How to Rank a New Website (PERFECT for Small or Local Businesses)

new websites are notoriously tough to rank in google search especially if you're short on money or time but there is a way to do it as long as you focus on the really important stuff and just forget about the rest so in this video i'll show you the ropes what you need to check off your list that'll get you the best results in the least amount of time and it's all free too so in the end you'll have my shortcut to ranking in google search so you can start getting found way faster even if you have some pretty stiff competition and all this stuff has been tested by some pretty big names in the seo space and i've personally seen these tactics work first hand by my own clients and students so here we go so you've got a new or newish website that doesn't really have any authority built up yet and you want to rank it fast i accept that mission and i want to help you so let's get right into the 10 steps that are going to get you found first i know you're a business that sells products or services but i also want you to think of yourself as a trusted source of information on your topic in other words you need to go with a content marketing focus on your website you know it doesn't rank really well sales pages but guess what does helpful stuff actionable stuff articles and videos that help solve a problem there's an absolutely amazing book i've got right here called they ask you answer that goes really in depth into how you can do this right so i highly recommend this book or if you're like me just go with the audio version because i prefer to listen than read usually so you know you need to create content to attract your ideal customers to your site but if it's new you can't just try to rank for the really big keywords straight out the gate remember we need to crawl before we can walk and we need to prove our worth with smaller keywords first and show google that we're getting traffic and keeping traffic

before they'll give us the keys to dominating the bigger tougher phrases so you need to go for keywords that are still valuable but a little more niche and specific so what i'm talking about here are long tail keywords use a tool like ubersuggest which is pretty powerful and free to type in the keywords you think you'd like to go up for and then take a look at the difficulty score that it shows you it's also going to suggest other keyword phrases that may be longer and more specific that have fewer monthly searches but are much easier to win you know these long tail keyword opportunities will end up becoming the basis for the content you create and you'll need to optimize each post for one of them so what type of content should you be creating for all these keyword phrases that you find i did a recent video going over the three types of posts you should be creating and how long it should be for the highest potential of ranking them this is known as the content cluster method specifically you should be starting with a handful of really in-depth pillar posts each being a really in-depth look at one of your broad topics for example i might do one pillar post about website optimization and one about content marketing and then one about paid advertising right these are big topics then you'd create keyword posts each one taking a deeper dive into a sub topic so if i had that pillar post all about content marketing i'd then want to create a keyword post about video marketing and one about podcasting and basically have each one cover one specific area within content marketing then you'd want to create what we call answer posts which you guessed it answer a common question that your ideal customers not only have but that they type into google and you want to make sure that all these different types of articles link to each other where it makes sense within the article so

that content marketing post will naturally talk about podcasting and then when you mention it you'd want to link to the podcasting article and then in the podcasting article you might want to link to one of your answer posts that answers the question what equipment do i need to start a podcast when you do this right in your various articles all linked to each other in a well thought out way that really provides the best user experience for your visitors you'll keep people around for way longer and google will also start to see that you are an authority on your topic and that you deserve to rank for your overall topics and keywords okay so that one isn't super easy to do in fact it's going to require some work on your part to pull it off so let's just do a really easy one next so all i want you to do is install the free rank math plugin on your wordpress site it's an all-in-one seo tool that's going to show you how well you're doing whenever you add a new page or post and it's also going to give you a little checklist of what you've done right and what you still need to add to give yourself the best possible chance for each individual post and it also makes it easy to add your keywords to your post titles and urls which is also extremely important in ranking so in addition to just giving you all those real-time suggestions the plug-in also really makes it easy to optimize each post for more clicks and one really easy and powerful thing you can do for extra seo power is to make your search listing more enticing than the rest of them on the page by crafting a really irresistible title and description and since most site owners really treat this as an afterthought if they ever think about it or do it at all you should be in a really great position to just swoop in with something great here ideally you want to include your keyword phrase and a solid benefit or unique selling proposition in your headline and a few more benefits or reasons to click through in your description so look at this search result for example

