Google utilize multiple signals to assess content quality and determine relevancy. They also quickly size up a particular piece of content similarly to how human readers do. They skim headings to get a feel for what the content will cover (and how well it’ll cover it), scan for important key terms, etc.
In other words, the art of achieving top SERP rankings isn’t about any one practice. Instead, it’s about creating high-value, helpful content and embracing all of the individual choices quality entails. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know to maximize your chances of achieving the high Google rankings you’ve been dreaming about, including must-know essentials and best practices.
How Can I Increase My Google Ranking?
Google focuses on providing the best possible experience for its users, so high-ranking content is consistently helpful, easy to digest, and information-rich. Factors that can help a piece of content achieve higher Google rankings include:
- High content quality
- Optimal user experience
- Mobile optimization
- Internal and external links
- Local search optimization
High content quality
High-quality SEO content is well-written, well-formatted, in-depth, and aligned with a user’s search intent. It also makes smart use of targeted, relevant keywords in both the content and any related metadata.
Optimal user experience
User experience goes well beyond the quality of the content on a website. Google also considers whether the site itself is easy to navigate, offers an intuitive experience, loads quickly, and provides enough value to encourage those users to stick around.
Mobile optimization
In 2023, approximately 96% of global web users accessed the internet via a mobile device, such as a smartphone or tablet. For that reason, optimizing for a wide range of different devices and screen sizes is an essential part of SEO.
Internal and external links
Relevant internal and external links add value to your content and help users easily find additional information that can help answer their questions. Additionally, backlinks to your content from authority users act as votes of confidence in favor of your content.
Local search optimization
If your content strategy has a local slant to consider, optimizing with local SEO in mind helps make your content even more valuable to Google and its users.
Can You Pay Google for a Better Ranking?
No, it’s not possible to pay Google to give you a higher search ranking or otherwise give you an advantage over your competitors. You can utilize Google Ads, Google’s pay-per-click (PPC) advertising option, to appear in strategically placed ad blocks. However, this is entirely different from ranking organically, which is something anyone can do for free.
The false belief that it’s possible to pay for organic search rankings is one of many common SEO myths. People may also mistakenly believe that paid advertising is always expensive, ads are only useful for e-commerce brands, and organic SEO takes too much time. In reality, both standard SEO and paid advertising have their benefits for brands of all types.
SEO vs. SEM
Search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) aren’t the same thing, but they’re two related concepts that absolutely have a lot in common. They both tie into a brand’s ongoing marketing strategy, and both leverage essential factors like keywords to boost traffic, drive conversions, and grow an audience. .
- SEO is essentially about optimizing content, websites, landing pages, etc., to support organic traffic from search engines like Google.
- SEM, on the other hand, factors generating organic traffic in marketing strategies and also includes paid options (like PPC ads).
Knowing the difference between SEO and SEM is less about choosing between them and more about knowing when and how to use each one. They complement one another beautifully. However, it may help to think of SEO as playing the long game when it comes to optimization and SEM as a way to drive short but powerful bursts of traffic when it really matters.
For example, building a strong catalog of valuable, keyword-rich evergreen content for your website or blog that drives a steady stream of traffic over time is a good example of SEO in action. A series of paid ads or sponsored posts promoting an important product launch or event would be a solid example of SEM.
How Long Does It Take to Improve Google Ranking?
There is no set time frame for how long it takes to improve a specific Google ranking. But for most brands, a new piece of high-quality content can take anywhere from two to six months to officially rank. The timeframe can also be affected by additional factors, like the quality of your optimization and the amount of competition for your targeted keywords.
Keep in mind that SEO is a long-term investment in your content, audience, and collective Google rankings. It requires time, patience, and sustained effort to work. But it’s also worth it, as it yields a high return on your original investment over time. Combining SEO and SEM can help balance sustainable, lasting results with fast, short-term results as needed.
Ready to learn more about how to improve your Google rankings and unlock the full potential of your brand? Explore Crowd Content’s proven content strategy solutions and step into the future.
What Is On-Page SEO vs. Off-Page SEO?
In a nutshell, on-page SEO covers on-site website or content optimization techniques and choices that are within your control as the owner. Examples include the optimization of your site’s HTML structure, metadata, web page content, and URLs.
Off-page SEO, on the other hand, covers the promotion of your site or content elsewhere online. Examples of off-page SEO can include cultivating a quality backlink catalog, social media marketing, guest posting opportunities, and adding your website to relevant directories and listings.
