Google’s first page – how to get your website there
Getting your website to Google’s first page of results is not an easy task and requires a carefully thought-out and executed digital strategy to succeed. Even if you manage to reach your goal and see your website on Google’s first page of results, you need remain vigilant and continue implementing search engine optimisation (SEO) tactics to maintain your ranking.
Let’s take a look at how you can get a website on Google’s first page.
First things first – should you do it in-house or hire a consultancy firm?
Getting to Google’s first page requires that you implement a search engine optimisation strategy. You can either attempt to do this by yourself or hire a professional digital marketing agency to lend you their expertise and resources.
While you might think you will save money doing it in-house, it’s actually much harder than you think to put together a digital marketing team if you have no prior experience or have any industry contacts to rely on. The best digital marketers have normally learnt most of their skills on-the-job and this is why hiring someone with no practical experience can prove disastrous.
On the other hand, hiring a professional SEO consultancy firm can be a superior choice for you even though it comes with an upfront cost. This is because you will get what you pay for – professional quality optimisation work by experts who are passionate about what they do.
Needless to say, having someone who knows what they’re doing on your side is the most important first step when it comes to getting a website on Google’s first page. Don’t hesitate to get in touch with the experts when you need the job done perfectly.
Make sure your website is in tip-top shape
Regardless of which way you have chosen to pursue SEO work, one of the most important things you need to get right is the technical performance of your website.
That’s right – if your website appears on Google’s first page but takes 5 minutes to load, nobody is going to buy anything, and your SEO investment will have been useless.
Your website needs to:
Load quickly
Pages load in a manner of seconds these days and if your website takes even a millisecond longer than average users will become bored, impatient, frustrated and quickly bounce away from your domain, probably to go to your competitor.
One way of helping your website’s load speed is to optimise the size of file’s hosted on the domain. For example, if you have large HD quality images all around your site, consider reducing their resolution so that they aren’t as cumbersome.
Be easy to navigate
Another thing that kills websites before they can say ‘on-page optimisation’ is a lack of effective internal linking and clunky menu systems.
For example, if you have one of those annoying drop-down bars that disappears before you can click anything then you are going to frustrate and alienate site visitors.
Going through and regularly auditing your site to check for dead links or broken redirects is essential to ensure that your website is functional for visitors.
Be mobile friendly
Ever since Google’s pivot to mobile-first search indexing, websites that are fully optimised for users viewing it on a phone or tablet are given higher priority than those that aren’t.
This is because the vast majority of consumer searches are performed on mobile devices rather than at a traditional desktop computer.
In order for your website to qualify as mobile friendly and get to Google’s first page you need to make sure that it’s layout and images scale correctly for different screen sizes.
You also need to ensure that there is no gap between the functionality of your mobile site and your desktop site – a mobile user should be able to do everything they could do as a desktop user.
Execute your SEO strategy and climb to Google’s first page
While the aforementioned site improvements can be described as SEO tactics in their own right, the active work you are going to be undertaking on a continual basis should primarily involve a mixture of guest posting on other domains in exchange for referrals to your own as well as publishing authoritative and well-researched blog content on your website.
As well as publishing original and engaging content, you will likely also want to maintain a social media presence where you can interact with your fans and convert them into paying customers.
We are a friendly and reliable team that pays detailed attention to your projects and management of your brand. Our team at SEO Shark has a passion for all things online. We constantly innovate using the latest professional techniques and strategies.
