How to get your website on the first page of Google

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Getting your website to rank on Page 1 of Google will boost your traffic and income. But how do you do it? Here’s how to get your website on the first page of Google…

There is an old joke which goes…

Q: Where’s the best place to hide a dead body?

A: Page 2 of Google!

Sadly there is a lot of truth in this joke as only 5% of searchers will even look at the results on page 2 of Google and only 0.78% of searchers click on results on the second page of Google.

Getting your website to rank on page 1 of Google is therefore hugely important if you want people to see your website in the search results and click over to your website.

And that traffic is well worth having. Did you know that there are over 1 trillion Google searches every year and Google currently has over 92% of the total worldwide search engine market share?

That’s a lot of potential traffic!

Better still, Google traffic is a lot more reliable and long-lasting than traffic from social media and Pinterest. By getting your website on page 1 of Google you can make your traffic much more passive in the long term. And, when coupled with passive income strategies, this means you can actually work less but achieve more!

And getting your website onto page 1 of Google is easier that you might think…

In this comprehensive guide, I am going to show you exactly what you need to do to get your website onto the first page of Google and reap the rewards in terms of increased traffic and increased income!

But first of all, what exactly do we mean by ‘getting on the first page of Google’?

How to get your website on the first page of Google

What does ‘getting on the first page of Google’ actually mean?

‘How do I get my blog on the first page of Google’ is a common question and a popular search query… But what do we actually mean by that?

In reality there are lots of first pages of Google… every single search query (all 1 trillion of them) has a page 1 – and not all of them will send large amounts of traffic to your blog… and many of them won’t send ANY traffic to your website.

So ‘getting onto page 1 of Google’ is not just about getting onto A page one of Google. If you want to drive lots of Google traffic to your website, you need to get onto LOTS of page ones and you need to get onto THE RIGHT page ones… the page ones which will send lots of traffic to your blog!

The art of getting a website to rank well on Google, appear on lots of ‘page ones’ and drive lots of traffic to your website is often called Search Engine Optimization or SEO.

How to get your website to rank on the first page of Google

So now we’ve covered exactly what we mean by ‘ranking on page one’ and why ranking on Google is so worthwhile… to drive traffic, grow your income and make your income more passive, let’s dive into the ‘how’ – how exactly do you get your blog onto page one of Google?

Do good keyword research

Arguably the most important part of getting your blog to rank on the first page of Google is keyword research. You can do everything else right, but if you don’t do good keyword research, you won’t drive much (if any!) Google traffic to your website.

Keyword research is a BIG subject, but the principle is very simple… Keyword research is all about finding topics (or ‘keywords’) that lots of people are searching for, but relatively few people are writing about. Or, to put this into SEO-speak, keyword research is about finding keywords (or more usually keyword phrases) that have high search volumes and relatively low competition.

Why is this important?

Because if you write blog posts on topics which nobody is searching for, you may well be able to get onto page one of Google for that keyword / search term… but if no one is searching for that keyword, you won’t get any Google traffic.

Conversely if you write a blog post on a topic that lots of people are searching for… but also lots of bigger, more authoritative websites have written about… your blog post doesn’t stand a chance of ranking on page one… and given that almost no one visits page two and beyond, and even fewer people actually click on a result there, again, you won’t get any traffic.

However, if you can find topics where there is a good amount of search volume, and not too much competition… you will not only stand a good chance of getting onto page one… but also getting a good amount of traffic clicking on your result on page one and heading over to your website!

To read more about how to do this, head over to my blog post on How to actually DO keyword research or watch my free keyword research masterclass…

Start low… and work up!

If you have a new or relatively small website, you’ve probably figured out that you are not going to stand much of a chance of ranking for the big keywords in your niche.

The best strategy if you have a new/small website is to start low and work up!

What do I mean by that?

I mean start by targeting lower volume / very low competition keywords in your niche. These are often called ‘long-tail keywords’.

These are keywords which you should be able to rank on page 1 for quite easily and, although they won’t send huge traffic, will send SOME traffic over to your blog.

