3 tips to get your website on top of Google search Part 4
3 tips to get your website on top of Google search Part 4
1. Spend as much time on the SERPs as you do in tools.
Even though an algorithm dictates a search engine's results page (SERPs) rankings, the algorithm rewards web publishers that craft the best content on the internet.
Because of this, it’s important to understand search intent. To accomplish this, we analyze a keyword's SERP and determine the problems users are trying to solve when searching for this query.
Aja Frost, Director of Global Growth at HubSpot, says, "Yes, tools offer us a ton of information. But that information is often based on incomplete, out-of-date, or biased data sets. I encourage SEOs to combine the insights they're getting from their tools with real-time clues on the SERPs. Every time you decide to target a new keyword, refresh a piece of content, or diagnose a page or section of pages with irregular traffic, take a look at what's coming up for the main queries on Google."
Depending on your goal, Frost says to pay attention to:
- Search features,
- The type of content that's ranking (product pages, listicles, tutorials, etc.),
- The websites that are ranking (databases, businesses, media sites, directories, etc.),
- How far down the page the first organic result appears,
How your page shows up (title, meta description, date, jump links, schema if applicable, etc.).
When you conduct these kinds of searches, "Don't forget to use an incognito window, frequently clear your cache, cookies, and history, and run your searches on both a desktop and phone," Frost adds.
2. Master the SERP overlap test.
While in SERPs, Frost conducts a SERP overlap test. She says, "I use this test all the time to determine whether to target two-plus queries with a single piece of content."
Now, you might be wondering, what is the SERP overlap test?
Frost details the steps below:
- Do a quick search in incognito for Keyword A and a separate search for Keyword B.
- If the SERPs look fairly different (i.e., the top-ranking pages are different, or the first result for Keyword A is the ninth result for Keyword B), Google treats those queries as separate searches with different intent.
- However, if the SERPs have a lot of overlap, you can treat them as the same query.
3. Aim for the featured snippets in SERPs.
Featured snippets are what search engines use to display an answer to a query directly on the SERP, so a user doesn't need to visit another page to get the answer to their question. Featured snippets can be:
- Paragraph-formatted answers
- Bulleted or numbered lists
- Tables
- Videos
- Interactive accordions
- Short, rich-answer callouts
- Interactive tools and calculators
- The image below is an example of a featured snippet for the query “What is inbound marketing?”
As you can imagine, featured snippets impact organic search results, which is why it’s also essential to try and rank with as many featured snippets as possible.
To do so, create posts that answer specific questions users have.
The content within your featured snippet must be semantically relevant to the keyword a user searches for.
This means that you can’t answer the question of “What is inbound marketing?” with unrelated content as the algorithm knows enough to detect relationships between the keywords and descriptions you give.
Additionally, your blog post should be organized and formatted in a way that lets Google know you've answered a question. For instance, this could mean using specific coding, so your featured snippet stands out on the page.
According to Karla Cook, Content Marketing Director at HubSpot, "Targeting featured snippets with consistently formatted sections has removed some (but definitely not all) of the guesswork when it comes to ranking for featured snippets."
Matthew Howells-Barby, Vice President of Growth at Kraken, has stressed that clean and consistent code is a significant factor in winning snippets.
If you want some more tips, just click the link below to book a free consultation with me and I'll help you out.