How To Rank Higher on Google: Small Business Strategies

Whether you’re brand new to blogging or a content veteran, learning how to rank higher on Google is crucial to getting traffic from this major search engine. Here’s my ultimate guide to ranking higher in organic search (and showing up in Google results faster). If you really really really want to rank at the top a particular keyword, you’ll want to do a SERP analysis to see exactly what it will require—and if it’s realistic. This sort of strategy takes a lot of work, but it’s one of the more reliable ways to get backlinks from other websites. Most publishers—including yours truly—love free, high-quality content, so if you’re willing to create good content for their site, they’ll usually be willing to publish it.

Why Local Search Matters

Understanding and meeting search intent is key to ranking highly. Because Google tries to give its users the most satisfactory results. To check your keyword rankings, go to Semrush’s Organic Research tool.

See how well you rank for SERP features

As Google wants to reward high-quality, “natural” links (editorially given) – these are the links you want to pursue. In truth, it’s incredibly difficult to rank a single page by itself for a handful of keywords – especially if there’s any competition at all. But for newer SEO Anomaly sites, and sites without a lot of authority, over-optimization can be a real drag. We won’t cover each element in detail here, but earning as many clicks as possible by optimizing these elements will go a long way. Each of the resources below should help to improve your CTR, and ultimately, your traffic.

The Dashboard & Reporting Tool for Spreadsheet Data

With a bit of creativity, you can turn a dull spreadsheet into an engaging visual tool. But what if you want to handle ties or make your rankings more dynamic? At the heart of any ranking system in Google Sheets is the RANK function. This handy little function allows you to rank numbers within a list, making it perfect for sorting data by importance or preference. That said, Google still recommends adding video markup for embedded videos, even if they’re hosted on YouTube. Learning how to make YouTube videos that people love is beyond the scope of this guide.

And some web pages get featured in special displays like “featured snippets” and “People Also Ask” questions. Ranking high on Google for one keyword is great, but ranking high for many keywords is even better. So once you’ve followed this process for one keyword, repeat it for more. Hit the graph caret next to any keyword in Rank Tracker to see its ranking progress over time.

• Search intent is the motivation and mindset of searchers, as revealed by Google.
• This report shows you relevant internal link opportunities on your own site.
• Make sure you do all the good stuff they’re doing but do it even better.
• People may be coming to you directly, people, may be referring to you in lots of different ways… You’re not just sort of this anonymous type of thing.
• And higher rank, as you know, means more visibility and engagement with your business.