Then write an excellent blog post that is absolutely the best answer to that long-tail search query and what should happen is, over time, Google will learn that your website delivers a good ‘user experience’ and will trust you with slightly higher competition keywords, and so on.

Little by little, over time, you will be able to target higher volume / higher competition keywords and so increase your website traffic.

Write blog posts which match searcher intent (Solve the problem!)

Doing good keyword research is vitally important if you want to get your blog onto page one of Google, but on its own it is not enough. For each keyword you have identified, you need to write a blog post that matches the ‘searcher intent’… in other words you need to get inside the head of the person who typed that particular query into Google and ask yourself ‘What do they really want?’ – then write a blog post that answers that query / solves the searcher’s problem.

Because if you write a blog post that doesn’t adequately answer that query, Google searchers arriving on your website from the results page will quickly scan your blog post, realise it doesn’t answer their query and immediately ping back over to Google and click on the next result.

And if Google sees that readers are spending very little time on your website before pinging back to the search results and clicking on a different result, Google will deduce (quite rightly!) that your blog post is not a good result for that search query and so rank you lower!

Write high quality blog posts

As you probably know, Google uses an algorithm to select which blog posts to put on page one of the search results for every single search term. There are many factors that go into that algorithm, but the overarching philosophy is that Google wants to give its users the best possible results.

So the results on page one of Google are, essentially, what Google considers to be the 10 best answers to that particular search query.

Part of being the best answer is writing a blog post which matches searcher intent. But part of being the best answer is crafting a well written, high quality blog post that delivers an excellent user experience.

Writing a blog post is very different to writing an essay at school, for example. It has its own ‘rules’ and you need to adapt your writing style to suit the very different way people consume content on the web – where they typically skim and scan a lot more, want fast answers and have very little patience!

For example, when writing a blog post you should ensure you include lots of subheadings to help your readers (and search engines!) navigate your post better and quickly find the information they most need.

You should also write in short sentences and short paragraphs to make your blog post easier and more enjoyable to read. This is especially important now that such a large percentage of Google searches are done on a mobile phone. What looks like a reasonable sized paragraph on a desktop computer looks like an impenetrable wall of text on a mobile phone!

And you should also use plenty of things like bullets, images and quotes to break up your text and make reading your blog post more enjoyable and more helpful.

Finally, ‘the best result’ is never going to be a blog post littered with spelling and punctuation mistakes, so when you have written your blog post it is vitally important to go back over your work to edit it and make sure it’s the best it can possibly be.

Overhead of notepad, pencil and coffee mug

Write lots of blog posts

As we covered earlier, ‘getting onto page one of Google’ is actually about getting onto LOTS of page ones. The more page ones you can get your website onto, the more traffic you will drive to your website (and the more money you will make from your website!)

Therefore, the more blog posts you write, the more chances you have of getting onto page one of Google and the more traffic you will drive to your blog.

Of course, quality is always of paramount importance… Writing a large number of poor-quality blog posts will not help you. But if the quality is good, then more is better!

Target more than one keyword per post

There is a mistaken belief in some quarters that you can only target one keyword per post, but that’s simply not true. In fact, if you do a good job, one blog post can target multiple keywords… I have blog posts on my websites that rank on page one of Google for dozens of different search queries.

While it is important not to go off on wild tangents, it is absolutely possible to optimize a post for multiple search queries and indeed doing this can often make your post even better.

One of the best ways of finding these ‘secondary keywords’ to target is to type your main or ‘focus’ keyword into Google and then scroll down to the ‘people also ask’ section. Here you will find questions that people who have previously searched for that search term have also asked. By adding the answers to some of these questions to your blog post you will make your blog post more helpful AND you will make it eligible to rank for multiple search queries.

Target featured snippets

One very neat way of getting your website onto the first page of Google and leapfrogging your competitors (even much bigger, much more authoritative competitors!) is to target featured snippets.

A featured snippet is the highlighted search result which usually appears right at the top of Google’s search results page for a specific query.

