1. Pick Relevant Keywords
In the previous example, where the user wants to buy a car, he intends to make a purchase. To fulfill this intent, he or she uses the “buy car” keyphrase. If you sell cars on the Internet, such a keyword would be one of the many by which you would like to rank as a top website in SERP. The “buy car” keyword is extremely popular and general. Still, slightly fewer users will pick “buy auto” instead. And some of them will even want to add details of their intent and search for “buy white Nissan” (if they have a particular model they want) or “buy cheap car” (if they are interested in saving their money). Your task is to find out all the options of keywords in your niche and analyze them. The truth is that it is almost impossible to get Google top for the “buy car” keyphrase or similar because leading market players have already taken them. So it would help if you focused on options with fewer competitors but still popular ones within users. Also, it will be easier to research keywords with SEO tools.
2. Study How Google Picks Websites for SERP
The Google search engine works on thousands of complex algorithms, including AI ones. All of them are created to teach Google to recognize users’ intents we have discussed earlier, to provide the best results for every user. For example, it is known that Google top for the same keyword can be different for different users with different locations, histories of searchings, etc.
Still, it is possible to understand how Google ranks sites in general. You need to satisfy these main algorithms and take into account these factors:
It is the most crucial factor because if other sites reference you, then the search engine realizes that you are reliable, and it can rank you highly. The quality of these links matters the most, so it would be wise to spend some money and buy premium backlinks. It may be a more critical factor for one niche and less important for another one, but in general, Google tries to show new pages higher in the search results. Pay attention that this is relevant only for new pages of authoritative sites, not new sites in general. For example, if a user searches where to buy a car, the sites with catalogs and prices will be set higher than the resources without pricelists specified. Technical optimization of the website. It includes HTTPS support, a mobile version of the resource, page download time, and understandable site architecture.
3. Analyze Why You Are Not in the Top Now
If you have just launched your website, it is absolutely okay that you have a zero rating, and you can just go to the next step. But if your resource is not new, a low rating means you do something wrong. So, find out what exactly. The worst situation would be if you got a penalty from Google, and it banned you. It is possible if you broke its rules. You can find out if it is so in the Google Search Console. In any other cases, a bad rating means bad SEO, but that is not a final verdict. One just will need to spend some time on its improvement. Check all the factors from the list above to understand where you or your team went wrong.
4. Do Some SEO
However, backlinks are the most important factor; you should start to do SEO from your site’s optimization. It means to set up everything from the technical side and fill pages with quality content. Content must include the keywords you picked in Step 1. And only when you understand that you are ready to show it to Google and users, get to link building. We have already mentioned in this article that you can buy backlinks. This is one of the link building methods. It means you pay for some agency to find resources ready to place a reference on your site. You can also do it on your own, though it is a rather complicated task if you do not have an SEO-team in your company. Links must be of high-quality and natural. It means they must be placed within useful and unique content covering the relevant topics. To fit them into the text, anchors with your keywords are used. For example, you have a website with the URL “example.com” where you sell cars. You can place a link on it at another site with the anchor “buy car” in the article about picking a car to purchase. Besides that, there is an essential tip on how to show Google that your website has authority: add your company profile to Google My Business. There you can set a link to your official website and add an address of your office in Google maps. So, the above mentioned four steps can help you to get Google top. And if you properly implement them, you will be able to achieve the main SEO goal: to get not only on the first page of the SERP but also get a featured snippet.
