In this article, we’ll outline some of the steps you need. To achieve your goals, discussing topics including site audits, web hosting, keywords, content, and the competition.

1. Audit Your Site

The first step in learning how to rank in Google is running an audit of your site. There are various online tools you can use to do this for you. These tools will highlight issues that can affect your ranking or errors you’ll need to fix, including crawl errors, broken links, whether your site is mobile-friendly, how fast your site is, and issues with your robots.txt file or XML sitemap.

If your site is slow, you may need to speak to your web hosting provider to find out if there are ways to make it faster, or maybe move to a provider with servers that perform better.

2. Install Google Analytics & Google Search Console

If you don’t already have Google Analytics and Google Search on your site, you’re going to need to install them. Without them, you’re not going to know who is visiting your site, how they found your site, which pages they’re visiting or how long they’re staying. Having these tools installed will also give you quantifiable evidence of whether the changes you’re making to improve your rankings are actually working.

3. Know Your Keywords

Keywords are the words that people type into search engines when looking for something online. To make sure your site has the keywords to attract the right type of visitors, you need to do some keyword research.

There are a few things to keep in mind when considering which keywords to target. First, you need to target keywords that are relevant to your business or the topic of your site. You also want to work on keywords that bring in a decent amount of traffic, while at the same time avoiding ones that are too competitive, i.e. terms that are being targeted by thousands of other sites too. Try not to choose keywords that are too broad. For instance, if your site sells a specific type of widget, your targeted keyword should be “specific widget name” instead of just “widget”.

4. Know Your Competitors’ Keywords

Finding the right keywords to target can sometimes be a long process, often involving trial and error. One way to help speed up that process is to look at which keywords your competitors are targeting.

Begin by doing a search on a keyword phrase that one of your main pages ranks for. Then, look at the websites of competitors that appear in the rankings for the same term. Next, you can find other keywords that the competitor’s page also ranks for. For the last part of that process, you’ll have to use third-party keyword research tools.

5. Filter Your Keywords

After completing the previous two steps, you should have quite a long list of potential keywords to target in your website text. But now you need to choose which of those are the best ones on which to focus your efforts. Your keywords need to meet a few basic criteria. They obviously need to be relevant to your business or the topic of your website.

Keywords should also have sufficient search volume, i.e. enough people should be searching for that term in any one month. Determining the right amount of volume is dependent on the keyword itself.

Low-volume keywords can be worth targeting if they’re not that competitive, which can make them a a good choice for new websites. But, most importantly, you need to be able to create content for each keyword that is going to attract and interest visitors – and also rank well.

6. Create your content and make it “complete”

Website content can come in a variety of different forms. It could be written text, images, video, audio, or games. When you know what type of content matches the intent of your keywords, you can work on producing the sort of content that most people are looking for with their searches.

The aim of your content should be to completely satisfy your visitors’ queries so that they don’t need to return to the search results and try a different site. You want your site to be the last click they make from the SERPs. Your content can be thought of as complete if it does that and also offers supporting evidence and answers other questions that are related to the visitor’s search.

8. Be patient

Getting good search engine rankings isn’t something that happens overnight; it does take a bit of research and work. But, like with most things, if you put in the time and effort, you’ll be rewarded. Once you achieve a page-one position, it can be tempting to sit back and relax. But while this can be a cause for celebration, it is really only a milestone on a road of continual work and improvement to ensure your site and its content stays fresh and relevant.