In this article, I’m going to show you how to rank number one in google the seven techniques in this article have helped me get to number one ranking for keywords like youtube SEO and nofollow links. Backlinko is the place where marketers turn for higher rankings and more traffic and if you want actionable strategies you can use them to get higher google rankings. You’ll love this article stay tuned so my team and I recently analyzed 5 million google search results to learn more about what people click on in the search results and why and as it turns out ranking on the first page of google ain’t what it used to be today it’s all about ranking number one or at least in the top three that’s because our study found that the top three results get 75.1 percent of all clicks and the number one result alone gets 31 of the clicks. Ricky bobby said it best if you’re not first you’re last in this article, I’m going to show you seven techniques to help you rank number one in google so let’s kick things off with us.
Google SEO Ranking Frist Technique
The first technique find low-competition keywords with explodingtopics.com let’s face it most keywords are super competitive that’s because everyone and their competitor is using the same tools ahrefs.com, rush, Moz pro, the google keyword planner everyone is typing the same keywords into these tools and getting the same accurate results. So to find untapped keywords that aren’t super competitive you need to use tools that no one else is using and one of my favorite untapped keyword research tools is one that I use called exploding topics. This tool surfaces trending topics that aren’t competitive yet and because exploding topics focus on terms that aren’t mainstream yet you can find keyword and topic ideas that most other tools won’t show you.
Google SEO Rank Second Technique
Now it’s time for technique number two rewrite old content to match search intent
This technique recently helped me rank number one in google for the keyword SEO campaign. Here’s the full story you probably already know that if your site isn’t what searchers want google won’t rank it even if that page has a million backlinks but if you can align your content with what someone wants you can find yourself with higher rankings for that term, for example, I published this blog post on my blog a few years ago this post was a case study of how one of my readers used a strategy called geographics to build a bunch of backlinks, Now I couldn’t find a great keyword for that post. so I just went with the SEO campaign it wasn’t a perfect fit and it didn’t describe the topic of the page but it was good enough and for a while, it was good enough my page quickly hit the top 10 for that keyword, and stuck there for a few months. But one-day google rankings and organic traffic to that page started to drop. So I kind of ignored the problem and hoped it would go away spoiler alert it didn’t go away traffic to my page continued to freefall that’s when I realized that my content was a horrible fit for user intent.
I’ll explain someone that who searches for an SEO campaign probably wants you guessed it an SEO campaign but my content didn’t give them that instead of outlining the steps to setting up an SEO campaign my post was about one strategy and using metrics like the well time bounce rate and pogo sticking google could figure out that my result wasn’t a good fit so they downranked it. This is why I decided to rewrite this post from scratch this time I made sure to publish a piece of content that someone searching for an SEO campaign would love and within a few days organic traffic to that page started to improve and a few weeks after that the new version of this post hit
Google SEO Ranking Third and Forth Technique
The number one spot let’s get right into one of my favorite new SEO techniques ghost posts. This is a new SEO technique that I’ve been using a lot lately and it’s working well let’s break it down so as you probably know the keyword difficulty scores that you see in most keyword research tools are based on one metric backlink are backlinks still important for SEO definitely but backlinks are only one piece of the puzzle first page rankings are also based on organic click-through rate, user intent, page speed, mobile friendliness, on-page SEO, URL length, internal links and lots of other factors.
That’s why I tend to ignore or at least take with a grain of salt most keyword difficulty scores instead of using those numbers. I use ghost posts, for example, a while back I wanted to optimize a post around the keyword-free SEO tools and according to ahrefs keyword explorer, this keyword is quote super hard to rank for, and instead of just blindly accepting that number. I decided to see how difficult this keyword was specifically.
I whipped up a quick post and published it on the fourth page of my blog feed. I didn’t email the post to my list or share it on social media .hence the name ghost post. I was surprised that my page started to hit google’s first page for long tail versions of my keyword like the best free SEO tools within about two weeks. It even started to crack the top of the second page for my target keyword that’s when I decided to promote the post on social media and improve the post itself as it turns out this super hard keyword wasn’t that competitive.
