Why it’s easier to get to the top of Google than you may think
Love to get found on Google but assume it’s impossible? Find out why you are wrong, and how even small businesses can reach the top with the right SEO.
There’s a common misconception among small business owners and freelancers that getting to the top of Google is difficult. And even if you were able to manage it, it would take a long time and a LOT of effort.
I am happy to tell you this is wrong.
Getting a page on your website to the top of Google is quicker and easier than you may think, and quite possible for many small businesses and freelancers… when you know how to do it.
You don’t need to be an SEO expert, and nor do you need to invest thousands of pounds. You just need to understand some basics of SEO and do a few simple actions.
The basics of SEO
Firstly, you need to understand how Google works, and what it is looking for. Basically, Google wants to serve the best possible results for every search term. And in order to do this, it scours websites for clues.
And this is the first place that most people go wrong. They assume that Google is psychic; that they can simply put up a website and Google will intuitively know what search term they should be ranked for.
This is not the case. Think of Google as a giant detective hunting for clues. And it is your job to lay those clues so that Google knows what your website/pages are about, and make the decision to rank you for the right terms.
The two SEO essentials
These clues mainly take the form of keywords and backlinks – the two most important elements to be aware of when planning your SEO strategy. Here’s why each is important:
- Keywords tell Google what your content is about, and how valuable your content is (compared to other content on the same subject).
- Backlinks tell Google how respected your website/we page is, and therefore how much priority it should give it when deciding where to rank it.
How to find the right keywords
So how can you get these two elements right? You need to know what type of keyword to rank for (for example, head term versus long tail) and the specific search term. You can identify your ideal keywords through research. As a quick guide, put yourself in the place of the person you want to find your website and try to guess what term they might put in a search bar.
You can also try simple strategies like using Google Autocomplete. When you start typing in a search term in Google, it will try to predict what you might be looking for:
Google says this feature reduces typing by 25% and makes it easier for us to use search on mobiles, where typing is harder. Collectively it saves 200 years of typing time per day!
From an SEO perspective it’s also really handy for researching keywords as Google’s suggestions are based on the most common (and trending) searches. They are what people are actually looking for, and a great start to base your keywords on. After all, there’s little point ranking for a keyword that hardly anyone ever searches for!
Why backlinks are so important
Backlinks are links from another website to yours. They are important for SEO as they help Google find your pages, and act as a form of recommendation.
Think about it: if another website links to a page on yours it must mean that page or blog has some value. And the more respected and relevant the page linking to yours, the more valuable that link is for SEO.
Do you have a page for Google to find?
The next important element of SEO – and again one too many small businesses and freelancers get wrong – is realising that you actually need a page for Google to find and rank.
All too often people think in terms of getting their website to the top of Google. But this is wrong: you don’t need your entire website to rank. You just need a page.
So much like you might back one horse in a race, the secret to getting to the top of Google is putting all your ‘money’ on one page. While it is important that your website as a whole is SEO friendly, as this builds your Domain Authority, your SEO goal should be to build one page per search term, and ensure that page ticks every possible SEO box.
How I helped personal stylist Sally Smy get to the top of Google
This is a strategy I used to help Sally Smy from Queen Bee Styling get to the top of Google for the search term London based personal stylist:
As you can see, the search term has over 20 million results, and Sally is now on page one of Google. Before we created a page that was specifically designed to rank, Sally appeared nowhere. It took her just a month to get to the top of page two, and a few more weeks to get onto page one.
Sally has a small website and modest Domain Authority, so if she can get to the top of Google in a few weeks for a competitive search term, so can you.
The page that helped Sally get to the top of Google
So what was the page we created? Before I started helping Sally, she actually had no specific page devoted to her target search term. In fact, she didn’t use the keyword on her site at all. Given this, it was no surprise that Google wasn’t ranking her – it had no idea what she did!
Te rectify this, we created a specific page for the search term. We linked to it from her home page (using the search term as anchor text) and made sure the keywords were in her meta data, headlines, body copy and image. We also added in plenty of related keywords to let Google know this was a high value page.
To help explain what we did, I made this short video:
We also worked on a simple plan to get some important backlinks to the page. To start with, we included one in content she had written for our site. And Sally worked on a guest posting plan to build more – and grow her Domain Authority.
How we helped a wedding writer get to the top of Google
Sally isn’t the only freelancer or small business owner that has used our simple strategy to get to the top of Google. Wedding writer Mandy Dineley joined a live class I held as part of our Easy SEO course and followed my advice to make some key changes to her website.
As you can see from the Facebook post below, these changes enabled Mandy to get to the very top of Google for her search term ‘wedding writers’ – this happened pretty much straight away. She even got a lead almost immediately as a result:
Several months on and she’s still in the top spot, beating over 263 million other websites:
Like Sally, Mandy was able to achieve this by following some very easy SEO steps, and despite a modest Domain Authority – proving that you don’t need to be a big company with deep pockets and an SEO team to get to the top of Google. You just need a simple plan!
So how can YOU get to the top of Google?
I hope this article has helped show you that it’s not as difficult or time-consuming to get to the top of Google than you may have thought. You just need the following:
- A website that is indexed on Google
- The right keywords
- A page devoted to each search term you want to rank for
- Quality backlinks
- An ongoing SEO strategy to boost your Domain Authority
Join Easy SEO and get our help to get the top of Google
If you’d like more help to get to the top of Google, join our popular online course Easy SEO. Easy SEO explains SEO in simple terms anyone can understand, then shows you what you need to cover off on your website for the basics.
We show you how to find the right keywords, and where and how to use them on your website. We also teach you about backlinks – why they are so important, the right types to get, and where to get them from.
And finally, to ensure you are growing your SEO every single month, we give you an easy checklist to follow. So you have manageable actions that will help you climb Google’s pages for the right keywords.
Just think: by working on your SEO, you too could start climbing up the ranks of Google. And maybe in a few weeks, you can also be at the top of Google for your search term, and getting more sales leads.
Want more hits from organic search? Sign up to our online SEO course now and follow our easy system to get to the top of Google.
