Half our clients like their site but need more sales, so figuring out how to get a website on the first page of Google is key.
Determining how to get more traffic to their website plagues a lot of small and medium business owners.
If this is you, then you’ve probably already been bombarded with ‘SEO Gurus’ who promise all kinds of things. (We get these unsolicited calls too!) So how do we differentiate ourselves from the other guys?
We spill the beans on how to get a website on the first page of Google.
We figure by taking some of the mystery out of how it’s done, our clients will rather we do the work for them.
- Want to talk to a real person instead of learning this yourself? 1-877-227-8713 -
There are 3 big steps to Search Engine Optimization.
- Keyword research. Potential customers are typing certain words into Google to find your service or product. What are those words?
- On Page SEO. Make sure that your current website mentions your keywords. (we use Thesis theme to make this easy)
- Off Page SEO. Make sure that other websites mention your website.
First we do keyword research.
A lot of research. Keywords are the backbone of how to get a website on the first page of Google, so this step is mondo-important.
You can do this right now for free.
Go to Google’s Keyword tool. (We also use Market Samurai. You can sign up for a free trial here)
Enter a phrase you think your customers might type to find you. For example, let’s say you sell lemonade in New York City. If people are looking to buy lemonade in New York City, they may type in ‘lemonade in NYC’.
So if you type that in to the keyword tool, you will get some other terms Google thinks is related to ‘lemonade in NYC’.
You will see a long list of terms, some of which are relevant to selling lemonade in NYC, some that are not. You simply pick the words and terms that show the most monthly traffic.
The next step is to find how many other websites are competing to be on page 1 for that term. The free way of doing this step is to simply take the term you like and put it into Google in quotations. Underneath the search results you will see how many other pages are competing.
Any term with 100,000 competing pages or less can be moved to page 1 in three months or less (with a couple more steps)
We repeat this process of finding great search terms with high searches and low competition over and over. Then, we make sure that your website mentions these terms.
Next is on-page SEO.
After all, if you would like to be found for ‘lemonade NYC’ but your site only talks about ‘coffee in NYC’ there is no reason for Google to think you also sell lemonade.
Our next step is to coordinate with the person who manages your website, and let them know about all the keywords we will be targeting. They can then make sure the on-page SEO is done correctly. (Don’t worry, if they don’t know how to do this, we’ll show them.)
Finally, we find other websites that are similar to our client’s site and get backlinks.
Here is an example of a great backlink.
If you clicked on that, you will notice it simply links back to our homepage. What you clicked is the backlink and the word ‘great backlink‘ is the anchor text.
So here’s the secret sauce on how to get a website on the first page of Google.
Get backlinks with your keyword in the anchor text, from multiple sites related to your site, from more websites than your competitor, and you will be on page one. Simple as that.
The reason this explanation isn’t going to put us out of business is because these steps take consistent work over time. Something that most of our client’s would rather someone else handle. Such as;
