Rank Number 1 in Google – 3 Steps and Resources You Can Do Today

Here’s a list of the top 3 resources and things you can do today to rank number one in Google. It’s all about the Content, content, content! Writing excellent content people want to read and making it findable will help you rank number 1!

The three steps look like this:

1. Write great content
2. Promote the great content that people love
3. Help Google Find your great content

The First Step in Ranking #1 on Google – Excellent Content

We all know it takes highly relevant, top notch content to get good search engine results (SERPs). To learn how to write really good content your buyer can find on page one, you’ll want to read this post about writing the content your buyer needs, when he needs it.

Step Two: Rank Number One on Google – Promote Your Content

Your content must resonate with your buyer. Understanding your unique buyer personas intimately and writing content specifically to a unique persona is at the core of getting your content to rank number one. Writing content for a unique buyer persona that is relevant to them right then will help you outrank your competition for the same keywords and phrases.

Writing content for your buyer persona using sentences and phrases that match the thoughts, pains, needs and goals your buyer has at each stage of the Buyer’s Journey will not only get you top rankings, it will improve your targeted traffic, leads and conversions.

The Buyer’s Journey has 3 pre-purchase phases:

1. The Awareness Phase
2. The Consideration Phase
3. The Decision Phase

Understanding and creating the content you need in each phase of the Buyer’s Journey will help you rank number one. Developing the perfect offer your buyer will download will help move your prospect through the marketing funnel. Doing this is easy when you understand the content your buyer needs right where they are. Including phrases they will use to conduct their search will help you optimize the content with the keywords that will result in the rankings and click-throughs you want.

Content Promotion to Drive More Traffic to Your Site.

Google’s algorithm includes tracking and measuring visitor engagement to your website pages. To improve engagement with your content and webpages you’ll need to drive traffic to your pages through various means of promotion.

SEO is the foundation for getting your keywords, phrases and content optimized. However, you need to do more to move your rankings to number one.  Some of the top ways to increase traffic are:

• Email Marketing
• Social Media Marketing
• Social Media Management
• Paid Advertising
• Influencer Marketing

A strategy that includes developing high-value content, content offers, and content promotion strategies is often referred to as online marketing, inbound marketing, content marketing or a marketing campaign. A good inbound marketing strategy or campaign will include within the content a relevant Call-to-Action that takes the reader to an offer download.

Promoting Content with Email Marketing

Once the visitor provides their email address and clicks the button to download their offer, their email address is automatically sent to your customer relationship management software (CRM) (i.e. HubSpot, SalesForce, Sugar CRM, etc.) or your auto-responder email software (Aweber, Constant Contact, MailChimp, etc).

Within the CRM or auto-responder email platform you will have created a sequence of emails that speak directly to your buyer, right where they are, right when they need it. The first one may deliver the content offer they requested. Subsequent emails may include additional information they need to move them through their buying journey, finally getting them to the decision stage where you can convert them to a customer.

If your visitor was impressed by your content, they will likely want more. Having an awesome content download or offer that is relevant to the phase of the journey your buyer is in, increases engagement and gets them into your marketing funnel.

Increase Engagement, Increase Rankings

If your visitor found your offer organically, they likely found it via a search for the keywords, phrases and strings they queried. If you promoted your offer via social media, social ads, AdWords, PPC or email marketing, you significantly increase the visibility of your content and your offer. By increasing the traffic to your offer, you also increase your search engine rankings or SEO juice.

Therefore, the more you promote your offer, the more people see it. The more people see it, the more SEO juice you get. The more juice, the higher your rankings for those content with those related keywords.

Social Media Promotion

Create powerful statements or questions relevant to your content and create a compelling meme or video, then post it to the social channels that are most effective for your industry or business solution. It takes time to build your following, so don’t give up.

Google loves social media engagement. Google believes that the more people like or follow you and the more they engage with your content, the more of an authority you are. Their algorithm rewards you with increased SEO juice when your social following, likes, tweets, shares, click-throughs and comments increase.

Social Media Marketing

One of our favorite ways to promote content is with small budget Facebook ads. We target our buyer persona demographics and start with a budget of $5.00 per day. As we refine our audience and our posts, we increase the budget.

Identify your goal. Is it your goal to increase traffic, increase social engagement or increase conversions? Develop your social ad strategy so that is aligned with and delivers on your goal.

