90+ Experts Share Their Strategies For Ranking Higher in Google – Ferzy Blog
- Updated on: 2018-09-12
- Read original article here
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Let’s face it: it can be pretty difficult to rank in Google these days, even when you are going for the easiest keywords. The fact that Google is constantly changing their search algorithms makes our lives even more challenging still. And to top all of that, there are so many niches, products, online platforms that no one strategy will work for every situation.
That is why you will NOT be hearing from us today.
Today you are going to hear the combined opinions of some of the top SEO experts and what they have to say about their most successful strategies. These are all people who own top ranking websites, who have taken what were just ideas and brought them on the number 1 spot in Google searches. They have done it in the past, they have flowed with the changes and are currently on trend, and we are certain they are going to be successful in the future as well. Just like you they have different needs and strategies so there will definitely be more than a couple of answers in there that pertain to your exact situations.
So now, without further ado, here are what the top SEO specialists have answered to the question:
What is your most successful strategy for ranking high in Google?
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Adam Heitzman
In short it’s “Giving Users What They Want”. At HigherVisibility at the core of our strategy is identifying user intent. Once you have an understanding of how customers are looking for your services you can tie in both the traditional SEO tactics of keyword research, technical on-page, and link building to more UX oriented tactics to ensure both the messaging and the experience line up to match the customer’s needs. If you miss on this, then you will likely have a campaign that is going to go nowhere.
Adam Heitzman is a co-founder and managing partner at HigherVisibility, a nationally recognized SEO firm.
Adrian Cruce
Contacting niche specialists/influencers and getting them interested in the content you promote is always going to help rank higher than countless hours of technical SEO work and other ways to get backlinks. Obviously, this means that your pages should be valuable because nobody will be interested if not.
With this in mind, in most cases the SEO strategy has to start with adding as much value as possible to the pages you want to rank. Then, promotion is much easier. Influencers will be interested, will add links to your content and other backlinks will appear organically without you doing anything. If you add value you can then contact people directly through social media and email. Many will at least be interested in seeing what you pitch.
It is very important to be transparent, honest and offer real value in modern SEO. Search engine optimization transformed into something that has quite a lot in common with marketing and PR. Learning PR, marketing and how to improve the content you want to promote before you promote it is a real recipe for success.
Freelance marketing and SEO manager, specialized in helping small to medium sized companies get off the ground.
Akash Srivastava
My most successful strategy for ranking high on Google is guest blogging.
Guest blogging is the best way to expand your readers and reach a large group of audience. It is nothing but, contributing a post to another person’s blog to build backlinks, authority, and traffic. Backlinks are the primary ranking factor in Google and guest blogging gives you an opportunity to secure a link back from another website. It helps you in establishing a relationship with the blogger who is going to host your post. Based on my experience, I found that guest blogging on other sites is 6 times as valuable as creating content on your own site.
However, along with guest blogging, you need to make sure you are publishing high-quality articles on your blog/website which you are promoting in guest blogs. In today’s high-level competition, it is imperative to be on the top of search results. Blogs are the best way to reach the target audience and rank higher on search engines. Personal blogging is the best thing that happened to me, as it allows me to share everything that I know.
If you are not satisfied with the traffic your site receives, you don’t have to worry about it. Start blogging and guest blogging today to see how it helps your website rank high on Google. I write guest posts on several sites along with personal blogging, and these posts brought lots of readers to my site.
Akash Srivastava is an SEO Consultant. He helps people create or revise their SEO plan, implement it and monitor results. Contact him today!
Ankush Kohli
Local SEO.
Google Adwords & Analytics Certified Professional. Expertise in SEO, PPC, Social Media, Blogging, Email Marketing, Business Development, Web Designing.
Anthony Hayes
Traffic Poking – Discovering keywords you can rank for easily that have traffic so that we can group them into one piece of content that will rank for multiple keywords.
This is done by finding real traffic stats for content created and actually ranking for the keywords in bulk with a throwaway site and bulk posting into that site.The data we get back can tell us keywords to target without the guesswork so that we know what to spend either time or money on when creating quality content.
You have to make sure the poking site is already indexed and we use some additional fast backlinking and giving the posts time to get indexed too. Its not a 24 hour solution but its something that will give you real; data to make better decisions on content creation and keyword targeting.
Internet Marketing Software creator for Alpha SEO tools, Traffic Infinity and full time marketer since 2008.
Bill Sheikh
The strategy that has worked best for our clients in achieving high rankings on Google, has been the skyscraper technique. With this strategy, we analyse the top ranking sites for a specific keyword in their specific market using tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush, Majestic and Google Keyword Planner for our research.
