Building a website is one thing, but driving traffic to that website is another.
There are over 1 billion websites, but most donāt generate traffic.
The best way to drive traffic to your website is to write content and make your blog posts rank on Google.
However, statistics show that 90.63% of pages created get no organic search traffic from Google. This means only a small portion of the webās content ranks on Google and generates traffic.
Of that small portion, that too only 5.7% of pages rank in the top 10 search results, and they take a big chunk of the organic traffic.
To get your content ranked on Googleās Page 1, you need solid knowledge of SEO
Letās Talk About How SEO Helped Us Rank 250+ Articles on Google Page 1
SEO can be complicated, but only if youāre not on the right track. During this 5-year journey of being an SEO specialist, personally, I had to learn a lot through my mistakes and keep myself updated.
Standing on my toes all the time helped me rank 250+ articles on Google Page 1.
Most of the 250+ articles I refer to are client articles for which I do content marketing, including SEO. There are also dozens of our medium articles that rank on Google. Feel free to check them out if you want.
For your context, most of our clients are in the SaaS space, for whom I do SEO and content marketing, check out our multiple SaaS case studies.
On Medium, I havenāt discussed the detailed approach to building an SEO foundation that can help you rank articles like mine. Through this article, I want to start doing that.
Let us tell you that our approach involves cracking down on multiple SEO tasks before you can rank 250+ articles on Google Page 1, like us.
I would like to jot down the five important SEO tasks/steps that help us rank articles consistently for us and for our clients.
1) Do Your Keyword Research Right
Keyword research is the first step in ranking your website on Google Page 1.
To start, you must define your niche and know your target audience. There are many tools for keyword research. The one I have used over the years is Ahrefs. The features offered by Ahrefs are unique to this tool.
Some of the features are game-changing for keyword research. Before you start using Ahrefs, you need some content ideas for your websiteās main topics.
Usually, when a client tells us the main topics for their software, instead of looking around for keywords for their main topics, I look for keywords that cater to their sub-topics.
For example, if our client owns a to-do list platform, I will choose topics like productivity and routines instead of keywords only about to-do lists, thus catering to their sub-topics and their target audience.
During keyword research, we keep these four things in mind:
- Relevancy: The keyword that you choose should be relevant to the website/business/industry
- Topic Authority: Choose keywords in clusters where you are targeting multiple keywords as sub-topics for one main topic. Covering every keyword/topic in a niche builds topical authority in SEO.
- Go for low-hanging fruits: Analyze the existing SERP results for every keyword before choosing one. Check the DR and UR of each website in the top 10 results using Ahrefs (If you see low DR websites with less topical authority ranking for a keyword, then it is a good indication that the keyword is less competitive)
- Go for decent search volume: A keyword with less than 50 search volumes might not be a good choice, considering the time you put into content writing and optimization (Unless and until the keyword is highly converting for your business). Similarly, donāt go for keywords with high search volume and big competition for your website.
2) Use SOPs Before Creating Any Content
Once you have your keywords, most SEOs and marketers share their well-researched keywords with content writers or write the content themselves. They do this without adequate content research while following an unstructured process to publish content.
Thatās why I have SOPs built for our content marketing agency. They help our writers, save time, and give our content a better chance of ranking.
The first SOP is for the research. Everyone starts their content research on Google and ends it there. If youāre not specialized in your niche, then you will probably write what already exists on Google differently. This is not ideal
To enhance your research, our research SOP shares a series of steps that include researching beyond an existing blog post for your given keywords.
It takes 1ā2 hours to complete the research and create an outline. This is because the SOP makes writers research thoroughly by checking:
- Existing content on Google that is already ranking for our keyword
- Latest YouTube videos around our keyword/topic
- Quora and Reddit posts around our keyword/topic
- Listening to Podcasts to get insights into our keyword/topic
After reading, gathering, and learning from all that content, itās time to generate data and take out any valuable insights that can be included in the content. The purpose of following a research SOP is to ensure you become familiar with the topic and understand the industry nuances.
Now, by using tools like SurferSEO, you can generate an outline. However, we wouldnāt recommend solely following the outlines suggested by the tool.
Instead, use the knowledge and understanding from your research to draft a better outline that will informally cover your content.
3) Write Content That Ranks
If youāre reading this article on Medium, then I probably donāt need to explain to you how to write because we know this platform is filled with talented writers. Writers on this platform are most likely to teach us more about writing than I can ever teach them.
However, one thing to point out is that writing about to rank on Google is completely different from writing for yourself while the writing part might stay the same, but how you approach your outline and optimize your writing matters.
If you aim to rank on top for your keywords, you need to do what top-ranking articles already did. In addition to that, you also need to provide value that wasnāt covered in the existing content pieces on Google.
