Brands like Amazon, Apple, Microsoft are spending millions of dollars on Google AdWords.
Do you know why? They all know how powerful search engine traffic is. If you’re looking to monetize your blog, focus on bringing more people from search engines to your site.
Are you struggling to get more traffic from search engines?
I know how frustrating it is for anyone to work really hard on their sites yet NOT see any results. There are a lot of SEO techniques like off page SEO, on page SEO, link building etc to increase your rankings. So it’s a lot of confusing stuff for most people.
One wrong mistake can cause penalties as SEO keeps changing. What worked 5 years back, won’t work now. Google has been rolling out updates and it’s very important to keep track of it and do necessary changes to your site.
If you are wondering about how you can grow your Google rankings for various keywords of your sites, let me help you with this post. Here is the step by step guide to increase Google rankings in 2017.
Step by step tutorial to increase Google rankings quickly
#1. Know your current keyword rankings in Google search results
The first step to increasing your search rankings is to evaluate your current keyword ranking positions. You need to assess your current position in Google search results before focusing on improving site’s search ranking. There are a lot of keyword tracking tools out there to help you easily assess your current keyword positions on search results.
Here are a few things you need to focus on:
#1. Assess your site’s keyword rankings. For this purpose you can use Serps.com. Just give your seed keyword and this site shows you where your site ranks for the given keyword.
#2. Analyze your site speed. If your site takes more time to load, it will affect your blog a lot. It’s good to have page load time below 3 sec. In order to improve Google rankings, it’s important to run your site speed.
You can use any of these tools
In a research done by eConsultancy, 47% of Americans expect page content to load in under 2 seconds. So, check your site speed.
#3. Assess your site’s health. If you want to check whether your site is banned by Google and if you are experiencing a sudden drop in organic traffic then you must check your blog site health.
Well, you can check that with “Google penalty checker tool”.
Just input your blog URL and click on “check”. You will get an instant reply if it is okay or else it suggests you some tips to work on it. Once you have figure out your current keyword rankings, you can find out where to spend most your time on.
#2. Check what factors you can improve
You can find every traffic detail about your site including your audience behavior (on your site) by getting access to your Google analytics account. In order to track your blog metrics, it is important to know what keywords generate traffic to your blog. There are two kind of keywords, one is informational keywords and another is commercial keywords.
To give a clear understanding of Informational keywords, here are the examples:
- How to prepare facials with natural products
- Make money online for free
- Top 10 clothing brands
Commercial keywords are mostly useful if you have an eCommerce website. Make sure you include these keywords before or after each keyword phrase:
- Deals
- Coupons
- Discounts
- Free Shipping
- Order
- Buy
- Purchase
- Review
Using Serp scan, you can identify which keywords drives more traffic to your blog. If you are not satisfied, you can get even more with Bringshare.
#3. Examine your site for any penalties
Increasing your search rankings is NOT hard if your site is properly optimized for search engines.
You need to check your site consistently for any penalties. There is no point in investing lot of time and money on site which is penalized. How you generate links to your site is highly important.
Any unhealthy or bad link can penalize your site. Google updates its search algorithms patterns regularly these days.
So, it is the need of the hour to diagnose a penalty or where the problem lies in. You can use Google penalty checker for this purpose. However, you can analyze backlinks based penalties easily with these tools:
- Open link profiler
- Open site explorer
- Ahrefs
- Majestic
Now, you can use the data given by these tools to take proper action. You can further check for unhealthy links using Linkquidator.
Once you find the bad links, you need to make sure that you removed it completely. Here is how you can do that.
- Remove your link manually Once you know from which site bad links are coming, contact the site owner and make an appealing request to remove your link.
- Use disavow links tool. If you don’t hear any response from the above method, you can use Google’s disavow links tool. It displays list of all your sites. Go to that site for which you want to disavow links, there you will find an option to export the links you find.
Upload the file and click “done”, by doing so, Google stops passing link value from those sites to your site.
#4. Do keyword research
If you're struggling to increase your search traffic even after posting consistently on your blog, you're not focusing on keyword research yet.
Keyword research is one of the effective inbound marketing strategies. So how to perform keyword research to boost your Google rankings in 2017 and beyond?
Here are some quick tips you can follow.
Based on your blog niche or business, make a list of all the relevant topics that you want to rank for. Whatever the niche you're in, you will at least know 5 to 10 topics that are extremely important.
For example, let's say your blog niche is health, then general topics will be, “Food diet”, “fitness equipment”, “diet for flat stomach”, “Nutritious food recipes” etc.
Now frame keywords around these topics. Think about what specific terms your target customer is searching for. For example, take the topic bucket “diet for flat stomach” from the above. Some of the keyword phrases that people might include are: “top 10 foods for flat stomach”, “how to get flat stomach through food”.
Check for related search terms in Google. To get more of such keyword phrases, you can use Google for it. Go to google.com and type in the keyword phrase. At the end of the page it shows, “searches related to that term”.
Type in any of these search terms again and check.
Mix both head and long tail keywords. Head terms are highly generic and too short whereas long tail keywords contains 4 or more words. For example, “How to remove dandruff effectively” is more specific where as “dandruff” is generic. The first one gets more search traffic than the second one. Mixing both will balance your long term goals and also gives quick wins.
Recommended: The Future of Blogging
Spy on your competitors. Observe for what keywords your competitors are trying to get ranked It gives you list of keywords. Start improving your rank for those keywords. You can use Google keyword planner to narrow down your keyword list. It gives search volume and traffic estimates for keywords. Take the information and check in Google trends to know which of these terms are trending upward.
Now, focus on the right topics for your business to get both long term and short term gains. Keyword research is just the starting point, you need great content in order to rank well for any keyword on search engines.
If you're wondering about how to find great keywords to drive more traffic to your sites from search engines, here's a great tutorial on it.
#5. Write great content around those keywords
Once you are done with keyword research, it’s time to write great and resourceful content around those keywords. Use those keywords in meta description and title tags too to improve search rankings.
How to write resourceful content if you are focusing on increase your search traffic? Here are a few tips to create content that naturally attracts more backlinks from other sites.
- Keep facts with accurate data. The content which has facts gets shared on social media as people feels your content as authoritative. For example, “Marketing statistics you need to know today”. Write case studies for your audience.
- Use story telling approach. Stories has the capacity to evoke emotions and attract audience. Start the sentence with something so unique that connects you with the readers. Write your own experiences related to the topic. Every story must have an ending so add a Call-To-Action (CTA) button at the end of the story to increase conversion rate.
- Write stunning and attractive headline. If your post headline is so attractive, nothing can stop it from getting clicked and shared. To get more awareness about writing catchy headlines that works well, you can check it on Buzzsumo for any topic (watch Ms. Ileane's video below to see How To Use Buzzsumo).
- Add numbers to your headline. The posts that has numbers gets more shares than the normal ones. For example, instead of writing “diet to burn fat around stomach”, you can write, “11 amazing foods that burns fat around stomach”
Once you use both informational as well as commercial keywords in your content, focus on building links.
#6. Start building links
One of the most challenging SEO skills is link building. There are several ways to build the links. In point #3, I mentioned tools to analyze the links. You need to get different types of anchor texts for inbound links and we will see how to get that.
Without building backlinks, it’s almost impossible to get better rankings on Google.
Did you know that 99% of the top search results on Google get at least one backlink from external sources?
There you go. The more links that you get from different sites the better it is for you to gain your website search rankings. Here are few effective yet easy tips to build natural backlinks.
- Use images to build links. Whenever you are adding an image to your post, give the keyword in the “Alt tab” that you would like to use in anchor text. Anchor text links are the ones that appear within the content.
- Create sharable content through social media. Focus on creating amazingly great content to earn links to improve Google rankings.
- Generate Google-friendly links. The effective link building lies in diversity which means diversity of domains in the overall link profile. It helps to stay away from penalty issues.
Final thoughts about increasing Google rankings quickly
Increasing search traffic and rankings is NOT hard. You need to learn what works and most importantly what does not.
Make sure to always focus on latest Google updates and learn basic SEO to start implementing those tips to improve your website’s search rankings.
So what are your thoughts? Do you have any more tips on increasing your website rankings on Google quickly? Share your views in the comments below.
Thank you Anil for this guide on how to increase site rankings! I agree that the best way to increase site rankings quickly we need to learn what works and most importantly what does not.
Hi Noelle,
That’s true, in SEO, always look for what works and more importantly what’s not.
If you’re a beginner, focus on giving the best user experience rather than increasing traffic. That’s how you build a search engine friendly site.
Thanks for stopping by.
Hey Anil,
Everyone is up for trying new things whereas the concept of using the proper keywords is always crucial.
Checking the current position can give you an idea of where you stand. The website speed plays a major role in the growth.
Most of the people avoid visiting the websites which don’t have the page loading time under 3 sec. It has been reduced to 2 sec for many.
No one can deny the fact that an evergreen content always wins.
Thanks for sharing with us.
~Ravi
Hi Ravi,
Glad to see around here. I’ve been reading your comments on so many sites for a while and glad you spend time in leaving thoughtful comments.
More than anything, website speed is playing a crucial role in increase site’s search rankings. After all, Google wants to give the best experience to their users.
Content is always king like you said!
Hey Anil,
Very good information to increase ranking. This step by step tutorial is surely going to be very useful to me. I think implementing these tips to your blog no need to spend money on Google AdWords. Getting best Google ranking is very tough and it requires a huge knowledge to monetize your blog.
Great tools to analyze the speed of website. Knowledge of these tools to maintain website is really very useful, just bookmarked these tools opening in new tab. First of all we must current keyword ranking of our site in google search results. Every blogger should be familiar with all these tips to increase ranking, I’m so lucky to find this post.
You made it very easy to increase rankings providing these informative tutorial, blogger should know this. Thanks for the useful stuff, Anil.
Have a wonderful week. 🙂
– Ravi.
Hi Ravi,
Spending money on AdWords is useless if you don’t know the SEO basics first.
If you’re a beginner instead of spending money on ads, figure out ways to do it all by yourself or hire someone who’s good at it.
Personally I use SEMrush for all of my SEO purposes so if you’re in a search for a better SEO tool, you may consider it.
Thanks for stopping by!
Really a very useful article, Anil. But here I want to know that how much time it will take for pages to get an improvement in traffic after filling gaps and inserting keywords in content?
Hi Rahul,
That’s a good question but no one can give you the precise answer for it.
At an average it usually takes anywhere around 1 week to 4 months to start ranking for a keyword. So don’t expect to see results overnight from search engines.
The time completely depends on the complexity of your keywords. Hope it helps.
Hey
Anil,
Everyone wants to looks their website ranking higher. But many of them can’t find the right guide. But, In this post all things are mentioned clearly how to increase ranking of the website in google. Happy to find amazing serps.com, just giving the seed keyword and this sites show ranking.
All the steps are effective and useful. Writing resourceful content is very important and I agree that writing stunning headline cant stop from getting clicked and shared.
Thanks for sharing such a wonderful post.
Praveen verma
Hi Praveen,
Thanks so much for stopping by and glad you find it useful. I always write lengthy articles just to make sure that my content creates more awareness to the beginners.
Content always plays a HUGE role in SEO.
If you’re not focusing on content, you’ll never get good results from search engines. It’s as simple as that.
Do you have any more questions?
Very well explained article but my question is what about Google Algorithms rules in 2017?
Hello Anil,
Your blog post is quiet informative , as I was currently researching on ways to remove bad links and your suggestion of “google disavow” is gonna solve my problem .
thanks for your help !
Great Post and well written.
I would like to add few thing from the above post.
Schema markup: Take full advantage of schema markup, Schema markup is code (semantic vocabulary) that you put on your website to help the search engines return more informative results for users. Try to boost your ranking on Google result based on the question typed searches.
AMP Pages: an Accelerated Mobile Page (or AMP, for short) is a project from Google and Twitter designed to make really fast mobile pages. At its essence, it’s basically a stripped-down form of HTML, a diet HTML if you will. You can grab your position in the Search engine page result if you optimise your website content for AMP pages.
Hi Nisha,
Great points.
Most beginners don’t know about the schema markups so I don’t particularly talk about them when talking about SEO techniques but that’s essential if you are running a huge website with tons of web pages.
AMP pages are becoming so important these days as most people who are browsing on smartphones are checking them before clicking on a link.
Thanks for the great tips again.
Thank you, Anil for sharing such an informative article regarding site ranking. This information and tools to increase the traffic and ranking will help. Glad to know about Serp.com and other tools. i also believe that Content is the king for every website. Writing an effective and valuable content with proper Keyword density will also help in increasing the ranking.
Hi Udit,
Serp along with my favorite tool SEMrush are great SEO tools for all kinds of bloggers and marketers.
They provide huge information and you can do everything from content research to backlink analysis to website traffic estimation.
Write keyword rich content is NOT the key but doing keyword research and using those keywords sparingly in your content can boost your search rankings.
Thanks for stopping by!
