Love to see and rank your website on the first page of Google but don’t have a budget for SEO? Here’s how to get it to rank without paying a penny.
there are billions of websites in the world and a lot of sites and content for Google’s spiders to crawl and rank. All to ensure that people searching find the best answers to their questions.
It also means that there’s a lot of competition for those precious places at the top of page one of Google’s SERP (search engine results page). And if you want to be found by the billions of people searching on Google every day – or even just the dozen or so looking for what you offer or do you need to ensure that your SEO game is strong?
So it makes sense that, if you want a site with great SEO, you need to understand exactly what it is that Google is looking for and using to rank.
PPC Advertising is costly. Spending a lot of money on Google Ads or Facebook Ads to advertise your business may hurt your revenue if not implemented in the right way. If you wish to know how to get on the first page of Google without paying, then follow these simple yet effective techniques that will show you positive results within a few weeks of implementation.
The happiest bloggers and website owners are those who generate a lot of website traffic through organic ways (search engines). Although getting more organic traffic to your website is hard, but not impossible.
I’ve seen people who made their website appear first in Google search with less than 10 backlinks. Yes, you heard it right!
This is definitely possible if the Meta tags and content are optimized properly (based on the keyword competition though).
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Whether you’re an individual or a small or large business owner, you would love to get on the first page of Google without paying, isn’t it? Well, we all do. To be honest, Google’s first page is guaranteed only if the webpage has been optimized in the right way.
Create content for humans
Anything that is out there on the internet has different purposes, goals, and business objectives. But ultimately at some point, everything you create needs to be found by, shared by, talked about and bought by humans.
It doesn’t matter how precise your keyword analysis turns out to be, or other technical aspects you may have in place, all your efforts will be in vain if your content doesn’t appeal to your end consumer or target audience. Yes, you might end up on the first page of Google, but you won’t win any hearts or business.
That’s probably one of the main reasons why Google’s algorithm updates emphasize producing quality content that can educate or motivate people to take action. An easy-to-read, value-oriented, and insightful piece of content is worth a thousand times more in SEO terms and business value than poorly drafted and meant-for-bots content.
So create content for people, not SEO bots. Create high-value content that educates and informs. Be conversational, classy, and witty with your content because readers love storytellers. If your content sings and your readers love it, then Google will reward you with higher rankings.
Target the Long-tail Keywords
Targeting the long tail keywords is one of the easiest ways to get to the top of Google without paying. The search volume for long-tail keywords is not as much compared to the main keyword, but they’re worth considering.
When a user is searching with a long-tail keyword that is more specific, he is likely to be purchasing that product or service. Moreover, the competition for these keywords is much lesser compared to broad matches. So you’re likely to rank higher with these keywords in less amount of time.
Let me explain with an example:
The user who searches for the keyword “internet marketing” is just looking for the meaning of this specific keyword. Imagine you’re a service provider; in this case, you need to target the long tail keyword “internet marketing services in Denver” where the user is actually looking for a service provider. This type of keyword converts the best compared to the broad match. Although the long-tail keywords don’t bring you much traffic, they convert the best.
It has been proven that long-tail keywords are easy to rank for, as the competition gets filtered out. This also helps your website rank higher for local search.
Optimize Your Title Tag with Keywords
For those who don’t know what a Title tag is: it’s an HTML element that comes within the <head> section that describes what the webpage content is about. From an SEO perspective, the Title tags are one of the most important ranking factors. Getting your website to the top of Google searches is an ever-green subject and hard to obtain in a short time. But On-Page SEO can change the game in no time.
The very first thing you need to do in On-Page SEO is to focus on Title tags. The better the Title tag is, the higher your website will rank on Google search.
A question may arise in your mind “how do I write a better Title for my webpage in order to rank higher on Google search?” Well, the easiest way is to use the primary keywords at the beginning of your Title tag.
Let’s take the previous example to understand in a better way:
Suppose a user searches for internet marketing services in Denver, the Title of your webpage on search results will appear as:
<title>Best Internet marketing services in Denver – Your Website Name</title>
The blue clickable text that you see on the Google search results page is a Title tag. The long-tail keyword in your Title tag doesn’t just help your webpage rank on the first page but also increases the CTR (Click through Rate).
Remember that the optimal title length is 50-60 characters long according to Google. Each of your website’s pages must have a unique Title tag in order to avoid any duplication.
