How To Rank first Page of Google !! SEO Ranking

How To Rank first Page of Google. SEO Ranking

 As the saying goes, the best place to hide a dead body is on the second page of Google. And it's because only 0.78% of Google searchersclick page 2 results. 

So this tutorial is all about higher rankingsand especially getting you off that second, third, or tenth page. Stay tuned [music] What's up SEOs? Sam Oh here with Ahrefs, the SEO tool thathelps you grow your search traffic, research your competitors and dominate your niche. 

Now, before we get started, it's importantto note that in order to get the most out of this tutorial, your website and contentshould meet a certain level of quality. Generally speaking, your site should be mobile-friendly, load decently fast, have clear navigation and UX, be secure using HTTPS, be free of other glaring technical SEO issues, and your content should be well written. 

Not only are some of these direct Google rankingfactors, but the process that I'm about to share with you will produce much better resultsif your website is up to scratch. Now, I'm assuming you have existing pagesthat are targeting keywords.

 If you're not, then go and watch one of ourkeyword research tutorials, which I've linked up for you in the description. Alright, so here's the entire process as a flow chart. Feel free to take a screenshot for your ownrecords and let's get started. 

Step 1 is to check the strength of the competition. With any battle, you need to know whoyou're up against. And since we want to rank on the first pageof Google, your competition is obviously going to be the top 10 results. Now, at this stage, we just want to do a quickspot-check to see if the websites ranking for this keyword are out of our league.

 So let's say you have a relatively new SEOblog and you want to rank for "SEO." You'll see that the top pages are well-known brands like Moz, Search Engine Land, Wordstream, and Google. Chances are, you probably won't be able tocompete anytime soon. Whereas something like "affordable seo services for small business" shows sites you probably haven't heard of. So this might be more within your wheelhouse. 

The second thing to look at is website authority. At Ahrefs, we use a metric called Domain Rating or DR. This represents the overall strength of awebsite's backlink profile. Now, while I don't use this as a main metricto gauge ranking difficulty, it can work well to spot check the relative "strength"of a brand from an SEO perspective. If you're not an Ahrefs user, you can useour free Website "Authority" Checker. First, enter your domain and you'll see a DR score. Mark that down. 

Then you can use it to check the Domain Ratingfor the top 10 ranking websites. If you have an Ahrefs account, just go to KeywordsExplorer and enter your target keyword. As you can see here for the keyword "SEO," allof the websites' Domain Ratings are quite high. 

So if your DR is let's say 30, then you probablywon't be able to compete. As for the keyword "affordable SEO servicesfor small business," you'll see Domain Ratings ranging from 6 to 86. So for that DR 30 site, I'd say it's wellwithin your wheelhouse. If you've chosen a keyword that's too competitivenow, go back to keyword research. And if your keyword is rankable, let's moveon to the next step, which is to make sure your page aligns with search intent. Search intent means the reason behinda searcher's query. 

 For example if  you search for "how to make awebsite," you'll see that almost all of the ranking pages are how-to guides with step-by-step instructions. To determine search intent, just Google yourkeyword, and identify the 3 C's of search intent. The first C is content type. 

So are the top pages blog posts, product,category, or landing pages? For example, the type of pages ranking for "buyprotein powder" are all e-commerce category pages. The second C is content format. And this applies mainly to when you're tryingto rank informational content. Common formats include: how-to guides, step-by-step tutorials, list posts, opinion pieces, reviews and comparisons. 

So if we look at the top pages for "best tastingprotein powder," you'll see all pages are list posts. And third is content angle. This one is harder to quantify than type or format,but content angle is generally the dominant unique selling proposition used by the top-ranking pages. For example, pages ranking for "best proteinpowder" almost all have the current year in the title, which to me says that freshness is the angle. 

Whereas the pages ranking for "blogging tips"are taking the angle of "for beginners." If you were to try and rank for "blogging tips"with an article called "17 Advanced Blogging Tips for Professional Bloggers," it might be tough to rank. Reason being, the better you can match the searcher'squery, the better your chances of ranking high. If your page doesn't match search intent,you'll want to update the page so it does. But, if your page is matching intent, let'smove onto the next stage, which is to ensure your content covers the topic in full. 

The way that you and I look at topics might bevery different from the way Google looks at them. For example, if you and I were to talk aboutthe best watch brands, I might talk about Apple and you might talk about Omega. Ask five more people, and you might getfive completely different responses. Now, looking at Google's top 10 pages forthis query, it's quite clear you should write a list-style blog post that focuses heavilyon luxury brands. And if you visit the pages, you'll noticesomething interesting. They all mention Rolex. So this is probably a brand you should includetoo if you haven't already. Now, this is kind of just guessing based on observation. So if you want to take it a step further, you canalso do a Content Gap analysis at the page-level. J

take a few top-ranking pages and paste themin the top section of Ahrefs' Content Gap tool. I've already done that here with 5 relevantpages, so let's run the search. And now you can see queries that one or moreof these pages are ranking for. Just sift through the keywords and you'll geta better idea of subtopics you should talk about. Now, if your content isn't up to par, thenrewind and follow these steps. 

But if you've covered your topic in full, move onto the next step which is to estimate the number of backlinks you'll need and then build them. Backlinks are an important ranking factor. Not only has Google said it themselves, butpretty much every industry study has found a positive relationship between organic searchtraffic and backlinks. 

Now there's no way to know an exact numberof backlinks required because not all backlinks are created equal. But we can get a rough estimate using Ahrefs'Keywords Explorer. Just search for your target keyword. And just below the Keyword Difficulty score,you'll see a little note that says "We estimate that you'll need backlinks from around43 websites to rank in the top 10 for this keyword." The way we come up with this number is bytaking a weighted average of the number of unique websites linking to the top pages. So, while this can work as an eyeball metric,I recommend scrolling down to see the top 10 pages so you can analyze other factors, liketopical relevance of the pages and domains, as well as website authority. We have a full tutorial on assessing rankingdifficulty, which I'll link up in the description. 

Now, if you don't have enough backlinks, thengo and watch our link building playlist and execute. But if you do have enough, let'smove on to the next step, which is to add internal links to your page. We already know that backlinks can help boostthe authority of your page. But internal links can also help tremendously. To find pages you should add links from, justgo to Google and search for site:yourdomain.com and then a keyword that's relevant to your page.

 You'll then see all indexed pages from your sitethat have that keyword somewhere on the page. Visit the pages and add internal links where relevant. Generally speaking, the more "authority" you'vebuilt to the linking pages, the more "authority" it can pass to the linked pages. 

If you don't have any authoritative pages to link from, then I highly recommend watching our video onthe "middleman technique," which is an SEO strategy built on the foundation of strategic linking. Now, after you've done everything up to thispoint, it's just a matter of waiting. How long? Well, that depends. After studying 2 million keywords, we foundthat less than 5% of the top 10 pages were under a year old. 

So rather than sitting around twiddling yourthumbs, go and repeat the process for different keywords and pages. But before you get all pumped up to do that,there's one very important thing you should know. Ranking on the first page of Google may notbe the answer to solve your SEO woes. 

If you look at this CTR curve, you'll see that there'sa huge drop-off after the first 2 or 3 positions. Meaning, if you're ranking in position 10,you'd only get around a 1% click-through rate. So to put this into perspective, if you rankedin position 10 for a keyword that gets searched 1,000 times per month, that's only 10 searchvisitors, which may not be worth the effort. 

So instead of just going for a first pageranking, shoot for the top 3. And this will often come down to matchingsearch intent, creating thorough content, and building more links. I highly recommend watching our videoon how to rank higher in Google, as well as our link building playlist.