I now rank in the top three for that keyword even though my page has way fewer backlinks than the other results on page one with that let’s start on technique number four rank youtube articles in google ranking a page from your site isn’t the only way to rank number one in google you’ve probably noticed that there are more article results in google than ever before especially above the fold, for example, this article carousel ranks above the traditional first result so for this set of results these youtube articles are the real number one result as another example I’ve been trying to get this post to rank number one for a target keyword of mine for a few months
Now unfortunately I’m still alternating between number three and number four so to get some real estate in that number one spot I decided to create a high-quality youtube article on that same topic and because I optimized my article the right way it’s made its way to the top spot within a few months which leads us to technique.
Google SEO Ranking Fifth Technique
Number five targets low competition high CPC terms when I used to do keyword research back in the day I’d focus a hundred on search volume so if I saw a keyword with 100k searches a month I’d automatically think that it was a great keyword today I put a lot more focus on a keywords CPC or cost per click in other words how much advertisers spend on those clicks this is important for two main reasons first traffic that comes to your site from high CPC terms tend to convert a lot better after all people are bidding to pay for clicks on that exact term which means that people that search for that keyword isn’t broke tire kickers they’re buyers second a lot of high CPC keywords aren’t as competitive as you might think for example I recently created a post optimized around the low competition high cost per click keyword link building services now this keyboard doesn’t get that many searches only about 350 searches per month with a CPC of 20 bucks a pop.
Google SEO Ranking Sixth Technique
I know that the traffic is made up of legit buyers moving right along to technique number six embed articles in your content you probably already know that dwell time is an important google ranking factor dwell time is the amount of time that someone spends on your page before going back to the search results and the higher your dwell time, in general, the higher your page will rank in google the question is how do you improve your dwell time embed articles on your page, for example, I recently compared my bounce rate on a sample of pages with and without an article and pages with an article had an 11.2 percent better bounce rate than pages without an article and that’s why I embed articles in pretty much every post that I publish sometimes I make the article an entire step strategy or a tip or as a way for people to learn more about something that I’m talking about either way I found that embedding articles can significantly increase your well time.
Google SEO Ranking Seventh Technique
now it’s time for our last technique number seven rank in the featured snippet spot in many ways ranking the featured snippet is better than racking number one that’s because the featured snippet is above the normal search results which is why a lot of people call it position number zero well over the last few months I’ve been running lots of featured snippet experience. I’ve developed a process that’s helped me rank for dozens of different featured snippets here’s how it works first identify the type of feature snippet that googles already showing for that keyword now there are three main types of featured snippets to keep an eye out for the definition snippet the list snippet and the table snippet then add something to your page that would fit perfectly inside of that featured snippet, for example, I wanted to rank in the featured snippet for the keyword nofollow links.
So I wrote a little section that would fit perfectly inside of a definition featured snippet which helped me rank in the featured snippet within about a month now there’s one thing I should point out about this approach according to an ahrefs study of 99 of all featured snippets are pulled from results on the first page of google so if you’re not already on the first page for a keyword you pretty much have a zero percent chance of getting in the featured snippet but if you’re already on page one and want to quickly get to the top of the results this strategy can help now before we end this article I have a quick bonus technique for you create branded strategies now to be clear this is an advanced strategy that’s not easy to pull off but when it does work it pretty much guarantees that you’ll rank number one here’s the full breakdown you may not have thought about it. Before but your brand is a keyword that you automatically rank number one. for example, if you google backlinks you can see that Iraq is number one with a bunch of site links from my site underneath it but why to stop there you can start to rank number one for lots of different keywords when you brand your techniques and strategies, for example, you might have heard about the skyscraper technique my three-step formula for building backlinks and because I branded my strategy lots of different people search for that keyword every month a keyword that I made up in fact according to google search console the keyword skyscraper technique gets almost a thousand searches per month and because I rank number one for that keyword I get most of those a thousand clicks so whenever you develop a unique strategy technique or tactic give it a branded name this doesn’t guarantee that people will start searching for it but it increases the odds that what you created will become a thing there you have it eight proven techniques to help you rank number one in google.
if you like this article make sure to subscribe below this article also. if you want exclusive SEO and traffic techniques that I only share with email subscribers head over to backlinko.com and hope on the newsletter it’s free now I want to turn it over to you what tip tactic or strategy are you gonna use from this article are you gonna try to rank in the featured snippets or start embedding articles in your blog content, either way, let me know by leaving a comment below right now.
