3 Simple Steps to Rank Higher on Google

 

There's nothing more frustrating than seeing your website rank on the umpteenth page of Google, even though you're constantly trying to improve the ranks. 

I know this because I've seen it happen many times.

Sometimes it feels like no matter what you do, nothing works. Google seems to hate your website and you've no idea why.

If this sounds all too familiar, then you've come to the right place.

Step 1: Find underperforming keywords.

Most SEOs advise finding your page two and then trying to get it to page one.

This seems logical, but there are two reasons why this isn't a good idea:

It's not always easy to improve rankings by more than 10 places.

Merely ranking on page 1 shouldn't be your goal if you want more visitors.

The first point should actually be self-explanatory. Think of it like this:

It's easier to win a game with two goals behind than with ten goals behind.

You can see that the click-through rate decreases exponentially the further down you get.

That's, if you can improve only one position from 5th to 4th, you'll see a bigger increase in visitors than if you improve ten positions from 20th to 10th.

And that's not a small difference!

If your primary target keyword gets 10,000 searches per month, the numbers look something like this:

Since you only want to see the "real" rankings, exclude any custom SERP features using the "SERP Features" filter. Just click the drop-down menu, click "Exclude", select "All features" and then tick the box "Link to target only".

Step 2. Choose a keyword you want to rank better for.

Each keyword in this filtered report is a keyword you already rank for, but not in pole position. This means there's still room for improvement.

The next step is to mine this list for keywords you most want to improve your ranking for.

However, it doesn't make sense to aim for rankings for low-value keywords or those that are likely to be difficult to work with. So here are a few things you should look out for to identify the best candidates.

a) Keywords that already attract the most visitors.

In general, keywords higher up in this report are the best targets if your goal is to maximize organic traffic.

This is because they already drive the most traffic to your website.

Here's the filtered report for the Ahrefs blog:

If you pay attention to the "Traffic" column, you'll see that there are a handful of keywords that are already bringing tons of traffic to our posts, even though our rankings aren't that perfect.

Considering that improving our rankings by just one position can increase CTR by up to 93% on average, we wouldn't need to rank much higher for these keywords to dramatically increase traffic.

b) Keywords with high search volume

Improving your ranking by just one position can almost double the traffic you get from that keyword. But double nothing is still nothing.

So check the "Volume" column to make sure the keyword has a high search volume.

Keywords with low KD values

Keyword Difficulty (KD) is our own keyword difficulty score. It ranges on a scale of 0-100, with keywords at the high end usually being more difficult to rank for than those at the low end.

In other words, it's usually harder to rank for a KD50 keyword than a KD20 keyword.

For this reason, it's worth skimming the KD column in the report and prioritizing the keywords with a lower KD value.

There's no point in driving more organic traffic to your website if it doesn't translate into more sales.

That's why it's important that you always prioritize keywords with business value.

To illustrate this concept, imagine you run a bakery in New York.

A #1 ranking for the keyword "New York bakery" will almost certainly result in more sales than a ranking for "cupcake recipe." The reason is that those who search for the former are more likely to become paying customers.

Therefore, "New York bakery" has a higher business value for you than "cupcake recipe", even though the latter has a 7 times higher search volume.

Step 3. Find out why you're being outranked.

One website may rank better than another for hundreds of reasons, but don't let that discourage you.

Many people (ourselves included) have studied various "ranking factors" on numerous occasions and have found that three things consistently correlate highly with rankings and traffic:

1. Number of referring domains
2. Authority of the site
3. Authority of the website

But before we get to those factors, there's an even more important ranking factor that you need to consider if you hope to rank higher.

Intention of the searcher

Google's goal is to provide the most relevant result for a given search query. Their entire business model is based on being able to do this consistently across hundreds of billions of search queries. For this reason, the company has invested heavily in understanding the intent of search queries, that's, why a person typed a particular thing into Google in the first place.

This is why none of the top ranked pages on link building come from companies offering link building services, but from informative blog posts and guides: