The creation of well-positioned websites with a great ranking on google, and the organic growth of a website, do not depend on a single SEO strategy. Instead, it relies on a series of actions and procedures that must be performed repeatedly, over a long period of time, so that your site or your company can reach the first pages of Google results.
Let's list some of these actions and also indicate some tools that can help organic growth and a better ranking of your company's website.
1 - Discover your competitors
In order to have a chance to win the digital battle for ranking on Google, it is very important that you know your main competitors so that you can adopt strategies to create keywords that will drive new customers to your website and not to your competitor’s website.
The simplest and fastest way to do this is using Google's own search engine.
Let's say your business is a Pet Shop. Let's then search for pet shops on Google.
An interesting detail about any Google search is the list of suggestions it offers. Note that in this list, we can already identify several long-tail words or phrases that can be used in our site keyword planning. We'll explore this detail later to get a higher Google ranking.
Our interest, at this time, is to determine our competitors, as we will use their domain to find out which keywords they are using to get a better placement when ranking sites on Google.
See the results below.
See that the results that appear at the top of the page, are the result of paid ads, made on Google Adwords. These sites are not ranked on google due to their SEO optimization, so we are not interested as they are not well ranked organically and will not help us answer the question of "how to get my site on the first page of Google".
Right below the paid ads, local sites appear, which in the case of our search correspond to Pet Shops located in the region (city, neighborhood) close to the physical location from which our search started.
These sites are from local competitors and are not showing up in Google ranking results because they have a well-crafted SEO design or consistent organic positioning. They are there because they are physically close to the location from which we searched.
Therefore, we should not use these sites to determine the keywords that we will use in our organic growth project, to get to the first page of Google.
Scrolling the results page a little further, we arrive at sites that are very well positioned organically, that is, they have a great ranking on Google, for the Pet Shops segment. The creation of these companies' websites was done in order to allow for this excellent positioning.
At this point, we start to answer the question "how to make your site on the first page of Google?"
These are the sites that interest us, as they are the most relevant to the desired segment and they certainly have a very well-designed SEO and keyword management project, which determined an excellent position for each one of them in Google's search results.
So let's show you some of the tools we can use to get the keywords used in these "Top Sites". The same keywords, used by these highly ranked sites, will be used in the organic growth project of our site, to get a better ranking on Google.
2 - Use Keyword Generation Tools
Just as there are many platforms for creating websites, there is also a multitude of tools for generating keywords on the internet. Most of them allow, in their free version, the creation of 3 to 5 daily searches to generate suggestions.
As we've already seen in this article, a very simple first way to generate keywords is through Google's own search engine. Just type the words of the segment you want, and the search engine will present a list of words associated with the search term. We can write down the suggestions presented there and then insert the words on our website.
Later, we will show the key points, in our blog posts, where we will insert the suggested words, to get a better ranking on Google.
We are going to show the use of 2 free tools that work a little differently from each other, but that complement each other, to get keyword suggestions.
SEO Tool: Ubersuggest
The first tool we'll be using is Ubersuggest, created by world digital marketing and website creation wizard Neil Patel.
This tool has a very interesting and useful functionality for our purpose. In it we can insert the domain of any site, to get the keywords that this site uses to be found by Google.
In the previous section, we raised the domains of the best organically ranked Pet Shop sites in Google searches. We will insert the best-positioned site in the Ubersuggest tool (www.petz.com.br) and verify the results obtained, which will help us answer the question "how to make my company appear on the first page of Google".
The traffic results for the inserted site are impressive. More than 5 million monthly organic visits to the website www.petz.com.br.
Now let's navigate the side menu of the Ubersuggest tool to raise the main words by which the site is found by Google.
Select the option Keywords [traffic] from the menu in the Ubersuggest tool.
See that the main words by which the site is indexed or found by Google are displayed.
The word cachorra has a volume of 1 million searches per month. This site is ranked second in Google searches for this word and receives an average of 162,000 monthly visits because of this word.
See that even misspelled ones, like cachoro, appear as words that index the site.
The creation of a well-indexed institutional website has to take into account all these factors and keywords, if we are to understand "how to make my website appear first on Google?"
We can use this word list to index our own site and to get a better ranking on Google. But in addition to simple words like the ones listed in this tool, we must enter long-tail words on our website. Let's then use the second tool to create the long tail word variations.
Tool: Twinword
The second tool that we will use is Twinword, to place our website on the first page of Google.
In this tool, we can enter a keyword, to create the long tail variations of it, which are most searched on Google.
Let's search for the word cachorra and find its variations.
Enter the word cachorra in the upper left corner of the tool. Then select the country as Brazil and the language as Portuguese, in the upper right corner of the tool.
After this brief setup, hit the Suggest button in the upper right corner of the tool.
See the results below.
See that the most searched long tail variations on Google are displayed, such as dog alemão, cachorro pequenininho, cachorro pequeno, cachorro pug, etc.
We can use this list of words to index our own site, thus achieving a better ranking on Google.
Let's use the same tool to generate variations for the word Pet Shop.
See how interesting the result was obtained. The variations obtained for Pet Shop give us a valuable hint about long-tail words that we should use on our website, such as banho e tosa, pet shop banho e tosa, loja de ração, mercado pet, etc.
In this tool, we can enter the keywords of the segment we want. For example, for the website creation industry, we could put the words website development, we make websites, website development, responsive website, website development, etc.
Now that we know how to find the keywords, which will be inserted into our website for its organic growth, we have to determine the most important points on the website where we should place these words, for a great result in Google searches. We'll do that in the next section.
3 - Enter keywords on your website
After finding the words that you should insert on your website, you have to create a blog and start the posts, to generate content on your website and get a better ranking on Google.
It is important to emphasize that the organic growth results of your website, require time and dedication in creating quality posts, to generate engagement of your target audience with your website. Developing well-indexed websites requires this effort.
The suggestion is to make at least 1 quality post per day, so you can start to get results from the third month of posts.
THAT'S RIGHT; THE ORGANIC RESULTS MIGHT NOT EVEN START TO APPEAR UNTIL AFTER 3 MONTHS OF DAILY POSTS.
So let's look at the main points where you should put your keywords in your post text to get the best results in organic Google searches.
Keywords in titles and content
First on the list is the body of your content. Try to use your keywords as naturally as possible. Instead of putting your focus keyword in each phrase, use some synonyms as well as LSI keywords.
Titles and subtitles are <h1>, <h2> and <h3> Html tags. These are the titles of the sections the user sees on the page. Don't ignore your <h1> and <h2> tags and make sure you implement your keywords in these titles naturally. These titles help Google identify what the content of each section is about. Generally, be sure to use your focus keyword on <h1> as well as some subheads.
It is important that only your main article title is formatted with the <h1> tag. All other subtitles must be formatted with <h2> or <h3>.
The next place is your content. Having top keywords throughout your content sends search engines a signal that those keywords are related to your topic. In addition to your main keyword, try incorporating synonyms and LSI keywords and create a natural flow for your readers.
Although you want to optimize your content for search engines, your main focus should always be on your readers. Using keywords will help search engines index your content higher in SERPs, but if your post doesn't provide high-quality content that your readers will find interesting, all SEO keywords will be useless. Search engines will quickly notice that users are dissatisfied with your content and will then degrade your ranking.
Also remember, if too many identical keywords keep appearing in your content, Google may penalize your blog for keyword overload. The same goes for titles! So, as already mentioned, try to keep an eye on your keyword density.
'Keyword Density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears compared to the total number of words on the page. Optimal keyword density ranges from 0.5% to 2.5%, so make sure you stay below the threshold.
Keywords in image filenames and alt text
Image alt texts are a minor search ranking factor, but they still have value. If you think about it, how many times have you ended up visiting a website because of an image you found?
That said, images alone have the power to bring people to your site, so you should optimize your images with keywords. People are always interested in great images and infographics, so make sure people can find your images more easily by using the right alt text. Thus, we will have a greater chance of appearing on the first page of Google.
Change the image file name from something cryptic IMG-5303 to something friendlier. The best case for image filenames and alternative texts is a specific and concise description of the image.
Keywords in the main post title
The importance of titles can never be emphasized enough because it's the first thing your readers see. To optimize your title tags for SEO, be sure to include your main keyword so search engines and users know what your post is about.
As already stated, it is important that only your main article title is formatted with the <h1> tag. All other subtitles must be formatted with <h2> or <h3>.
Keywords in the meta description
With the high competition on the front page of SERPs, don't miss the chance to improve your site's clickthrough rate by optimizing your meta description.
Conclusion
To answer the question "how to put my company on the first page of Google", it is important to know your competitors and use the proper tools to raise the keywords that you will insert in your website posts.
Post daily using the tips and tools presented here and be patient with the results, as organic growth takes time and dedication.