Over the years that I have been involved in developing websites (which is admittedly a lot of years!), the number one question I get asked is the one in the title of this message: how do I get my website onto page 1 of Google?
Website SEO Ranking Factors
There are many factors you can control that influence where you land up in search, including the loading speed of your site, whether it is mobile friendly, whether or not the person doing the search is logged in to Google (they may get suggestions personalized for their current location when logged in), whether your website has a security certificate (SSL) installed, and so on. Those are all things related to search engine optimization (SEO, which is the business of preparing your site’s infrastructure and metadata for search engines), but assuming you’ve ticked all those boxes, the biggest factor that determines where you will end up on Google’s search engine result pages (SERP’s) comes down to how much good quality, rich content is found on your website compared to that of your competitor’s website.
What is “good quality, rich content”, you may be asking?
Simply put, good quality, rich content is the difference between telling people that you supply XYZ widgets and educating people about the XYZ widgets you sell. This is where the rubber hits the road when it comes to getting good SERP’s and it’s unfortunately the one thing that most website owners tend to neglect, mainly because it requires the most effort to produce.
These days Google are putting a lot of their own effort into finding the best quality websites for specific search terms. They use super advanced technology such as Latent Semantic Indexing to determine just how comprehensive and relevant your content actually is for any specific search term you are trying to target. If they find that you’re publishing thin, wishy washy material on a regular basis in an attempt to try and bolster your ranking, you may actually end up hurting your position more than helping it.
My Advice
So, my advice to those of my customers who are looking to get better SERP’s is this: firstly, make sure that you have all the SEO boxes ticked, then go ahead and create awesome content regularly about your products or services for your websites. Look at what your competitors are doing on their sites and do it better than they do. If you need help creating that content or getting your SEO sorted you can always call on me.