As many industry experts will tell you, the best place to hide a body is the second page of Google search results.
If you’ve ever taken your search that far, you’re one of the few and proud people who work hard to get the answers you’re looking for. If not and you want to know how to get on the first page of Google, you need to learn about what they’re looking for in content.
Here are four ways to boost your business by nailing the first page of Google results.
1. Seize Business Listings
If you haven’t taken the time to confirm with Google that your business is up and running, you won’t get the ranking you’re looking for. Google needs to know that your business is up and running before granting you a high ranking. If you haven’t seized your business listing, you also leave it up to users to make your business known.
No matter what industry you’re in, one negative review is detrimental to your search ranking.
It takes 40 positive reviews to undo the damage done by one negative one. Given that it’s hard to motivate people to leave a review unless they’re furious, you’re fighting statistics to get the recognition you deserve.
In a world without phone books and yellow pages, we’re subject to the internet as the way that customers find out about our businesses. However, there’s much more to get out of business listings that those old services couldn’t provide.
With your Google My Business listing, you can tell people your open hours, where you’re located, and how they can get in touch with you. You get to add photos of your most popular products and services, showing customers what to expect. You even get to list reviews and your responses to them, building a strong reputation for your business with a potentially new audience.
2. Make Your Site Mobile Optimized
If you haven’t made your site mobile optimized, you’re going to fall behind the competition. One of the ways that Google now ranks websites for user searches has to do with their design and how well they’re made for mobile devices and smartphones.
If you optimize your site for mobile, you take care of some common problems that sites face.
Given that mobile devices are now running circles around laptops and desktops when it comes to browser traffic, you need to take mobile seriously. When you design for mobile devices, you get the chance to make it easier to send data to your visitors. When you optimize for mobile, you streamline the design and structure of your site.
Mobile optimized sites don’t need to be stretched or scaled when they’re downloaded by mobile browsers. When you optimize your site for mobile browsing, you trim the fat and make things easier to see. Separate large blocks of content to a blog or somewhere else so that way you’re only serving the most important content to visitors on a mobile device.
3. Make a Blog
When search engines are looking for results to user searches, they’re looking for results that match the content and intention of the search. This kind of searching is best matched with blog posts.
When someone uses a search engine, they’re either searching for a specific product or the answer to a common question. By creating a series of blog posts, you get the chance to capture both types of searches, offering your products as the solution to the questions raised.
When you create a blog, you also get the chance to update your URL often with strong content relevant to user searches. It’s hard to predict what users could be searching for unless you have been in the industry for a while.
Start by thinking like a potential customer. Ask yourself some common questions that people have about your products and services. Consider each one of these questions the subject of a 500-word blog posts and start populating your blog with these posts.
Remember that an increasing number of searches are now run via voice search technology and virtual assistants. That means words like “how”, “what”, and “why” are a big part of how people search now. When you write responses to common questions, include this type of phrasing in your posts.
4. Become a Social Media Expert
Given that a growing number of consumers now find out about products for the first time on social media, it’s vital for you to have an active social media presence. You get the chance to release products or promotions for them to a test market that you can target as granularly as possible. You also get the opportunity to see what your customers think via reaction buttons or text comments.
Don’t spread yourself too thin by trying to win every social media channel. Pick no more than three to focus on and start learning about your customers there. Every social media application has its own type of audience and when you use them, you need to keep that in mind.
Social media gives you the opportunity to share your blog posts with a wider audience. If you have great photo content relating to your products and services, social media is the place to share it. For companies where customer testimonies and word of mouth matter the most, social media is the place to focus your growth.
Still Wondering How to Get on the First Page of Google
If you’re still wondering how to get on the first page of Google, you need to learn about how their algorithm works. The more you learn about what they’re looking for from you, the better you’ll do at connecting with customers running searches relevant to your products.
To become a serious search engine expert, check out our guide on how to differentiate SEM from SEO.