Featured snippets are often (though not always) provided in response to a question and aim to give searchers the answer to their query at a glance.

There is a bit of an art to landing a featured snippet – and especially crafting one in a way that people will want to click over to your website for more information – but once you get the hang of it, it can be a sweet shortcut to getting the top spot on page one of Google – even for highly competitive search terms!

To find out more about how to do this, head here >>> How to optimize your blog posts to win Google featured snippets

Optimize for your chosen keywords

Of course, you can do your keyword research brilliantly and write an excellent blog post which fully answers the searcher intent and STILL not get onto page one of Google!

It’s not enough to have written the best answer to a given search query – you also need to convince Google that your blog post is the best result. And the way to do that is by optimizing your blog post for your main keyword phrase and your secondary keywords.

Think of this as helping Google out by playing its game… Google is after all essentially a machine and can’t read your blog post like a human can (although it’s getting ever closer!) so it needs a little help to be sure that your blog post is indeed the best result.

You do this by ensuring you have used your main keyword phrase in various key locations such as the title, the first paragraph, at least one sub-heading, at least one alt description and also by including your secondary keywords, synonyms of your target keyword and related phrases.

(It used to be that the way you ranked on Google was by repeating the same exact keyword over and over again, but Google got wise to that and now looks for much more natural language patterns, which is why using synonyms and related phrases is so important!)

And the best tool to help you do this is the Yoast SEO plugin. To learn more about this head here >>> How to use the Yoast SEO plugin to optimize a blog post

Deliver an excellent UX

Doing good keyword research, writing excellent content that fully answers the searcher intent for each query and optimizing that content will take you most of the way towards you goal of ranking on page one of Google for multiple search queries and driving lots of Google traffic to your blog… but on its own it’s not enough. You also need to make sure your whole site is optimized and delivers an excellent User Experience (UX).

This means doing things like:

Ensuring your website is mobile-friendly
Making sure the pages on your website load quickly
Making your website easy to navigate around so visitors can find what they need easily
Ensuring your website is secure
Using categories and tags correctly
Doing lots of internal linking to build a good site structure
Using a good SEO plugin to take care of all the technical aspects of SEO
Making sure your website is well maintained (for example, no broken links, content regularly updated, poor quality content deleted if it cannot be salvaged…)

You can find more about this here >>> 22 easy ways to improve your blog’s user experience

To find out exactly what you need to do on your website, download my FREE DIY SEO AUDIT!

Build up your E-E-A-T

If you do everything in this blog post you should find that you begin to rank on page one for lots of search queries, however one way to speed up this process and give you more of a chance of ranking for those higher competition keywords is to build up your E-E-A-T.

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust. Google wants to send its users to the best result, and part of being the best result is being an expert/authority in your niche and having a website that people can trust. Because of this, websites with higher E-E-A-T will naturally rank higher in Google’s search results.

To find out more about how to build up your E-E-A-T and make it clear to Google that you have got a good level of E-E-A-T, head here >>> 15 easy ways to improve your blog’s E-E-A-T

Work hard and be patient

And finally… if you want to get onto page one of Google for multiple different search terms, and particularly if you want to rank for those higher volume, higher competition keywords and grow your traffic and income, then it will take hard work and a lot of patience.

It is virtually impossible to have overnight success with SEO, but it is something where hard work and dedication does eventually pay off.

Keep working hard at it… Keep doing good keyword research, keep crafting as many high quality, well optimized blog posts as you can manage, keep focusing on user experience and building up your E-E-A-T and you will get there!

And the really great thing about Google traffic is that the hard work you put in keeps on paying off for months and years to come… It’s not a flash in the pan thing like social media. SEO done well drives high levels of good quality, reliable and long-term traffic to your website.

And once you have that good traffic you can monetize your website via ads or other passive income streams and have a relatively passive business that delivers a good income for a relatively small amount of work each month.

Over to you!

What have you done to get your website onto page one of Google? I’d love to hear about it in the comments below!

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