Find Where Audience Intent Meets Your Business Goals
Although both keyword research and intent research frequently intersect when it comes to digital marketing, they have different focuses. Keyword research addresses the key terms, phrases, and questions people search on Google.
Meanwhile, intent research is about targeting the underlying motivation and intent behind a search. Researching intent involves digging into the context of an audience’s searches and considering factors that could impact search behavior. Examples can include location, time of day, and prior searches a user might have conducted.
Researching, creating, and promoting original content on a specific topic represents an investment, so it’s essential to choose wisely. For example, the fact that a particular keyword is high-volume isn’t enough to make it a good fit for your brand or audience. Paying attention to search intent can help you narrow your choices and focus on options that are more likely to meet your audience’s needs.
Make Your Customer the Hero of Your Story
Although customers and their needs have always been at the heart of everything brands do, this is especially the case today. Consumers have more choices than ever. Personalization and relevancy are also increasingly important when it comes to content, and search engines are in the business of delivering the best possible results for each user.
The better you are at anticipating and meeting the unique needs of your target audience, the higher you’re likely to rank. Following the Google E-E-A-T approach to SEO is crucial. E-E-A-T stands for:
- Experience
- Expertise
- Authoritativeness
- Trustworthiness
Ensuring your content brings all of these benefits to the table is the best way to signal quality to Google and meet rising consumer expectations. You can make your customer the hero of your ongoing brand story further by:
- Making your audience believe you understand their needs and wants
- Stating their pain points and introducing smart solutions
- Connecting with your audience on an empathetic, emotional level
- Backing up your brand, products, and services with valuable social proof
Map Out Your Ideal Customer Journey and Know What a Conversion Means
Developing a keen understanding of your audience and setting up your site to better serve their needs is the ideal way to boost conversions, encourage customer loyalty, and make a bigger name for your brand. Study and consider how your visitors prefer to find information. Then, streamline your site and content to cater to those preferences.
It’s also crucial to understand what counts as a conversion. In digital marketing, you can consider a lead to have converted when they take a specified action in response to a clear call to action (CTA). Let’s dive into some knowledge and techniques that can help.
Sitemaps
A sitemap is a file that serves as a kind of road map for search engines. It lists all of your site’s elements (including pages, videos, files, and graphics). It also illustrates the relationship between all of them. A good, organized sitemap helps visitors find their way around and helps search engines crawl your site efficiently. Facilitating efficient crawling, in turn, helps search engines index (and ultimately rank) your site faster and more accurately.
The two major sitemap types to consider are:
- XML sitemaps: XML sitemaps are designed to guide search engine crawl bots and help them effectively locate the site’s various URLs.
- HTML sitemaps: HTML sitemaps are streamlined to guide actual visitors and help them locate the most important parts of a site.
Navigation logic
Think back to the last time you landed on a particularly well-organized website after a Google search. Everything you needed was exactly where you expected it to be, and the user experience was so intuitive that you likely didn’t even have to consider where to head next for additional information.
That’s the type of experience you want to provide to audiences. Not only will visitors be more likely to stick around and see what you have to offer, but Google will pick up on the quality of the overall user experience and rank your site accordingly.
Ideally, your website design makes it easy for visitors to accomplish their goals as quickly and easily as possible. So, the better you are at anticipating visitor expectations and setting up navigation to match, the more likely you are to close a sale or eventually see those visitors again.
To see the power of superior navigability in action, consider how web design company Forge and Smith helped BC Dairyimprove their site structure and better serve their clientele. Previously, BC Dairy’s site was completely unorganized, which made it hard for their visitors to find the content they were looking for. After the site revamp, content was effectively filtered to better serve BC Dairy’s four separate audiences via tiered navigation menus, footer menus, and additional tools.
Optimize Page Structure
Optimizing your content for SEO is about more than simply paying attention to content quality and using keywords wisely. Ultimately, the information you offer your visitors is going to be only as effective as the overall user experience.
Great on-page SEO that results in high Google rankings efficiently combines content quality with solid design elements and streamlined formatting. On-page SEO is the process of optimizing your content for human audiences and search engines alike.
Some key on-page SEO factors to consider when crafting your content include:
- Header tags: Header tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.) lend structure to your content and make it easier for both readers and search engines to see what it’s all about at a glance.
- Meta tags: Meta tags like meta descriptions and meta titles optimize the way your content appears on a SERP by summarizing it for both search engines and potential visitors. Meta tag quality can make a huge difference in how many people ultimately click through to your website.