Hereās how you can write better:
a) Understand the nuances of your industry
Your writing style should convey the tone of someone who knows the industry. This doesnāt imply using jargon for the sake of jargon.
Too much jargon in your content can alienate your readers. Keep in mind that, writing good content will take time if youāre not well-versed with the industry nuances.
However, consistent practice and research about your niche can help you improve. As you write, make sure to:
- Have a target persona in mind
- Be clear and to the point
- Correct your grammar and spelling
- Write like an expert (Do your research and back your content with solid statistics)
b) Use AI tools to write better
Now, I know what youāre thinkingā¦ āGoogle is against AIā
It seems that way because websites with AI content have been hammered this year.
The thing is, Google doesnāt like it when you overuse AI, as it doesnāt make sense or add any value to their searches.
If your content is worthless and looks like a copy of every other piece on the Internet, either way, Google isnāt going to love it, whether or not youāre using AI.
Google can softly penalize you if you rely too much on AI for your content. In our previous articles, weāve said it clearly that we use AI tools to write content. This means we only used AI to help us with content suggestions.
You can use AI tools to:
- Fill your blank sheet with some content and edit it
- Generate different outputs to explore other angles for your content
- Prevent writerās block
That being said, weāre very bullish about interpreting every AI output with the human touch.
This means we donāt recommend you start publishing AI content without editing it first. You must ensure your content is valuable, readable, and adds a fresh perspective for people searching on Google.
4) Optimize Your Written Content Using Tools
During our content audits, we found that most websites have well-written content but canāt rank on Page 1 because they didnāt optimize their existing content.
We have done dozens of optimizations for sites to unlock their potential to reach 100,000+ visitors per month. If you follow the above three steps correctly, you can increase your chances of ranking higher, but you canāt neglect this step, which involves optimizing your content.
When it comes to optimizing content before publishing, we follow a simple checklist that weāve used for years:
- Content Optimizing: Add relevant keywords to your content and include the NLP terms to help search engines understand more about your content and its keywords.
- URL Optimization: Include your main keyword in the URL.
- Meta Title & Meta Description: Write a better title and description that includes your main keyword and improves your CTR on SERPs (Search Engine Result Page)
- Header Optimizing: Include secondary keywords in your H2 and H3 headers.
- Image Optimization: Add relevant keywords in your Image Alt Text.
- Internal Linking: Use proper internal linking structure with the right anchor texts.
Proper on-page optimization for your content requires multiple tools. I use Surfer SEO and various SEO plugins from WordPress, like RankMath and LinkWhisper, to optimize the content before publishing it.
5) Build Backlinks To Rank on Google Page 1
If youāve read our previous articles, you know that we love building backlinks. weāve been doing it for years.
Today, Google says backlinks are not in their Top 3 ranking factor. We beg to differ.
Some people donāt think they need backlinks to rank their articles. We agree to some extent, but backlinks can only be factored in when there is existing competition in your niche.
To negate the sea of myths around backlinks, we have relied on building these types of backlinks for most of our articles to rank on Google Page 1.
1) Guest posts & Link Insertions
Guest posts are articles you publish on someone elseās blog under your name. The benefit is that you get to include a backlink to your website, helping increase your websiteās Domain Authority.
On the other hand, link insertions are when you get backlinks from an existing piece of content on someone elseās website without you writing the whole blog post.
Guest posts and link insertions have played a significant role in getting our 250+ articles ranked on Google.
Most of the guest posts and link insertions I got for our clients were through well-planned, strategic cold email outreach.
2) HARO backlinks (Now Connectively)
HARO is the best and most cost-effective platform for building backlinks.
You can sign up for free on HARO, but we suggest you subscribe to their paid plan of $20 monthly because itās worth every penny.
Feel free to check out our article on landing top-quality backlinks using HARO
With HARO, you canāt scale your link building, but you can get backlinks from top media publications like Entrepreneur, The Huffpost, HubSpot, and Time by replying to a few journalist queries daily.
3) Statistical Blog Posts
Journalists love linking to stats. These types of backlinks can come from top media publications, just like HARO. We came across this concept of writing a statistical post while watching a video of Brian Dean.
As we shared this with one of our clients, and we convinced them to published a statistical post about their industry by conducting a survey. This strategy proved valuable and landed our client 20+ DR70 backlinks.
20+ Quality and High DR Backlinks For Statistical blog post
We replicate this strategy on most of our client websites.
4) Digital PR
Digital PR backlinks are some of the most cost-effective and scalable ways to build links.
Running a digital PR campaign for your website requires decent, trendy content ideas that journalists can easily pick up.
The best part of using Digital PR is that your website can get a flux of backlinks and brand mentions from top media publications.
As these seem natural to Google, they boost your domain authority and can indirectly push your overall website content in the search engine rankings.
If youāre interested in ranking your articles and what to grow your business using our SEO systems. Then please book a call here