Write blogs consistently
Marketers and SEO enthusiasts often fall for the myth of “Let’s stuff more keywords and win the game.” But that’s not how SEO works. Using long-tail keywords means creating a lot more content – various content types to feed your keywords.
The equation is simple: if you want to index more, you need to write more. You might be writing between four and five blogs a month, and wondering why you’re not ranking.
But when you compare it to industry leaders and experts who tend to push out more than 15 blogs a month, you can see that’s just not enough if you’re serious about competing for the same keywords.
A pro tip is to try to make your blogs engaging too, by using GIFs, videos, podcasts, quotes, images, or even infographics.
Add LSI keywords to your Content
LSI stands for Latent semantic Indexing. Using LSI keywords in your content is one of the most recommended & best practices to boost your SEO traffic.
This method is also beneficial to prevent any kind of penalties from Google.
Confused how?
The Penguin, which is Google’s core algorithm, populates and penalizes the websites/blogs that are stuffed with the same set of keywords on a webpage that is intentionally added to rank higher for that specific keyword. This will eventually drop the rank of your website or webpage on Google's search results page.
Instead of repeating the same keyword again and again (also known as keyword stuffing), using LSI keywords in your content will make it look natural & improves the quality of the content as well.
The better your content is, the more your webpage will appear for different keywords. This will eventually boost your organic traffic.
Sounds amazing, isn’t it?
Well, you just need to find the best LSI keywords & add them to the content in the right place. That’s it! If you mastered this technique, it’s the easiest way to make your website appear first in a Google search.
Where can you use LSI keywords?
There are multiple places where you can use LSI keywords. You can use it in Title & Meta tags, headings, anchor texts, and body content. Finding these keywords is pretty easy. You can either try Google Keyword Planner or Google search results page to find out the best LSI keywords related to your main keyword.
Compress Your Images
Why optimizing image is a major Google ranking factor? Well, most of my clients had websites with a total page size of approximately 3 MB – 10 MB (this includes the JS files as well). However, the images had more than 50% off that size.
Fast-loading images are extremely necessary if you wish to show up your website product images on Google image search (Do not forget to add Alt text to images).
One of the most common reasons why websites don’t rank on the first page of Google is due to the slow loading time. You need to understand that images can have a big impact on SEO if the website is loading slowly. Google loves fast websites, and so do internet users.
More than 40% of internet users leave the website if that doesn’t load within 3 seconds. Once they leave your website they will give a very bad impression and will never come back again.
Reduce the file size as much as possible. There are multiple ways you can do it. I recommend you opt for these two easy ways:
- Choose the dimensions of your image wisely. You need to scale them based on the width of your page.
- You can use plugins or online tools. There are many plugins and online tools out there that can reduce the size without sacrificing the quality of your image. I personally use Smush it WordPress plugin and Tinyjpg to compress the images.
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Optimize your heading tags & content with keywords
<h1> to <h6> the heading & sub-heading tags that are used to describe the paragraphs in an organized way. The H1 tag is one of the important ranking factors as they help search engines identity what the page content is about.
Content is king. Google loves fresh and unique content. A website that gets updated regularly with unique content has a higher chance of being ranked on the first page.
This doesn’t mean you will rank higher if you have a blog post of 3,000 words but lacks quality. What really matters is how good the quality of the post is. How good you are in implementing the keywords within that article.
Based on my personal experience, I’ve seen many websites ranking higher with less than 800 words whereas their competitors were having blog posts of more than 3,000 words and still lagged behind.
This is why I say, the quality of the content matters the most, not the quantity.
If your blog topic has so much to talk about, then you just keep on extending more words by adding the perfect LSI keywords. This way, you will have higher chances of getting to the top of Google search results.
If you own an e-commerce website, then you can implement a jQuery script to limit the text on the page with the “show more, show less” function. In addition, you can create unique content of at least 300-500 words by repeating the keyword once along with the LSI keyword. Add H1 and H2 heading tags with the keyword within them.
How long will it take to see the results reflected on Google search?
Well, it takes time. It may take a week or two or even a month. This depends on multiple factors, i.e. if you have a sitemap installed on your website or not, whether your blog is updated on regular basis with fresh content, how good your internal structure is, etc. You may fetch the edited webpage manually through the Google search console and request indexing. If you are confused about how to get to the top of Google search results without paying a penny, then you can follow these tips and check the results yourself.