- Internal linking: Smart use of relevant internal linking helps your visitors easily find additional on-site information that may be helpful to them. It also helps Google understand your site and how individual pages relate to one another.
Free tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics can help you streamline the process of improving your on-page SEO. So can paid options like Yoast, SEMRush, and Ahrefs.
Page elements
Reassessing the core functionality of your website now and then is a crucial part of meeting visitor expectations, offering a positive user experience, and keeping Google rankings high. Some key questions to ask yourself might include:
- Do any particular site elements make it harder for visitors to find what they’re looking for or to actively engage with content the way they want to?
- Are there any pop-ups or other features that might annoy or distract visitors?
- What changes could you make to your site to make it easier for people to use?
In most cases, simple is best when it comes to website and content design. (Simplicity helps support important SEO factors like site speed as well.) Every feature should ultimately serve the user and improve their user experience. If it doesn’t, consider removing it.
Headings and skimmable content
Most users in search of information and solutions don’t painstakingly read content from beginning to end. They skim it to assess whether it has the answers they’re looking for, especially at first. From there, they may either read the content in its entirety or zero in on the individual sections that will be most helpful to them.
Well-optimized content makes it easy for audiences to engage with it in whatever way makes the most sense for them, so the more skimmable it is, the better. Good, organizational use of descriptive, keyword-rich headings and subheadings is key. A user should be able to scan just the headings and come away with a solid idea of what the content is about.
Images: Enhance User Choice and Brand Visibility
Including relevant images, infographics, or videos can also help improve content value and readability. The same goes for podcasts, transcripts, etc., so consider which additions complement your content best and would be most useful for your audience.
Enhancing your content with additional visual elements benefits your brand by:
- Offering visitors more and different ways to consume information
- Helping visual learners understand your content better and get more out of it
- Improving overall brand visibility
- Increasing your chances of turning up in Google Image results, YouTube search results, etc.
Actionable Tactics and Examples
Kick your on-page SEO game up a notch by routinely implementing the following techniques:
- Write helpful, in-depth content that educates, informs, and entertains.
- Leverage headings and subheadings to lend structure to your pages.
- Make your URLs concise but descriptive to help search engines understand your pages.
- Compose keyword-rich title tags and meta descriptions for all pages.
- Optimize your images by adding keyword-rich alt text.
- Enrich your pages with relevant internal and external links.
- Improve your site load speeds and perform regular ongoing checks.
- Optimize for mobile responsiveness on a wide range of devices and screens.
- Perform ongoing keyword research to stay in step with what audiences are searching.
- Update your content regularly to maximize ongoing rankings.
Demand High-Quality Content
Content quality and thorough search engine optimization go hand in hand when it comes to successful ranking strategies. The better your content serves human audiences, the higher Google will ultimately rank it, meaning the best way to impress search engines is to create for humans first and foremost.
Content that’s competent, relevant, and engaging naturally attracts more readers. The more readers you attract and the more engagement you can encourage, the more likely Google is to perceive that content as high-value and rankable. Here are some tips for ensuring your content is as high in value as possible:
- Focus on quality over quantity. A handful of well-crafted articles is ultimately better for SEO than countless mediocre ones.
- Get to know your audience. Conduct general market research, and poll your current audience to find out what they like and don’t like. Tailor your content to match.
- Diversify your content with different formats. Explore video, infographics, podcasts, and social media offerings in addition to traditional written text.
- Focus on usefulness. Google favors helpful content that adds value to users’ lives.
- Be consistent. Implement a content calendar, create in advance, and schedule your content to make this easier.
- Embrace regular content refreshes. Keep your content current with regular updates that reflect current information. Include updates in your content calendar.
- Get more out of your best work. Repurpose successful content to get maximum mileage out of it and introduce it to new audiences.
- Consider professional assistance. Hire professional writers and content services to ensure high quality and breathe new life into your strategy.
Use Schemas
Schemas are sets of structured tags you can add to a page’s code to help search engines better understand what it’s about. Adding the right schema markup to your SEO strategy can maximize your potential to rank by:
- Helping crawl bots thoroughly understand your content
- Boosting visibility by qualifying you for SERP features like rich snippets
- Streamlining the indexing process
Below are some key examples of schema types to know and potentially implement.
- Local business markup maximizes visibility in relevant locale-specific searches.
- Organization markup showcases essential information about your business or establishment and qualifies you for a knowledge panel in SERP results.
