How to Get My Business on Top of Google Search: Here’s 5 Ways to Do It
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To help increase Google rankings and get your business at the top of the Google search can boil down to three main things – usability, authority and relevancy. All of these are key when it comes to your website dominating the SERPs. These three main factors are a mix of onsite and offsite optimisation which will help Google determine the overall user experience of your website.
At Embryo, we help businesses get to the top of Google every single day via a range of tried and true SEO tactics, as a result, we’re pretty confident that this blog is the perfect jumping-off point for people looking to get their business to the top of Google’s search pages.
If you’re interested in learning more about how we would use the following five techniques (plus many more) to get your business appearing at the top of Google for keywords that matter to you, then get in touch. You can call us on 0161 327 2635 or email [email protected].
Without further ado, here are the top 5 tactics businesses can use to get their website on top of Google Search.
Identifying Target Keywords Searched for by Users
If your goal is to appear at the top of Google for the products or services you are offering you need to make sure you are identifying the relevant search terms or phrases around this. These are known as keywords and they are the terms that your potential buyer or user will be searching for in the hope to find your business.
To identify the relevant keywords your business needs to rank for you need to carry out some keyword research based on your website’s category pages, products or services. Once you have identified a variation of relevant long and short-tail keywords you can then embed these into your web pages within the content, page titles, meta description, heading tags and ALT text to generate optimised content for the user. As a result of this optimisation, it allows Google to crawl your web pages and index the pages for the relevant keywords targeted to that page and therefore are more likely to display in the SERPs.
Keyword Research
When it comes to carrying out your keyword research there are a few tips and tricks to help you out. Everyone uses a different tool when carrying out keyword research but here are a couple of the favourites:
For example, let’s say you used KWFinder to carry out some relevant keyword research for your business which was an online ecommerce website which sold “mystery football kits”. You could search for a relevant keyword such as “mystery football shirts for sale”. The results would give you a list of varied keywords around your original main search terms and an average monthly search volume which let’s say would be 5,000. It would then also give us the KD (keyword Difficulty), which is a score out of 100 on the competitiveness of the industry and how easy it will be to rank in the top SERP positions. Along with this it also gives us a bit more insight into the industry with the current top 10 positions for that selected keywords and a trend in search volume over recent years.
Content Is King
You may have heard this saying before, and when it comes to SEO it’s true. After the last core Google update in March 2023, there was a massive emphasis on the quality of content you are providing to your user. When ranking your website Google looks at each of the page’s content and ranks it based on how helpful it is to the user. Your content needs to educate and help the user along their journey.
Along with meeting Google guidelines of providing helpful content for the user it also needs to be optimised for when Google is crawling your webpages. What we mean by this is ensuring that those target keywords match up with the page content. Designating target keywords for each page and making sure it is included in the page title, URL, meta description, heading tag and alt text at least once can all contribute to achieving a higher Google ranking, however, it is important not to go back to those old ways of blackhat SEO and stuff the pages with keywords as we can be penalised for this.
Backlink Profile and Authority
So we’ve spoken about content and that ticks off the relevance part of SEO. However, Google also monitors your website based on its authority and trust and the higher this is the better your website will appear in the SERPs.
What is a backlink profile many people will ask? This is the number of external links pointing to your website. Essentially what this is doing is giving Google a signal that you are trusted by others therefore a user visiting your website can trust you.
What makes a good backlink?
Some people say the more of these you have the better and that can be partially true however it does come down to quality over quantity. A good backlink can be determined by a few things but here are the most important ones.
Making sure the backlink you are getting to your site is actually relevant to your blog, product or category page. For example, let’s say we were an online ecommerce website that sold men’s designer clothing and we wanted a link to our “men’s designer t-shirt page”. A great link for our site would be the likes of Vogue who are a luxury fashion magazine so as you can see this is relevant and meeting our target audience.
There is also another reason why Vogue would be a great backlink for our “Men’s designer clothing client”. As Vogue is an industry-leading fashion magazine they have an overall DR (Domain Rating) of 86/100 and are well trusted by Google, therefore the fact they are linking to us will boost our overall DR and help us appear higher in the SERPs.
Optimise and Update Google My Business (GMB) Profile
A Google My Business Profile is a free business listing run through Google. It is normally found on the right-hand side of the SERPs where the white space is. This appears usually when a user searches directly for your brand.
Making sure this is fully optimised with contact details, images, opening hours, description, recent blog posts and website URL is a great way to increase visibility as you are taking as it enables Google to see all your business information in another place giving you extra credibility.
This is great for small and local businesses as it gives them a chance to read positive reviews and reach your site through a number of different ways helping to increase CTR.
If you want to discover more about the importance of your GMB profile and why it is more important than ever, try reading one of our latest posts.
Improving Usability through Onsite and Tech SEO
We’ve discussed the authority and relevance when it comes to SEO, however, we can’t leave out usability. Ensuring your website is optimised to the best of its ability to make the usability of your website better for your potential users is vital as it will ensure they are choosing you over your competition.
Improving the usability of your website can be done through all different aspects of on-site and technical SEO however we will touch on a couple of the important ones now. Things such as URL structure, site speed, internal linking, structured data and many more.
URL Structure
When it comes to URL structure there are a couple of things you need to remember to get it right.
- Shows a seamless and clear structure so the users know where they are, at all times on your website. For example homepage/category/product. This also allows the authority to pass through the funnels of the site correctly from the top that is the homepage.
- Include a target keyword so Google can identify what we are trying to rank for, this will also help us with the relevance aspect of SEO.
Internal Linking
Why is internal linking key? It’s easy for our homepage and those main category pages to be indexed and gain traffic, however, some of our web pages sit a bit deeper and lack authority. Internal linking is a great way to help pass that internal authority to our web pages and guide our users through the site to the next relevant page on their user journey.
Structured Data & Schema Markup
How can Schema benefit me in the SERPs?
Although schema may not have a direct effect on organic rankings it will help your listings look a lot richer within the SERPs. Adding review, faq and organisation schema code to the backend of your website can massively help when it comes to improving CTR as you are taking up more of that white space over your competition within the SERPs.
Page One Rankings Lead To More Sales and Leads for Your Business
Whether you’re a local business or a multi-million-pound company all these different aspects of SEO will contribute to getting your business on top of Google Search so make sure you consider all of them when looking to boost those rankings.
If you need any help with getting your business to the top of the Google search then be sure to drop us an email at [email protected] or call us on 0161 327 2635.
