How to Improve Google Ranking

The $64,000,000 question?

Literally!!!!

The answer.....who the hell knows?

Seriously though. The real answer is that there are a number of way to achieve this depending upon what you want to accomplish. If you want to rank for "web design" I think you need to rethink your options unless you have a $50,000 a month budget for SEO for 5 years and even then I have my doubts about your success!

The fact is, ranking online has become a game of inches and degrees. There is an old adage in marketing that says " never try to take the main competition head on". It's true....you are never going to make a new Coca Cola and be successful with that. You can try but you will fail.

The internet has been around long enough now for there to have developed what I call " the entrenched competition". Those titanic monster websites that have 2,000,000 backlinks to them and 100,000 visitors a week. You are just not going to compete with these entities for any large traffic volume keywords. It's futile!

But alas all hope is not lost. There are plenty of places that these monsters do not bother to tread. The reason they do not tread in certain places is that they can't be bothered. Why would the Titans of the web want to optimize their website for a 200 search volume keyword when they are already #1 for a 40,000 a month search volume keyword?

This is where the opportunity lies for those of us with the time and the willingness to work a bit harder to take a few wins from their domain.

1) Do Your Research

The key to this strategy is to do the research first. Decide what niche you want to go after and look for opportunities where others are poorly optimized. For this you will need some SEO tools. I recommend Serped.net as an all-in-one research tool because , not only is the monthly price not too objectionable , the tool is very robust and the man at the helm, Colin Klinkert is always working on improving the product as well. I met Colin briefly at an online marketing event and he was a hell of a nice guy and seemed very dedicated to his work.

Without a decent SEO tool such as this you will have to rely on free tools that are out there but you will find the free tools very limiting at times. Probably my favorite free tool is SEO Profiler. You can access unlimited use of it's link aggregator  which isn't all too bad for a free tool. It does not allow full functionality but it will call up link profiles and anchor text profiles which is very useful for competition analysis.

How to Rank Higher on Google

2) Competition.

You simply must know where the competition is strong and where they are weak if you want to go after the smaller niches I talked about earlier in the article. My main strategy for this is an analysis of their anchor text. many big sites get their links organically and have little or no control over the anchor text of their inbound links. We, as smart SEO people can use this to our advantage. If we can aggregate competitors links and see what there anchor profile looks like we can better understand how to compete with them by finding out what anchor they are lacing for lower competition keywords.

Let's say, for example, that the main keyword is Dallas SEO and the search volume for that term is 1200 searches a month. Chances are for a term like that you will have to go up against the best in the business who have been at the game for  a few years and are well optimized for that search. But what is there is 200 searches for Dallas SEO expert. Chances are that the competition won't have spent as much or their time and resources going after that term. A look at the number of references through anchor text research will tell us that.

OK...so lets say that is still a bit steep. What about a suburb. If there is some search volume for Frisco SEO at say 30 searches a month and the competition has no anchor text from links pointing at them to that effect then you may stand a chance at dominating for that term. The likelihood of the big guys ever bothering to notice you taking over that search are highly dubious. They are too busy doing what they do running their business every day to be bothered to notice in most cases.

This is one strategy to help you get a few wins. This is a strategy my friend Justin Monk uses to get a lot of his business and it is working fantastically for him for Minneapolis SEO.

Another tactic is to look for keywords that are only loosely related to the industry. The way to do this is instead of looking directly at the industry, look for the problems the product of service solves and focus on keywords and phrases that surround these ideas. An example would be plumbing. Instead of looking up "plumbing" as a search term, look up "water leak" or "pipes frozen" as a search term and you may find an area that no-one else is targeting and have it all to yourself.

First page of Google

3) Content Ranking

Depending on the type of business you are in you can often get plenty of traffic to a website by building out a number of pieces of written content. I would not necessarily recommend the content method for a local construction company. Traditional methods like local citations, social profiles, and traditional link building methods are going to be your most reliable and fastest method to get ranked and banked.

The main point is not to get too pigeon-holed in your way of thinking. Be creative and opportunities will reveal themselves. Tool, as I mentioned earlier are a necessity but a good mind in combination with good tools will take you a whole lot farther!

However, there are certain types of websites such as e-commerce type websites affiliate websites and other types of sites in this vein that are really well adapted two doing content marketing.

The reason that eCommerce sites do well in this venue is partially due to the fact that there are usually a lot of products on the site. Due to the number of products you also have a lot of pages on the site and consequently a large number of keywords attached to each different product.

An interesting side note is important here. In recent years it has come to our attention from Google's data that approximately 50% of the keywords being searched in their database every month are new searches that have never been searched before.

If you're paying attention this should leave you a clue.  the clue is this in case you're not paying attention. If there are that many new keywords being searched this opens up a tremendous opportunity for a writer of content for his e-commerce website to create content around these keywords.  Also,  the fact that these are relatively new keywords the person who creates content around the subject matter early in the race stands a far better chance of having that content consumed by searchers.

People are pretty creative when it comes to search structure and wording.  if you are like me you have started out doing a general keyword searches only to get results that were necessarily what you were hoping for.  the next step is to drill down into specifics much further by lengthening the keyword search.

One of the drawbacks to having such a massive database of information online nowadays is it a create much more difficulty in the process for the person trying to find  a specific solution to a specific problem.

Let's look at an example.

You start out with a simple search term like” weight loss” and you are likely to have hundreds of millions of search results.  Also,  you're likely to get such generalized information that you will be forced to become a lot more specific about what it is that you're looking for.

So you drill down and type in “  weight loss for men “.  you still get tens of millions of search results and then it occurs to you that you have an even more specific need.  your doctor just announces to you that you are type 2 diabetic.  so now you type in “  weight loss for diabetic men “.

Naturally, most of the results are going to be sales pitches for a number of different product-based solutions or pre-made diet type Solutions that are not necessarily practical or affordable for your situation.  the rest of the results will be from the usual suspects such as WebMD and Healthline outlining various different studies and so forth that have been done on the subject but not necessarily any Concrete Solutions that are directly related to you.

So you drill down even further.

You search free “weight loss information for diabetic men over 50”........  and so the process goes.

The bad news for the Searcher is that this can be a bit of a dilemma and can leave the person doing the surge very frustrated.  the good news for you as the  content creator is that if you are lever and willing to do the homework in terms of keyword research and simply using a bit of your introspective muscles you should be able to come up with some reasonably good content headlines that will fit for some of these people when they are searching for these types of solutions.

The weight loss example may not be the ideal example for this situation but I happen to be at a loss right now for a better example and weight loss is so Universal that it gets abused by writers of this type of content,  like myself,  from time to time.

Happy hunting in the SERP's.

A series of similar questions people ask about Google Ranking

• how to get your website on Google?
• how to improve Google ranking?
• how to rank higher on Google?
• how to increase Google ranking?
• how to get to the top of Google?
• how to improve Google search ranking?
• how to rank in Google?
• first page of Google?

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