Google Ads and PPC

This works in relatively the same way as Social Media marketing. Many businesses and industries do much better with a much smaller budget using Facebook ads. Be sure to experiment with long-tail keywords that reflect the buyer persona’s thoughts, needs, pains and goals in the specific phase that your content relates to. This will result in higher relevant click-throughs and high-value engagement.

Influencer Marketing

An influencer is someone who is very active on social media, blogs, forums and high-traffic social environments. Because we prefer to buy from someone who has been referred to us through a trusted third-party, we are 80% more likely to make a purchase from a referred resource than from a vendor we don’t have a relationship with or hasn’t been referred to.

Influencers bring their audience and their audiences’ network to the table. Influencers are highly trusted, liked and have a loyal network. Influencer’s have the ability to drive traffic to your site, increase your social media exposure and without question, sell your product as a result of a simple recommendation or compelling story about your brand or their experience with your product or brand.

You’ll get your content ranked number one on Google if you follow Step One above and create a promotion strategy that you tweak and refine based upon the data you receive. Keep measuring, continue refining and don’t stop promoting good content.

Step Three: Get Ranked #1 on Google – Best Practice Technical Search Optimization

Following Google’s best practice recommendations for technical (on-page) optimization is the first step to letting Google know your content is available to be indexed and ranked.

Use one of the tools we recommend below to confirm you have optimized your page effectively for:

• Keyword Relevance – Help the search engines recognize your content for the targeted keywords you have chosen.
• Search Engine Appearance – Once you’ve published your new post or landing page, be sure to go to Google Search Console and index your new page. If you search for the newly published page, you won’t find it in the search engines. Once you follow these quick steps below, you’ll see that it is now indexed and findable!
  • Click on your website property,
  • Click on “Crawl” in the left sidebar, then
  • Click on “Fetch as Google.”
  • In the prompt under the page title, “Fetch as Google,” to the right of your domain URL, add the URL of the new landing page or blog post.
  • “Click Fetch and Render.”
  • Then click “Index” next to your new entry in the list below.

• Visitor Experience – be sure your content is structured in an easy to read fashion. Use bullet points, lists, effective sub-headings, conceptual images and short paragraphs. Provide high-value links to sources that the reader will find relevant and useful to this subject. Don’t use links to a competitor’s site and don’t link keywords to another website.
• Target Keyword – When setting up your on-page SEO, use one keyword/phrase to help search engine crawlers understand the content topic. Be sure to use that keyword/phrase in the title and in the first paragraph.

There are many free and premium tools available to analyze your content and determine whether your new content landing page or blog post passes technical optimization best practice recommendations. Yoast WordPress Plugin and Alexa.com are popular tools.

Here are some free tools I think you’ll find helpful:

• Keyword Density Analysis Tool – This great tool checks the value and influence of your keywords. Once you’ve published your page, simply pop the new page URL into search box and you’ll get a comprehensive Keyword, keyword phrase, along with a word count and list of linked words.
• SEO Analyzer – This tool analyzes the on-page SEO and provides feedback on what you need to improve as well as where you score well in your efforts.
• Analytics, Plagiarism Search and Writing Resources – This tool is a regular go-to for me. It provides the Flesch Reading Ease Score, Grade Level Reading Scores, Statistics, and Keywordsl It’s easy and it’s fast.
• SEO Tools – This website provides a list of free and premium tools to analyze your page:
  • SEO analysis
  • WSA Spider – analyzes your entire website or a page. It crawls it like a search engine and provides a report on your on-page optimization, domain strength, link architecture, backlink campaign and social media reputation – all in one report.
  • SERP Analysis
  • Blog Analyzer
  • URL Analyzer
  • Backlink Analysis
  • Link Structure
  • Backlink Hunter
  • Link Popularity

Yes! It is a lot of work to prepare content that will catapult to the first position in the search engines. But, it is worth every minute of effort. Once you get a routine going, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at the results you get. Unfortunately, this is what we have to do today to drive targeted traffic back to our websites. Buyers want to do pre-purchase research. You need to provide them with the content they need.

If your content is valuable, they’ll reward you with loyalty and referrals.

The more you employ these three tactics, the better your rankings will be.

If you don’t have time to do these steps yourself, give us a call or send us an email. We’ll be happy to help you figure it out and even support you with some or all of it.

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Get the FREE Buyer’s Journey Template and Get Started

Get your free buyer’s journey template so you can map your content for each Buyer Persona and the phase of the journey they are in. You’ll be surprised how easy it is to create great content using the words that are in their head at the time they are searching for a solution.

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