- Review markup helps your best reviews appear as review snippets in SERP results.
- Product markup showcases key information about your products and also maximizes the chances of your products showing up in Google image carousels at the top of SERPs.
It’s also worth checking out Google’s search gallery for more schema suggestions, including options specifically for news, food and drink, education, sports, jobs, and entertainment.
Image Optimization Pro Tips
Many modern consumers use Google Image search to discover new brands, products, and services to love, so don’t sleep on image optimization. You can maximize your ability to rank well by prioritizing the following:
Description and file names
Optimizing the names of your images, as well as the attached alt text and image descriptions, helps Google understand them and rank them appropriately. Taking care to place images near or within related text and page features gives you an SEO boost, too.
ADA text
Consider the fact that some of your visitors may have disabilities or impairments. You can help make your content more accessible by ensuring it’s compliant with ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) standards. Adding features like descriptive alt text aligns your images with these standards.
Speed up load speeds
While quality is key when it comes to images, you don’t want to use large files that slow down page load speeds, as you risk losing visitors. Compress your images accordingly without compromising quality. Perform regular speed tests to check for potential issues, as well.
Build Quality Backlinks
Also sometimes called inbound links, backlinks are links on other websites that send visitors to your website. Specific subcategories include editorial backlinks, paid backlinks, press backlinks, forum backlinks, and comment backlinks.
These subcategories help your content better align with E-E-A-T by signaling to Google that people find your content valuable and worthy of sharing with their own audiences. They register as votes of confidence in much the same way a positive business review or a product recommendation from a friend would.
However, not all backlinks are created equal. Maximize the SEO value of your backlink catalog by implementing best practices like the following:
- Focus on acquiring backlinks from high-quality sites. The more respected the site, the more a backlink from that site is worth to Google.
- Consider guest posting as a possibility for growing your catalog.
- Encourage quality organic backlinks by posting high-value content people want to link to.
- Take it slow and don’t rush the process. A good guideline is to limit efforts to five to ten links per day.
- Take note of what your competitors are doing and apply what you learn to your own strategy.
Don’t be afraid to get creative when it comes to growing your backlink catalog. Take this case study from Ahrefs, for example. They leveraged the value and structure of a standard stats post to encourage links via outreach efforts. Ultimately, Ahrefs was able to acquire 36 links from 32 sites.
Utilize Advanced SEO Tools
Digital marketers and content creators really have it made these days, thanks to the wide selection of advanced SEO tools out there. The right tools can’t replace essential human insight and creativity, but they can help streamline the process of planning, creating, and optimizing your content. They can help you navigate events like algorithm changes, as well. Some widely trusted options to consider include:
- SEMRush: This comprehensive platform offers assistance with a wide range of tasks, including keyword research, site audits, visibility insights, and competitive analysis.
- Ahrefs: Like SEMRush, Ahrefs offers marketers free and paid assistance with multiple aspects of a good SEO strategy. Examples include rank tracking, keyword exploration, and site auditing.
- AI assistants: AI content creation assistants should be used with care to ensure optimal quality, but they can help talented human creators brainstorm ideas, outline content, and streamline the draft creation process. Examples include ChatGPT, Jasper, and Claude.
Analyze and Adapt Based on Metrics
Tracking and analyzing key performance metrics is essential for determining the success of any rank improvement campaign. In addition to actual SERP rankings, some possibilities to consider include:
- Organic traffic rates
- Engagement rates
- Bounce rates
- Dwell time
- Keyword rankings
- Click-through rates
- Conversion rates
- Backlinks
Low bounce rates combined with high dwell times, click-through rates, engagement rates, and conversion rates all suggest that your content quality is on point.
Why Is My Google Ranking So Low?
Google rankings can tank or come up on the low side for many reasons. Examples include:
- Technical SEO issues like broken links
- Duplicate content
- Lost backlinks
- High competition
- Too much content that isn’t useful or helpful enough
- Out-of-date or irrelevant content
If your site is very new, it may take more time to build authority and raise rankings. Perform regular site audits to monitor for potential problems like these. Always fix any issues found as soon as possible.
Leveraging SEO Practices for Long-Term Success
High Google rankings and long-lasting SEO success don’t just happen. They’re the results of methodical adherence to best SEO practices and a willingness to adapt to changing algorithms, evolving consumer expectations, and digital marketing trends.
Ready to take your content strategy to the next level and beyond? Explore a wealth of new possibilities with Crowd Content’s catalog of advanced SEO services.
