Ranking your website on the first page of major search engines like Google seems nearly impossible, given the saturated competition in many industries. Advanced search engine optimization is the key to ranking where you want on the first page of your targeted search result.
Reaching the first page on Google leads to increased awareness for your brand.
Repeated appearances mean that customers will retain the name of your business before they even buy from you. Familiarity is linked to higher engagement and therefore higher sales.
Here are the 6 best strategies to increase your chances of appearing on the first page for search results:
Enhance Your Threshold Pages
If one or more pages of your website currently rank on page two, tweaking their content and further optimizing them could bring them up to page one. Explore these pages, study their content, and ensure all elements – including visual content – are optimized for search engines.
A good trick to do this is to analyze the direct competitors sitting on higher ranks and figuring out what it is that they are doing to retain their spots.
Increase Internal Links
Backlinks leading to your webpages from external sources are essential, but modern SEO research has revealed that internal linking can also significantly contribute to a higher ranking. This is not only because of the increased number of keyword-rich links leading to your pages.
In fact, when you add a useful link to an informative page and convince the customer to redirect to another page of your website, the increasing browsing time reflects positively with Google’s analysis, and it is then more likely to begin ranking your site higher.
Remember that the key is for these internal links to be useful for the customer.
Optimize Your Navigation
SEO and web design experts say the key to a well-built website is that the user should be able to find any information they need with a maximum of three clicks.
This should be true for all your pages, but your most important money-making pages should be the highest up in the navigation. This is because Google decides how important a page is by checking its distance from the homepage.
The essential pages should ideally be one click away from the homepage.
Optimize Your Mobile Site
Not having your website optimized for mobile phones is perhaps the biggest SEO mistake in 2021.
At least 50% of all searches begin on mobile phones.
If a user finds your webpages in search results but then clicks on them only to find that the page isn’t mobile-friendly, there is a high chance that they will leave immediately. This clearly explains why Google tends to rank mobile-friendly sites higher up in the search results.
Invest in ‘Featured Results’
When you make a search query, there are one or more websites that appear on top in Google’s Featured Snippets.
If you are confident in your product and are ready to invest in attaining the first couple of ranking spots, sponsoring your pages can do wonders. The key here is to do your research and pick the most potent keywords, and ensure you lead customers to the most relevant page.
While there are now several social media channels and other ad platforms available, Google search queries are still the most popular way customers find what they need.
As long as major search engines are relevant, effective SEO will remain the best way to drive traffic to your website.
