How To Get To The Top of Google (Rank #1 in 2022)

All right, so you wanna get your website to 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. There's no surprise, they're 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 gonna share the strategies that we use for our clients here at Exposure Ninja I know that we've broken down in our best-selling books on 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 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 searches problems. 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 the 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 wanna create the content that best satisfies the searcher. Hmm, in fact... Hmm, in fact while we're on definitions, let's define how Google really works and understand the business model 'cause actually that gives us even more context. So Google makes about $40 billion 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 engines 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 gonna go somewhere else. So that's what Google cares about the best. Not because Google has some deep purpose like organise the world's information. It cares because it needs to keep you hooked using its search engine, so it can monetize your suite clicks. Now I wanna 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 is gonna understand this, and it's gonna 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 gonna bring up a completely different set of search results, mostly focused around longer form content is gonna 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 is showing really informational pages on the search results, you know that in order to rank for that time, you're gonna have to produce something which is informational. If on the other hand it is showing really commercial pages for that term or you 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 the Google doesn't have rules like every page that ranks on Google needs to have 2000 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 in the best answers is gonna 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 homepage 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 homepage is just basically an introduction to your business or an introduction to your website. And actually the deeper more useful information is on your sub pages, so whether these are service pages if you're a service or lead generation business or whether they're product 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're ranked 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 but 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 gonna 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 hugs go? What was happening to our industry? It's 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 wanna 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 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 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, you have a tax accountancy, so you're gonna have phrases that might be searched for, by someone who's looking for a tax accountant, for example, tax accountant, tax accountancy, a tax accountant for small businesses, tax accounts 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 gonna be very commercial keywords. These are gonna be the keywords that you're gonna be optimising 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 sorts of people that you want on your website because they would make good potential customers. The third type of keyword is even further up 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 this might be things like how to scale a small business. Well, an accountant is gonna 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 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 gonna have core pages on our website that target the commercial terms, tax accountant. We're gonna have blog posts that might target the problems, how to save money on VAT bills or how to save corporations hacks 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 gonna need different types of content on our website because Google is gonna 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 wanna prioritise your commercial keywords because those are the ones that most rapidly gonna 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 gonna be your top priorities, but your other types of keywords are gonna be really useful for building up visibility of the site, building up your credibility, picking up links as well which is gonna 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 homepage or services pages, so page where 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 gonna optimise for your target keyword. 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 gonna 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 wanna optimise 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 wanna do is optimise our content for how Google is showing the information in the search results, now you'll have notice 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 best WordPress plugins you're probably gonna get an unordered list, which has just lifted from someone's website and put directly in the search results there, so that Google can show that information to the search or 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 showed it's a good idea to try and use the same sorts of markup that Google is using to show those featured snippets, because actually you do want those features snippets, now people get confused about featured snippets and think well, I don't really wanna 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 over contract. Actually you'll notice your click through rate increasing from search results. If you've got featured snippets because people can see that the information is good, and they're gonna wanna read more detail about it as well. The next thing that you wanna do is optimise 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 matter 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 ones who write a compelling meta-description. So meta-description is the black description texts 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 gonna have. Over competitors in the search results, because you essentially wanna snap up more clicks through your meta-description than any of the competitors listed on that search results page. Because that over time is gonna show Google that your page is more relevant, because more people are clicking on it, which is gonna help your ranking. So if you can do things like mentioned free delivery if you're selling product fast delivery things like that are gonna 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 free consultation any kind of initial incentive to get people to contact you than 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 gonna get the traffic and that also of 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, there seems a little bit basic. This is gonna get phased out." Here we are almost a decade later, still talking about the importance of links, whether it's gonna go away or not in the future, nobody knows, but right now links are making a difference. So what's the deal with things. 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. In Google to an extent is still a popularity contest. Okay, the most popular sites have the most authoritative 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 higher foot ones, the great thing about them is they're predictable, the lower foot 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 lower 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. And this example, we conducted a survey for one of our clients about the popularity of this loop 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 notice that this article started to pick up some large media links, including one from the garden. 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 write a book and just put it on your website. You're gonna find that people start linking to you because people always wanna 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 gonna 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 will 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 gonna get 100% success rate. Sorry, your success rate is gonna depend on who you are, but it's gonna 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 ResponseSource in 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 ResponseSource Gorkana help her report her 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 gonna contribute opinions and facts. And journalists, and very high authority, successful publications that you would have heard of, and you might even read, use these services as a shortcut to get opinion. 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 hashtag journorequests, hashtag prrequests, if journalists can't even face going to ResponseSource or Gorkana, they can just use Twitter and use the hashtag journorequests. They'll say looking for someone to give an expert opinion on how to turn your eyes inside out, oh no! They might say hashtag journorequests, 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 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 gonna 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 gonna be searching for if they're looking to do business with you, the things that they're gonna 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 source of customer. Once you know those keywords, write or optimise content on pages for those types of keywords. And make sure that you're matching the intent of the keyword to the intent of the page. So for example, you're gonna optimise your main core pages, these are the commercial pages which result in a lead or sale for your commercial terms. You're gonna optimise blog posts or knowledge basis for informational terms, okay? These are phrases that people are searching for if they need an answer to a question. Then you're gonna 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. (crickets chirping) If you haven't learned anything, then I hope you've enjoyed it. (crickets chirping) If you haven't enjoyed it, then (gulping) if you haven't enjoyed it, then thanks for watching anyway

'cause 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 a 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 wanna work with us then we can talk about how that might happen as well. So go to exposureninja.com to request your free view 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. (high energy upbeat music)