Harsh Agrawal is the Fountainhead and CEO of ShoutMeLoud, an award-winning blog that aims at helping people be their own boss. After completing his engineering degree in 2008, Harsh started his online venture in November of the same year. By 2009, he was recognized as one of India’s young turks and featured in many online magazines and newspapers.
Google today, is the mother of all things digital. On average, this search engine processes more than 3 billion searches daily and trillions annually. Google search is the world’s largest search engine and is the home to user-centric advertisements, trending searches, and top news. It crawls through the web to understand the relevance of the information provided to its users. Several tangible options can help in appearing on the first page of the search results on Google.
The first page ranking on Google will benefit the business in ways like improving visibility, generating more leads, increasing engagement, driving website traffic, and creating thought leadership too. The practice of aligning with the ranking factors is named program optimization aka Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Down below are a few tips that could help in ranking on the first page of google.
Determine your keywords
To begin with, understand the type of search queries that you would like Google to answer regarding the information on the website. These are referred to as keywords—which, most often single words or phrases. Each page on a website or blog must target a special set of keywords in a way that the pages aren’t competing with one another. The proper keywords for your business are the ones that are most commonly used by the potential customers in that space. There also are various keyword tools that will help in generating the right set of keywords.
Tell Google what keywords you’re using
Google works by crawling the online, ranking the many pages that exist, and indexing them. When a user searches a query, Google can then scan through its more organized index instead of the entire web to quickly come up with relevant results. Therefore, another important step to stay exposed to the idea of the first page on a google search on the primary page of Google is by placing keywords within the following places:
Meta title
Every blog post and the webpage of a website has a meta title. This title not only appears at the highest of your page within the sort of a header but also because of the title of that page’s listing in the search result.
Meta description
The meta description is that small description that shows up underneath the title in Google’s search results. Thus, meta description helps Google to place the business on the first page for the proper searches and helps Google users to access the right information.
URL
The URL consists of the domain name (such as shoutmeloud.com), followed by a forward slash, followed by text separated by dashes. Including keywords in your URL will help Google to more quickly identify what the page is about. The URL of a particular website appears in between the title and meta description in search results. A URL that matches the title of the page is more appealing, trustworthy to the users, and a better fit for the first-page appearance
Emphasize location
Another hack to get the website pages on the primary page of Google is to focus on location-based queries. Confirmation of location on the website indicates your city and/or geographical area, via your contact page and potentially also through blog posts and services pages. That way, when people search: “your industry”+” your city”, Google will show that information and show your business as a “near me” search result.
Create a Google My Business account
Google My Business(GMB) is evolving into one of the foremost powerful tools for local business owners. Both Google Maps and Search pull from Google My Business to supply local listings (known as Business Profiles). Creating a Google My Business account is a straightforward hack to adding more information to your Business Profile, which eventually helps in appearing on the primary page of Google Maps and Search results. Verifying the listing will help optimize your search results.
Obtain Google reviews
Google searchers like to see what people believe about a business, so it’s no surprise that the companies with more positive Google reviews show on top of the primary page. Ask customers face to face to review the service to be able to rank better in the search results.
To sum up, getting on top of search results takes time and effort, and is doable even for a small business.