Waikato Business News August/September 2020

WAIKATO BUSINESS NEWS August/September 2020
15
How to Rank No 1 on Google
When people search online for your products or services, you
want your website to be found easily. But what does it take to
rank No 1 in Google?
I’ve lost count of the number
of times a business
owner or general manager
has asked for my advice
regarding, “How do we get our
website higher in Google?” Or
sometimes even more directly,
“We launched a new site.
Why isn’t it ranked #1?”
We all know that Google
is where people turn to find
answers to … well, everything!
According to Statcounter.com,
94.7 percent of
all search engine searches in
NZ are done through Google.
The nearest competitor is Bing
with 3.21 percent!
When people search for
products or services related to
your business, you want your
website to be found easily. To
get your website to rank well
the most important thing to
remember is that it won’t happen
by accident. You want
to rank No 1 … and so do
all of your competitors! The
organic rankings are a competition
that you don’t win without
considerable effort.
Firstly, it’s important to
clarify what “ranking” means.
When you run a search on
Google, the search results
page usually starts with three
to four ads. These look almost
identical to the organic results
but have the word “Ad” beside
them. These results are not the
rankings but are Google Ads
(previous called “AdWords”).
You need to be running paid
Google Ads campaigns to get
your ads to show there.
Underneath the ads, if Google
thinks you were searching
for local results, Google is
likely to show the “Google
Snack Pack” – which shows a
map and three results of local
businesses near you.
After that snack pack the
first organic results are shown
– this is what “rankings”
refers to. The organic results
are the webpages that Google
determines are the most
important for the phrase that
was searched for.
So, what does it take
to get ranked No 1 in the
organic results?
The process of getting
a website ranked higher is
called “Search Engine Optimisation”,
or “SEO” for short.
At its most basic level SEO
can be split into two sections:
On-Page Optimisation and
Off-Page Optimisation.
On-Page Optimisation is
based on the content and code
on your website. It forms the
foundation of your rankings
and in my estimate accounts
for 30-50 percent of your
search engine ranking. However,
without this foundation
being done well, the other
work that accounts for 50-70
percent of your ranking won’t
count for much. The foundation
needs to be built first.
Sometimes when a new
SEO client starts with us, we
find that the words they want
to rank for aren’t even mentioned
on their site! A very
simple check you can do when
you want to rank for a phrase
is to check the content and see
how many times that phrase,
or close variants, are mentioned
on your page.
Next, check if those keywords
are included in your H1
(your main heading – which
should be in an tag in the
code). After that there are over
30 other checks that should be
made for your On-Page Optimisation
for each page. These
include hidden code, such as
schema, user-experience tests
such as page-loading speed
and mobile responsiveness,
internal linking throughout
your site and many more.
Reviewing the basic content
can be done DIY, but after that
it make sense to engage an
SEO specialist.
The other 50-70 percent of
your results comes from Off-
Page Optimisation, which is
mostly other websites linking
to your site.
An easy way to think of it
is that each website that links
to your site is a vote. The more
votes your site gets, the more
important it is and the more
likely it is to rank well. If an
important site (one with lots
of “votes”) links to your site,
then its votes count for more
than a non-important site linking
to you. And if a site has
strong content that relates to
your products or services and
links to you, then that counts
more than a non-related site
linking to you. This complexity
is just scraping the surface
THE DIGITAL WORLD
> BY JOSH MOORE
Josh Moore runs Duoplus, a Hamilton-based digital marketing
agency that helps businesses get better results through highly
measurable online marketing. www.duoplus.nz
of how Google works. Building
this complex and powerful
process of identifying
which sites are most important
for billions of different
search phrases, is why Google
is so powerful.
Overall, getting ranked
takes consistent effort over
time. It can take many months
to build up rankings to compete
for highly competitive
keywords, but it can be well
worth it. We’ve seen the
investment pay off strongly
for our SEO clients with the
phone ringing constantly
and work coming in the door
because they’re found in the
top spots of the search results.
It’s a great feeling having
your website ranked well,
but just remember, it doesn’t
happen by accident.
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