Google Maps SEO isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it process — ongoing tracking and adjustments are essential to stay ahead of competitors and maintain strong visibility. Regularly monitoring your performance helps you identify what’s working and where improvements are needed. The Q&A section on your GBP allows potential customers to ask questions about your business directly in search results. Once those questions are asked, you or other customers are free to answer those questions. If multiple competitors are using a category you haven’t added, it may be worth including to expand the pool of people seeing your business online. The higher your business ranks, the more likely customers are to find and choose you.

A guest blog post is a free piece of content that you offer to another blog. In return, you’ll get at least a “bio” at the bottom of the guest post, where you can link to your homepage, a blog post, or (hopefully) whatever you like within reason. As mentioned, your Google E-A-T score essentially takes into account if your brand can be trusted. While the quality of your content will play a huge role, it will be of less help if your branding isn’t applied consistently. Authoritativeness basically has to do with your online rep and the recognition that you’re getting.

how to rank on google

More often referred to as anchor text, attributes give additional information about the page you’re linking to. Internal linking is another part of link management that improves Shopify SEO. This means strategically linking to related pages from other pages, and when done right, it will boost sales potential and ranking. Once you have tested your store for speed, you want to update your content and optimize your store images.

how to rank on google

High volume keywords can undoubtedly be valuable for your SEO strategy, but your team should also take a look at lower volume — and even zero volume — keywords. Though these keywords garner a lower number of searches each month, the people placing these searches are often further down funnel and ready to complete a purchase. Google Scholar Metrics allows authors to view journal rankings and ratings by various h-indeces.

how to rank on google

Create a Google My Business Profile

The first core tenant of smart on-page SEO is that you need to thoughtfully use the keywords (search terms) that your readers would use when searching for your content. This helps new readers know that they’re in the right place and it also helps search engines to rank your content for those search terms. For example, high-quality content leads to more backlinks which boost your credibility. Improving your page speed can also lower your bounce rate which shows to Google that people are trusting your site.

how to rank on google

Share this post:

  • For example, use New York best coffee instead of just best coffee.
  • Quote their content, share with them, and then they will likely reciprocate (with a link) at some point.
  • This means your site should have a responsive design, easy navigation, and readable content without requiring users to zoom in.

There are a number of online directories where it’s worth listing your blog or website. While you may not see any search engine benefits from this, simply having that link to your website can help Google to find and rank it more quickly. To maximize your chances, write blog posts that are long-form in nature. Definitions of “long-form” content vary widely, but most people would agree it means writing at least 1,000 words, and more like 1,500 or more. Blog posts under 1,000 words are much less likely to rank highly—see more in my guide about how long a blog post should be. Of course, it also makes a lot of sense to include your website in your bio – and to post SEO Anomaly links to your blog’s content.

Usually because they have lower search volumes and more specific intents. A keyword ranking is a webpage’s position in organic (unpaid) search results for a given query. I really wished I had something like this to read too about 5 years ago when I first found the online world.

Optimize your site structure

Use catchy, keyword-optimized title tags and meta descriptions. Above all, make sure your content matches search intent and is helpful to users. How hard it will be for your small business website to establish brand presence via Google search depends on several factors. For example, new websites are at a disadvantage compared to older URLs (but that doesn’t mean that young websites can’t rank). Choosing keywords with decent search volume and low competition will be easier to rank for, and sites that publish frequently tend to move up in Google rankings more quickly.

how to rank on google

Unfortunately, building high-quality backlinks is one of the most challenging parts of SEO. You have to create something worthy of earning backlinks, then convince people to link to you. Here, it’s suggesting that we internally link the phrase “content marketing strategy” in our list of content marketing tools. For example, all the top-ranking pages for “pancake recipe” are blog posts with recipes.

This means it would be easier to rank for than the keyword, business ideas (example provided below). Domain Authority and Page Authority are terms used by SEOmoz.org to quantify how authoritative a site or page is overall. This goes back to my example of getting a link from CNN.com being more important than getting a link from a weak site. If you can get a link from a high page authority page, this is likely to help your ranking. By simply optimizing the titles of your articles, you could see the difference between almost no traffic to lots of free Google traffic. If you are looking for ways to brainstorm for great article ideas, read this.