Learn How to Rank Higher on Google | 6 Easy to Follow Steps — Ryan Stack
Google and other professionals in the SEO world make SEO seem like an impossible task to complete…with over 200 + factors and everything changing on a daily, weekly, monthly basis — where do you start? How about with the simple basics that still WORK and help you rank higher for specific search phrases!
If you don’t know me, I’m the owner of The Stack Group and one of our biggest products is in SEO. We have spent 10’s of 1,000’s of hours over the years helping clients rank and felt that it would be worth it for me to share some basic fundamental truths that, if done right, could help your site rank higher. This by no means is the full A-Z list of what to do, but it’s a good starting point for the person who’s on a budget and may want to do some basic things to help improve their site rankings — so here we go — 6 Easy to Follow Steps that will help you rank higher on google:
Step 1: Leverage Google Tools and Set Up GA, GSC and GMB
What is all this stuff? These are very useful tools that are free and offer a huge amount of helpful insights for your business. If you haven’t done so already, you can search your business and claim your google my business (google maps) listing. If you don’t have one, you can create one and verify it with google in just a matter of minutes.
Once you have your GMB listing, search google search console and google analytics and set both accounts up under the same gmail.
These 3 tools are essential in gathering data, improving local search, understanding your website health, and how well google is able to crawl your site.
Step 2: Keyword Research
This is perhaps one of the most important steps when deciding to conduct any type of SEO. If this step is skipped, then it’s almost like spending countless hours and potential $$ without knowing if it will produce any traffic or results. The worst thing you can do is guess what people are searching for and how they may find your business. To avoid wasting time and money, keyword research will help you find targeted phrases with real traffic and focus your energy on ranking your site for those phrases.
There are a lot of expensive keyword search tools on the market — but if you don’t have a budget to get this done you could use tools like https://keywordseverywhere.com/. This allows you to add their app to your google chrome browser and display search traffic for words you enter in google. Once you add the app, you can search a phrase and under the google search bar, you’ll see volume, CPC, and Competition.
Volume means the estimated amount of people who search for that phrase on a monthly basis. CPC is the estimated Cost Per Click that you would spend if you wanted to use google adwords to rank and competition is on a scale of 0.01 to 1–1 being extremely difficult to rank for.
The key in this process is to find groups of phrases that have high search volume but low competition — especially if you have a newer domain name or site age. My recommendation is to narrow your target and find smaller search terms that have low competition and make that your first round of targets. An example could be instead of plumbers near me, you could target plumbers in town, state. This might have less volume, but it would also tend to have less competition which will increase the odds of you appearing towards the top of that search.
Over time, when you begin to rank for more terms and increase your authority, you can switch your efforts to go after larger volume keyword phrases.
Search for groups to start with — pick around 25 keyword phrases to start with and grow it over time.
Step 3: Optimize Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
Let me break this down. The title tag is the big bold search listing result that you see in any search you may perform and the description is the text underneath that bold title.
To optimize these on your website, you want to be sure to include the keywords within the phrases you’ve identified in your keyword research that pertain to that page on your website. This has been a major ranking factor in the SEO work we’ve done over the years and still, in 2021, is a major factor in ranking your site pages.
Rules to follow when optimizing these 2 elements:
TITLE TAGS:
Google starts to cut off your title tag if it goes too long. A good rule to follow is to make sure your title tag is around 50–60 characters. We don’t recommend surpassing 60 characters.
META DESCRIPTIONS
Google recommends meta descriptions to be around 50–160 characters. You want enough content to describe the page while also making sure that you don’t go far beyond a description.
STEP 4: Optimize Header tags
Header tags help prioritize the content on your site page. They help rank what is most important to least important for the search engines to understand. Typically, the title for web pages will be your H1 Tag. For each section of your page you can assign H2, H3, H4 etc.
For example. Perhaps you have a dental business and your first main piece of content is your services page. Your H1 Tag may be Complete Oral Health and Dental Services. As the list of importance goes down on your page you may have an H2 tag of Preventative Dental care, then H3 of Emergency Dental Services etc….
Take your time to include these tags to help google understand the main focus of the page (H1 tag) and the other areas of focus that are important. If you only have time to do a small amount of SEO work, we advise every page to at a minimum have at least a H1 tag.
STEP 5: Include Alt Text On All Images
Alt Text or Alternative text allows you to write what the images on your site represent. Think about how most people upload images — they usually have file names like image4058384945. When that’s all google can understand — you can easily see why this will not help you SEO. Take the time to add alt text to all site images as this will help google understand what the image represents, and it can also help these images show up under image searches locally.
STEP 6: Create Consistent Content
One of the most basic aspects of ranking higher in search and for more search phrases is creating consistent content. Seems very obvious, yet most people don’t spend time doing it. There’s only so much optimization you can do on a site — there’s only so much you can optimize titles, meta descriptions, alt text, page titles, page speed, etc…until you realize that additional content is necessary to rank for more phrases and to rank higher in search.
One of the easiest things you can do is create a blog on your site and target 2,3,4, or 5 of your keyword phrases around a new article each week. You can simply write about information related to 1 phrase, but we find it more beneficial to include more than one targeted key phrase in each article. Be as detailed as you can in each article, add images with alt text, include videos if you have them, and aim for a minimum of 500 words per article.
Follow these 6 SEO steps and watch how your site rankings improve.
Ryan Stack
CEO of thestackgrp.com
About The Stack Group
The Stack Group is a locally owned and family-run modern digital design and marketing agency based in Agawam, Massachusetts. We specialize in Modern Responsive Website Design, Affordable Search Engine Ranking SEO and Social Media Marketing & Branding.
Additional Resources:
