Google SEO Strategy Decoded: How to get that #1 Spot

Writing to rank on Google is something a lot of bloggers just don’t even think about. Visit one of the many websites dedicated to Google SEO and you hear that writing quality content is all you need to get a first-page spot on the search engine.

It’s an easy answer for bloggers but is also completely, absolutely wrong!

If just writing quality blog posts was all it took, then 95% of bloggers wouldn’t be quitting within the first six months of launching their websites. These are legit bloggers with something to say and getting no love from the world’s largest search engine.

Why? Because it takes a lot more to get your blog ranked on Google than just putting words on the virtual page.

The good news is that putting together a Google SEO strategy will put you ahead of the vast majority of bloggers and will boost your traffic through the stratosphere.

Why Google SEO Matters

According to WordPress, bloggers create more than two million new posts every day. Most of these posts are just updating or rambling with little hope of making it anywhere on Google.

But should that matter? Why not just focus on the interaction with your readers with new content?

How about another question, does it matter how great your blog is if nobody reads it?

Traffic from Google search accounts for between 55% and 80% of most blogs’ total traffic. Search traffic averages 68% of my 50,000+ monthly visitors across six blogs. That’s more than 35,000 monthly visitors thanks to ranking on the first pages of Google, free traffic that I wouldn’t have otherwise.

You’ll see some search traffic by just creating content for your blog but it’s not enough. Getting real Google love means getting to that first page.

Anything after the first page is just wasted words.

A study by Chitika shows that the first ten search results on Google get almost all of the clicks from searches with the top five results getting 75% of clicks.

Now that Google has moved all the ads to the top of search results, regular blog posts may be getting much less of the total traffic. In another survey, most internet users were unable to tell the difference between ads and organic search results.

That means those two or three ads at the top of a Google search are getting the majority of clicks and makes a great ranking strategy even more important for bloggers.

Hiring an SEO company to help you rank will cost thousands a month, minimum. Avoiding a good SEO strategy will cost you thousands a month in lost sales.

There is a DIY solution!

Turns out, ranking on Google isn’t that tough if you put in the time to learn what it takes to boost your posts to the first page. I rank for 1,728 different search terms on the first page of Google and that’s just the first page!

The secret is a Google SEO strategy, a process you use with all your posts that is quick enough to not take all your time but effective enough to get results.

What Kind of Articles Make it to #1?

Google ranks pages…not blogs. Do a search and almost all the results will be individual pages on a website rather than the home page.

It may seem a trivial difference but it hugely affects your Google SEO strategy. Most bloggers work on getting their homepage ranked, building the SEO value of their whole site when they should be trying to rank each individual blog post.

Google is usually extremely tight-lipped about how it ranks websites. In a break to this secrecy, Google’s Andrey Lipattsev said in 2016 that the two most important factors are content and links.

Let’s look at content first.

Writing the kind of posts that Google loves goes a lot further than just writing interesting content.

Using keywords with just the right level of competition and traffic

Understanding how to show Google what key-words are important in your post?

Making your posts interesting through tables, images, and other media

Tricking out your post to hit Google’s checklist for reader experience

Writing content that gets ranked in search goes beyond posting each week to your blog and learning how to write for search is just as important as writing for your readers. We’ll cover all of these and more in chapters dedicated to putting your content on SEO steroids.

As for links…

I was surprised how little most bloggers know about link-building when I first started paying attention to Google SEO. I reached out to a group of financial bloggers I knew, a group that had been extremely helpful in getting started blogging.

I asked what link-building strategies they were using and if they had any advice…

The overwhelming answer was, “I haven’t done any link-building strategies.”

These aren’t the average blogger that updates their site every couple of months and never really makes any money. A lot of these bloggers get tens of thousands of visitors each month and make thousands on their websites.

But they’ve never paid much attention to a real SEO strategy. They get good traffic just by virtue of having hundreds of posts on their blog and being around for a few years…but are missing out on the real potential for search traffic.

Link-building is about making it easy for Google and readers to find your articles and about showing the search engine which posts are important for which keywords.

• Building links on your own website to highlight information and keep readers on your blog
• Using SEO strategies like the Hub-and-Spoke to create a complete reader experience
• Getting links from guest posting and other strategies to increase an article’s ranking

How this article will Help You Rank on Google

Getting ranked on Google is an afterthought for most bloggers. They spend hours, sometimes days writing a blog post and then hope it goes viral and attracts the kind of attention they need to show up in the search.

That’s fine if you just want a hobby blog. If you just enjoy writing and don’t care about increasing blog traffic or making money on your site…just keep doing that.

If you want to get each post to rank in search and if you want to make as much money as possible blogging, you need a Google SEO strategy you can use for each post.

That’s what this book is all about.

The nine chapters lay out a complete SEO process for planning, writing and ranking each blog post. Being able to put everything in a process will help use your time most effectively without getting lost in all the parts of a successful SEO strategy.

Not only will you be able to use this Google SEO process for ranking new blog posts but also to improve the rankings on existing posts. In fact, the final chapter shares a strategy I use to boost existing posts. It’s a strategy that has nearly tripled the traffic to each post and almost nobody is using it.

Ranking your blog posts on Google doesn’t have to cost thousands in SEO services. Putting together a Google SEO process is all about understanding what works in search engine optimization and how to make it natural to your blogging process.