Thanks Anil for sharing informative tips for how to increase website ranking in SERP It’s really helpful article you can share with us.
Hi Anil,
Great post. I’ve recently started getting more analytical about my keywords for a personal finance blog I help run. I’m already starting to see some progress but it looks like it’s going to come down to trial and error for the most part.
I’m excited to start trying some other things you suggest, especially site speed since I’ve noticed load times can be sporadic. Thanks again.
Hi Valentine,
Keyword research is the #1 way to get better at SEO.
Just make sure NOT to only use free tools like keyword planner but also get access to better keyword research tools like semrush, long tail pro etc if you want to find great keywords.
Also make sure to focus on speeding up your site!
Anil this is a great writing. Indeed any seo journey “keyword research” is the essential initiation. But i have a question is it not ok to use a seo plugin to get rid of extra work?
HI Mousmi,
Yes, keyword research is indeed the first step to SEO success.
SEO plugins help a lot.
If you’re just starting out, I recommend you to start using SEO Yoast plugin (free). It’s so much helpful in optimizing your content for specific keywords for better rankings.
One thing I personally discovered is that adding links in YouTube videos in the header video description pointing to deep pages pointing to a blog post or webpage will direct readers to quietly share that content on social networks like Pinterest, Twitter, Triberr, Facebook, Google+, and more.
What’s your take on adding links in YouTube video descriptions to specific pages on a blog or website? Do you feel it’ll increase traffic and improve long term SEO?
Hi Drewry,
Great question.
I’m personally creating videos on some of my most important pages and adding links to those pages from the description.
They are great for increasing traffic and also helpful in getting better rankings.
Just make sure to optimize your videos with primary keywords and also include them in your video description.
I also heard that stepping your domain name game up and transforming http:// to https:// quietly helps boost search engine rankings. Do you know anything about that by chance?
Yes, https helps a lot.
Almost every I know in my industry is using https (more secured version).
Not only helpful for SEO but also helpful for increasing your website conversion rates as people feel more secure when they are using a https version.
Keep rocking!
Yes the SSL Certificate plays a vital role in ranking in Serp it is officially released by Google.
Hi Anil,
Interesting post, thank you. I like the way you emphasised the whole keyword research thing and the importance of identifying your main keywords.
A lot of people underrate keyword research and the benefits that you can get by really analysing what your competitors are doing and what is driving all of their traffic.
Hi Neil,
Thanks for the appreciation. And yes, keyword research is the reason why many blogs get better rankings.
Competitor research is also one of the key metrics that plays a huge role in getting better SEO rankings and website sales.
Thanks for stopping by!
Great post! I wanted to learn how to increase our page rank. This will give us idea on how to increase traffic to our business website Landscaping design. Thank you for sharing.
Page rank is dead now.
IT’s of no useful and focus on building as many quality links as possible if you want to get higher rankings on Google.
Just make sure to focus on competitor research (find how they are getting links) and create solid content to get as many natural links as possible.
Thanks for stopping by
Thanks so much for your posting.
I want to know about Google algorithms rules in 2017 ! Always time to time google algorithms is change
Hi Anil,
These are some really great tips. With google constantly changing its ranking algorithms, maintaining your ranking position can be really difficult, and it takes a lot of time and effort.
I’ll take this article into account hoping it would make things a little bit easier this time.
Lucas
Hi Lucas,
The bad thing about Google is it is more helpful for advertisers (to make money).
So it obviously gives bad rankings for so many thin pages and sites. Making sure to get as many links to your content as possible is the best way to keeping your rankings intact.
Thanks for stopping by!
Hey Anil,
Thank for this guide on how to increase site rankings. The website rank plays a major role in the growth. Keyword research point is very well explained. I really found it very useful. Thanks for sharing.
Maria.
Hi Maria,
Thanks so much for finding it useful.
Make sure to read Moz beginner’s guide to SEO if you want to get better understanding about keyword research and other crucial ranking factors.
Also make sure to get access to the right SEO tools like keyword planner, wordstream, semrush etc if you want to stay ahead of SEO game.
Keep rocking.
Hi Anil agarwal,
Thank you for your great post, write know i learning SEO from scratch, i know that keyword research is the key factor in SEO, But i am little bit confuse in keyword research. some time i use longtail pro, some time i use keyword everywhere, both gave different keyword difficulty value. Please tell me which tool i should use to get good result. thank i’ll wait for your suggestion.
Best Regard’s
Kashif