Let’s start off with some stats about how users operate online. The first stat you need to know – 97 percent of user interactions online start with a search engine. That means that the mass majority of people who discover your business website will find it on the SERPs. So, now let’s look what happens when they reach the SERPs. Around thirty percent will play around with the sponsored results. Now, on the one hand, that’s a lot less than those who head straight to the organic results. However, that’s still a massive chunk of the audience base that you’ll miss if you don’t pay attention to this section of the results. Of course, you’ll miss out even more if you don’t end up on page one. You need a strong click-through rate if your business is going to be successful. After rank ten, the click-through rate more than halves and it only gets worse from there. This should tell you just how many users actually find themselves reaching page 2 of the search results. Most won’t. Most will instead click on a max of three sites and determine which one to use out of these results.
So, now we know why the search engine is so important let’s think about how your rank online is determined. It works like this, Google indexes your site, updating it with new information on a regular basis. It uses an algorithm to determine info that is relevant to your ranking and consider whether or not your ranking will rise or fall based on the information provided. Crawlers will also go across your site, gathering info to determine whether your site should appear to users searching specific keywords and phrases. We’ve simplified the actual process a lot, but it should give you a fair idea of how it works.
So, we know why it’s important to rank high online, we know how ranking is determined. But how do you actually impact ranking? To do this, you need to hack Google. There are a number of options to consider here that could help you a great deal.
What Does Google Say?
Honestly, not a lot. You might have heard about one of the latest algorithm updates for Google. Known as the medical update, this change impacted a lot of medical sites and caused their ranking to drop. Unfortunately, when business and websites questioned Google, the search engine giant claimed that there was no specific way to fix the issues. What does this mean?
Well, the fact is Google are focused on quality. That means they only want the best sites to appear for people searching on their engine. This is why today content is king. If you have great content, then you are providing a site that Google wants users to see which is key. Of course, content isn’t the only factor that Google look at when determining the ranking of your site. There are tons of them, and no one actually knows the full list. However, we can make educated guesses and that’s exactly what you need to do.
Factors That Determine Ranking
As we said, there are a lot of them. Domain authority certainly plays a part and this is essentially a trust measure to determine how much users actually trust the information you provide. Social profiles are another major factor to consider which is why you want to make sure that you are getting as much information as you can shared from your site. If some content goes viral, then that’s just the cherry on top of the cake.
Backlinking seems to play a part too. Backlinks refer to links back to your site from other businesses and websites, hopefully with high domain authority rankings of their own. In other words, you need your site to be trusted by other trusted sites. If that’s not complicated enough, just wait until you find out how you get those backlinks.
Again it all comes down to content. You need to think about providing content that other sites can reference or link to. A great way to do this would be to create a cool, clever infographic. Infographics are very popular as sources of information and will often be borrowed or copied from other sites. The reason for this is that the info is bright, colourful, enticing and easy to understand. Adding an infographic to your site can be achieved by using a web design service. They’ll create an awesome infographic that your customers and clients will find interesting but will also be appealing to other businesses.
Guest posting is another great way to get those high-quality backlinks. Look for ‘work with me’ pages online to find users that are interested in guest posting opportunities. Either they can write for your site, or you can write for theirs. Either way, it will form a connection between you and another website online, ensuring that you get the interest your site needs and those precious backlinks.
Of course, it’s not all about content. You need to think about the technical aspects of your site as well as these can also impact ranking. Your site should load fast – it shouldn’t take more than a couple seconds for each page to load. That means you need to be careful how much content you stuff on one webpage. It does need to be easy to navigate – a max of two or three clicks should be needed for a customer to find what they are searching for. You can achieve this through inbound links. Finally it needs to optimized – it doesn’t matter what device customers are using your site should still run beautifully.
What About PPC?
PPC, Adwords and other options are ways for you to get your website in the sponsored results sections of the SERPs. If you do this, your site will either appear at the top or the right-hand side of the results and remember, 30 percent of users click here. But you have to be careful. What you pay for a service like this will be determined by how often people click. If they click more then, you’ll be paying more an a CTR doesn’t always correlate with a high conversion rate. In other words, you can get the clicks and still have a low level of purchases. That’s why you need to make sure that your site is awesome.
There are other forms of sponsored results too. You can look into paid ads on Amazon. It’s a great way to make sure that products that you are selling through Amazon appear higher up in the SERPs. This is also a clever way to expand your reach online and your brand profile.
Other Hacks
There are a few other hacks that you need to be familiar with. First, when you build content on your site, you should make sure that you are looking at questions customers want to know the answers to. You might have noticed that in the SERPS there are often questions with answers that come from websites. If you write great content and answer the question better than other sites out there, your webpage will be chosen for this honour. It’s a great way to generate interest and get sales through content marketing.
Alternatively, do consider using an SEO plugin. With an SEO plugin, you’ll be given a fast, easy way to optimize your business site on the page and off the page. By doing this, you can build beautiful rich snippets that will help increase your CTR and ensure that customers choose your site over others even if it has a lower ranking.
We hope you find this information useful and discover the best ways to hack Google, gaining the advantage your business needs online.
