How To Improve Rankings – Direct From Google

I’m sure you knew already that Google already has a wealth of comprehensive advice on how to improve things, but what do you do when you can’t get your webpages to the top of page 1?  What if you once held page 1 rankings but now they average on page 5?

 

Look below, what you may see when you do a search for your target keyword

At the bottom there is a little text link.  When you click on that it gives you a couple of paragraphs of where to start.

• The first link on there will take you to your Google webmaster search console “performance” section (you have signed up for webmasters / analytics right?) – You will need to already be getting some traffic to your site at this point.
• The second link gives a few pointers on what to do with the “data”.

I will get to both now.

Don’t worry if you are not seeing the above image…  you can still access the same steps by going directly to the links below.

• Step 1: https://search.google.com/search-console/performance
• Step 2: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9050677

Please let me know if any of these links are no longer valid.

Step 1:

Inside your performance section, you will see a graph of your website traffic.  Click on “new”, then “page” from the drop down menu.

 

Type in part of the url of the specific web page you are looking at stats for.  So if your webpage is http://yourwebsite.com/best-blue-widgets-for-x/  then in here you would type “best-blue-widgets-for-x/”  (without the speech/quote marks).

Then hit the apply button.

You will then see a traffic graph, and further down the page you will see a list of search queries this page is ranking for.

 

 

On the right you can see traffic for each search term.

Now “sort” the impressions column biggest to smallest.

Is it what you expected?  Are you actually  getting the most traffic for the keyword you are trying to target?

If so, great, you’re doing everything right, if not you need to look at ways of turning this around.

Thankfully Google gives you these tips.

Just hit the back button a few times until you land on the Google search page where you did your search  and clicked on “see ways to improve”.

 

Step 2:

Number 2 in the list takes you to a specific page in Google (please let me know if this link is no longer working)

In here are a few pointers that will put you on the right path.

• Certainly go through all of them as you see fit, but if you’ve been following my advice your content should already be good and page structure etc.
• In a nutshell the main two takeaways are to do with keeping your content up to date, and attracting “natural” backlinks.
• Do not EVER look at buying links, PBN’s etc… None of these things work now, or will do in the future.

 

Google is getting smart, so why not just be the good guy and do things right..

 

Surely you want a long term business anyway?

If you want to know how to set your blog posts up properly to work in conjunction with this, please visit my page on writing the best blog post.  This leaves no stons unturned and analysises a web page so you can write blog posts that convert.

 

So… now you have this data, what do you do with it?

Start with the “updating content” if it’s not been done for at least a month.

 

Before you go this route ask yourself, is this content that NEEDS updating?

If your page is about a list of the 10 best things… then sure, over time this list will change.  New products come on to the market

If your page is about “why does my RV backfire, then quite simply this content will hardly ever need updating because the facts will be the same for years to come… unless things change in the industry down the line.. new engines are made etc etc.. who knows…

 

Read this:  Neil Patel has the perfect write up on this topic, so I might as well hand this part over to him.

 

Attracting links to your website:

• Google actually says that you should try to get mentions on relevant websites.
• This means that link building is encouraged if done right.

 

How to do link builiding properly:

• Mentions from other websites in the same or very similar industry
• If your site is about cooking, you’d certainly want to create youtube videos of your recipes, linking back to the correlating page on your site.
• If your site is about a certain model of model train, then you’d want to get mentions from model train hobbyist sites, reddit subsections, pinterest etc.
• If your site is a health site (AND you are as GENUINE Doctor AND you show your GENUINE qualifications on your “about” page”) you’d want to get links from respected medical groups, or your BIO’s on LInkedIN etc.

 

How to do link building wrong

This day and age Google is smarter than ever… so below are things avoid unless you want your website to crash and burn.

• Seeking out “link building gigs” on places like fiverr.com – many of the people will simply pop your site on low quality websites (who also have lots of other outbound links to other websites)… all these sites will get hit eventually… so steer WELL clear.
• PBN’s.  AKA private blog networks.  These became popular a few years back.  People would simply buy dozens of expired domains…  and even thought they tried to make sure their stats were good.. they were simply popping peoples web links on for money.  So in essence you already have all the domains you need to link back to your site to.
• Social media blasts – again on fiverr etc you will find services to blast out your site to thousands of places for a small fee.  Google is much smarter now.. and uses a team of thousands of human evaluators to look at websites to see if they are playing the game right.

 

So, by now you should be able to figure out that there is no point in trying to beat Google… eventually they will find out and it will be game over!

 

 

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