i'm getting what the article is about but there's nothing enticing in there that makes me really want to click on this one versus any of the others that would come up you know the headlines pretty utilitarian and the description is really just an excerpt pulled from the article itself so i think we can definitely do better so what about this instead the ultimate newbies podcasting equipment checklist starting a podcast is exciting but the gear can be confusing this handy checklist will tell you exactly what you need without spending any more than you have to using words like ultimate and checklist and hitting on the fact that i'm eliminating confusion and saving you money makes this listing much more clickable and here's where it gets really interesting so if you get more clicks than google expects you to get at the position that they're showing you in the search results even if it's just slightly more they're going to see that they're going to take note of that and they'll start ranking you higher as a result and with rank math you just input all this text right inside wordpress it could not be any easier so now you've successfully gotten the click thanks to your new improved title and description but now your challenge is keeping people right there so dwell time and bounce rate are two really important factors that google looks at to measure how good your content really is so dwell time is just the the amount of time people spend on your site or on your page and bounce rate is the percentage of people who bounce off your site after any given page so you want a high dwell time and a low bounce rate how do we do that you know assuming your content is actually good to start with because let's face it no tricks or hacks that i'm going to teach you today are going to save subpar content so you want to enhance that already great content with things that keep people interested like great images and text that's broken up into easy to read chunks

so rather than that big intimidating wall of text that's just going to make most people give up because it looks like a term paper right you want short paragraphs you want headings bullet lists and then bolded or italicized text to emphasize your important points and when you use all of these elements your content starts to look easy to get through and easier to skim which is actually how most people are going to consume your stuff and while we're talking images one quick extra pro tip here add alt text to every image using your keyword phrase and then a few closely related phrases for extra ranking power so if you're doing this in wordpress they make it really easy to add what we call alt text whenever you upload an image it's just a really good practice and an extra way to get in your keywords so now that you know what dwell time is let's increase it even more by using video so when you create a video and you embed it on your post you're helping yourself rank in a few ways one you're keeping people interested for a longer period of time that's the dwell time piece and if you're hosting it on youtube and then embedding it on your site and you're using your keywords in the title and description of that video you're sending a really strong signal or signals rather to google at the same time you know google owns youtube so they love cross-pollinating their different platforms in other words if both your post and your video are trying to rank for the same keyword phrase and you embed that video on your post you're making it much more likely that the post will rank in google and your video will rank inside of youtube so whenever you write a new post i'd love to see you turn that post into a video and then embed it on your post letting your visitors decide if they'd rather watch it or read it and with video you

get the extra benefit of letting people get to know you which is a fantastic way to build trust in a really big way okay so google has made it really clear how important it is for your site to be fully optimized for mobile so if you want to make sure you're in the best possible position for rankings you need to run google's mobile friendly test which can be found at search.google.com test slash mobile friendly as well as their page load speed test found at developers.google.com speed and i will be leaving those links in the description below as well next if you're in the process of planning your website and you don't have your domain name yet you might want to consider an exact match or partial match domain name now this is a little controversial and i'm not saying that you definitely want to do this because if you do it wrong it can look really spammy but taking that out of it the results don't lie websites with keywords in them have a higher chance of ranking so an

exact match domain would be something like plumber in modesto.com you know it's not branded which is not ideal but it would have a really good chance of ranking so should you go for something like that i would say probably not but it's your choice you know what i would recommend more would be what we call a partial match domain something that still has your keywords but it's also branded so this would be something more like mikesmodestoplumbing.com and if you're a local business serving a local area you don't want to sleep on really hitting it hard to rank in local searches specifically in the map pack this is actually my favorite place to show up and search and the best chance any new business has to rank your actual business pages and i've got several in-depth videos of how to rank in the map so click right here for that complete playlist but in short you want to claim your google my business listing optimize a few key areas on your website and there are some things you'll need to do on your website as well and i go into all of that in the playlist so click right here and we can pick right up see you there