How to Rank on the First Page of Google

 How to Rank on the First Page of Google

As the saying goes, the best place to hide a corpse is on the second page of Google. And it's because only 0.78% of Google search engines click on page 2 results. So this tutorial is all about higher rankings and especially getting you off of that second, third, or tenth page

. Now before we begin, it is important to note that to get the most out of this tutorial, your website and its content must reach a certain level of quality. Not just some of these direct ranking factors from Google, but the process I'm about to share with you will yield much better results if your website falls short. Now I assume you have existing pages that are targeting keywords.

 If not, go ahead and check out one of our keyword research tutorials, which I have linked for you in the description. All right, here's the whole process as a flow chart. Feel free to take a screenshot for your own records and let's get started. Step 1 is to verify the strength of the competition. With any battle, you need to know who you are up against. 

And since we want to rank on the first page of Google, your competition is obviously going to be in the top 10 results. Now at this stage, we just want to do a quick check to see if the ranking of the websites for this keyword is out of our league. 

You will see that the main pages are well-known brands such as Moz, Search Engine Land, Wordstream, and Google.

Most likely, you won't be able to compete soon. So this could be more inside your wheelhouse. The second thing to consider is the authority of the website. Now while I don't use this as a primary metric for ranking difficulty, it can work well for checking the relative "strength" of a brand from an SEO perspective. If you are not an Ahrefs user, you can use our free Website "Authority" Checker. First, enter your domain and you will see a DR score. 

Write that down. Then you can use it to check the Domain Ranking for the 10 highest-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", all the website domain ratings are quite high. So if your DR says 30, then you probably won't be able to compete. 

If you have chosen a keyword that is too competitive now, go back to keyword research. And if your keyword is classifiable, let's move on to the next step, which is to make sure your page aligns with search intent. Search intent means the reason for the search engine query. 

For example, if you search for "how to build a website", you will see that almost all the ranking pages are how-to guides with step-by-step instructions. To determine search intent, simply Google your keyword and identify the 3 Cs of search intent. The first C is the content type. So are the main pages of blog posts, products, categories, or landing pages? For example, the type of pages classified for "buy protein powder" are all pages in the e-commerce category. 

The second C is the content format. And this mainly applies to when you're trying to classify informational content. So if you search the main pages for the "best tasting protein powder", you will see that all the pages are list posts. And the third is the content angle. 

This is more difficult to quantify than type or format, but the content angle is generally the dominant unique selling proposition used by higher-ranking pages. For example, almost every page rated "best protein powder" has the current year in the title, which to me says freshness is the angle. While the ranking of pages for "blog tips" is taking the angle of "for beginners". 

If you were trying to rank for "blogging tips" with an article called "17 Advanced Blogging Tips for Professional Bloggers" it might be difficult to rank them. The reason is that the better you can match the search engine's query, the better your chances of getting a high ranking. If your page doesn't match the search intent, you'll want to refresh the page so that it does. But, if your page has a matching intent, let's move on to the next stage, which is ensuring your content covers the whole topic. 

The way you and I look at topics can be very different from the way Google sees them. For example, if you and I are talking about the best watch brands, I could talk about Apple and you could talk about Omega. Ask five more people and you might get five completely different answers. Now looking at Google's top 10 pages for this query, it's pretty clear that you should write a list-style blog post that focuses on the biggest luxury brands. And if you visit the pages, you will notice something interesting.

They all mention Rolex. So this is probably a brand that you should include as well if you haven't already. Now, this is kind of an observational assumption. So if you want to go a step further, you can also do a content gap analysis at the page level.

 Just grab some high ranking pages and paste them into the top section of Ahrefs Content Gap tool. I already did it here with 5 relevant pages, so let's run the search. And now you can see the queries that one or more of these pages rank for. Just go through the keywords and you'll get a better idea of what subtopics you should be talking about. 

Now if your content isn't up to the mark, rewind and follows these steps. But if you've covered your topic in its entirety, move on to the next step, which is estimating the number of backlinks you'll need and then creating them. Backlinks are an important ranking factor. Not only has Google said so, but virtually every industry study has found a positive relationship between organic search traffic and backlinks. 

Now, there is no way to know the exact number of required backlinks because not all backlinks are the same. But we can get a rough estimate using Ahrefs Keyword Explorer. Just search for your target keyword. 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, such as thematic relevance of the pages and domains, as well as the authority of the website. 

We have a full tutorial on how to assess rating difficulty, which I will link to in the description. Now if you don't have enough backlinks, go ahead and check out our link building playlist and run it. But if you have enough, let's move on to the next step, which is adding internal links to your page. We already know that backlinks can help increase the authority of your page. But internal links can also help enormously. 

To find pages from which you need to add links, simply go to Google and search for the site: yourdomain.com and then a keyword that is relevant to your page. You will then see all the indexed pages on your site that have that keyword somewhere on the page. Generally speaking, the more "authority" you have acquired on the linked pages, the more "authority" you can move to the linked pages.

 If you don't have any authoritative pages to link from, I highly recommend watching our video on the "middle man technique" which is an SEO strategy built on the foundation of strategic linking. Now, having done everything up to this point, it's just a matter of waiting. How long? Well, that depends.

After studying 2 million keywords, we found that less than 5% of the top 10 pages were less than a year old. So instead of sitting around fiddling with your thumbs, repeat the process for different keywords and pages. But before you dare to do that, there is one very important thing you should know. Ranking on the first page of Google may not be the answer to solve your SEO problems. 

If you look at this CTR curve, you will see that there is a big drop after the first 2 or 3 positions. That is, if you are in position 10, you will only get a 1% click-through rate. So to put this in perspective, if you ranked 10th for a keyword that's searched 1,000 times a month, that's only 10 search visitors, which may not be worth it. So instead of looking for the first-page ranking, aim for the top 3. 

And this will often come down to matching search intent, creating full content, and building more links. I highly recommend watching our video on how to rank higher on Google, as well as our link building playlist. But before you go, be sure to like, share, and subscribe for more hands-on SEO and marketing tutorials.