Once we find the top ranking sites we analyze each site’s backlink profiles to find potential opportunities for us to obtain the same backlinks for our clients. Sometimes the backlinks are acquired by doing blog outreach and in other cases, we are able to create the same backlinks ourselves. Before you utilize the skyscraper technique, it is very important to have all onsite SEO completed to ensure the best results.
Bill Sheikh is the founder of U-Thrive Marketing, a digital marketing firm based out of Tulsa, Oklahoma US. He has helped hundreds of businesses across the US put their business on the map online. He specializes in generating more customers for businesses utilizing proven tactics such as SEO, PPC.
Brandon Safford
Wise business owners will hire a professional, white-hat SEO specialist and focus on a specific niche of customers. Self-attempting to rank can inadvertently lead to being Pandalized unless the author has detailed SEO knowledge.
The niche, however, is key. A clothing store that sells all sizes to all tastes, to both genders, will fare worse on a search than one that specializes in plus-size ladies business-wear, because long-tail keywords will focus the crowd to the smaller audience specifically looking for those terms.
Providing an excellent level of unique, helpful content is crucial. Avoid duplicate pages, terms, and especially plagiarism. Engaging content will not only encourage customers to return to the site, but also to link to it organically, establishing more traffic and back-links. Those attempting SEO can benefit a great deal from using Moz Pro, which gives a breakdown of the page, as well as suggested changes to ensure your page is fast, friendly, and fruitful.
Much of what is revealed, however, will be code-changes or opaque to the unskilled, so again, it is best to hire a professional white-hat. Despite all efforts to rank high in searches, high traffic volumes amount to very little if they do not result in a conversion to a lead or a sale. The astute web designer will need to make sure the landing page captures the viewers’ attention, makes an offer, provides more in exchange for that offer, and then provides an even better offer, to translate increased traffic into increased revenue.
Brandon Safford is Founder and Principal of Small Business Analytics of Texas (SBATX), which helps SMBs gain and retain high-value clients using a combination of data analytics, artificial intelligence, search engine optimization, Six Sigma process improvement, and Lean Six process development. Member: IEEE Fort Worth, and HEB Chamber of Commerce.
Brian Carter
Write valuable, unique content with a keyword sensitivity (do keyword research but don’t spam up the title) and then make sure people see it by advertising it to key audiences via Facebook. Then we can get organic links as deserved.
Brian Carter has been a trusted influencer for 18 years. A bestselling author, IBM futurist and one of LinkedIn’s top 25 social media experts, he has 250,000+ fans and students. He’s built marketing programs and keynoted for Microsoft, NBC, Universal and more. Media appearances include Bloomberg TV, The Wall Street Journal and Entrepreneur.
Bruce Clay
In any form, buying the #1 AdWords position. In organic traffic it is a combination of penalty avoidance, on-page semantic optimization, content management, and SEO siloing. The last item really moves the needle.
Founder/President of Bruce Clay, Inc., International speaker, author of 3 search marketing books, offices on 4 continents, famous for top-3 rankings.
Casey Meraz
The most successful strategy I have for ranking high on Google is creating the best content out there. A lot of people have the mindset of creating content that meets the minimum standards and basic word counts. And while sometimes you need just enough content, I have found that by really treating your website as the know all source of the topic is a great way to get a page ranked above everyone else. To do this, start by looking at whats ranking now and make a list of topics to help guide you.
You can then create text and graphics in a more informative way than what’s currently available.
Casey Meraz is the founder of Juris Digital, a law firm marketing agency based out of Denver, Colorado.
Chase Reiner
Identifying UI behind searches and adjusting UX to match what people are looking for for that query. Generally, long form content seems to out perform short form content, so, creating huge lists of topics, is a great strategy for people who are starting out.
Why? Because with long form content you can do so much more than a post with 5 tips about xyz. For instance, you can repurpose your content into huge posts on different channels like Youtube and then embed that video into the post, you can share daily tips from that content onto social platforms (while at the same time increasing social share API counts and changing OG data each time if you’d like), etc.
But most importantly, people will be more likely to link and share your content since it isn’t a post that was written in 5 minutes and generally shows a lot more authority on a subject than what 85% of the content out there looks like.
I teach online marketers and business owners how to get higher rankings online via Youtube.
Chris Countey
To win in search you need to think like Google. For every keyword you want to rank highly for, consider the intent of that keyword and related searches. Do your keywords represent an action, like a purchase?
