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.