Your winning page should match that intent. Is your audience just looking for information or is there intent behind a general question? Use the SERP to estimate what Google’s opinion of the intent of a search is. Ads, PLA’s, Knowledge Graph results and related searches can help you determine what type of content Google is likely to serve up organically.
Chris is an SEO from Philadelphia with more than ten years of search experience.
Chris Makara
Aside from getting the basics covered onsite, for me I see the most success in using outreach to build links. At the end of the day, this is what I find moves the needle the most. Of course these links need to be relevant to your site and not garbage links.
Now outreach isn’t necessarily the most fun thing to do, but you can build quite a few great relationships with others and ultimately help your site(s) rank higher. But keep in mind that few will link to you if your content is not top-notch. So before you even begin to perform any sort of outreach, be sure your content is worth linking to or you’ll just be wasting your time.
Since 2003, Chris Makara has developed a broad digital marketing background with a focus on SEO, Social Media, Automation and Analytics. He is the founder of Bulkly, a social media automation tool for individuals and small businesses.
It has been the same for some years: lots of keyword research, creating content and a good PR strategy to get links in a natural, useful and sustainable way.
Freelance Technical SEO working while travelling the world.
Christian Rudolf
Links is a little less powerful tool to rank high today but still powerful. Its also the hardest part in SEO. Onsite SEO, you fully control all actions but for off site SEO, you still have to relay on others to “help” you. Make sure you have linkable content for the vertical of sites you are asking for “help”.
If you have a site about drone flying and want links from blogs about photography, you have to have content they want to link to, for instance a deep guide about how to shoot great pictures with a camera on the drone. Once you gotten the link to your guide, you can ad internal links from your guide, to your commercial pages and you can safely use any anchor text you like, safely, even very commercial ones.
Founder and head of SEO at Topdog SEO.
Our strategy for ranking high on Google includes:
1) Quality Content Generation & Promotion
2) Building High Authority Links
3) On-page Optimization
1) Quality Content Generation & Promotion: Search engines (Google) love fresh content that offers real value to the readers. Google puts unique and valuable content higher in the ranking. If readers find a content worth, they share it with their network. This sharing adds to the social signals of that post and content with higher social signal gets priority in the listing. So, social sharing also indirectly helps in higher ranking As far as content promotion is concerned; One doesn’t need to be at all the places. Pick-up the relevant social channels, communities, related blog posts, and 3rd party forums. Get in front of your audience and influencer of your niche. In this process, you build a few high-quality links as well.
2) Building High Authority Links: Outreach to brands and sites we mention in our posts: A) Roundup Posts; B) Outreach to sites that have linked to a similar content.
3) On-page Optimization: On page is one of the important yet ignored aspect of SEO optimization. People do not give importance to Metas (Title and Description). A well-optimized post with properly written meta gets more click (higher CTR). It indirectly contributes to the ranking of the content. We have our on-page search engine ranking factors checklist that we aim to tick for all our posts.
Together, the above three factors contribute to the higher ranking on Google.
Colin is a full-time online business owner, investor, marketer and entrepreneur. He has felt 7 figure success from his online marketing ventures. Check him out at Serped.com and you can follow Colin On Twitter here.
Throughout the years I working with an easy framework which helps any site to rank on Google: LUMPSS. It stands for:
> Links – both Internal- & External links;
> URL – structure, canonical, keyword rich slug;
> Meta tags – page title, meta description, Hreflang, Alternate, etc;
> Page content & elements – EPIC content driving topical relevant traffic, and the markup for this content;
> Site speed – in a mobile world, how fast is your site and how to improve;
> Sitemaps – Both HTML as XML sitemaps.
To tackle the links & content bullets above here, I’ve created an additional framework which can help any company to build more brand awareness through SEO, social amplification, and PR. It’s based on the simple concepts of:
1) Build a strong foundation of a presence online through which people can easily get exposed to your brand by finding your content which helps them in their immediate need. This is the foundation for a Content-Brand pyramid.
2) Once a brand has established a good foundation or a baseline of traffic through free, organic search & social channel, the company can start leveraging their audience to build more trust & authority in the vertical through publishing more authoritative pieces of content in the form of studies/research. Key here is to build more trust, where your audience starts to spread your content organically, growing your reach. This is the trust/authority layer in the pyramid
3) EPIC content, create content which is so irresistible and EPIC, that your audience wants to spread it as widely as possible. This type of content will have the ability to get a disproportional amount of media coverage, gaining a lot of external links for your website, improving the SEO footprint, especially if it’s combined with thorough internal linking optimization.
Dennis Goedegebuure is the Vice President for Growth & SEO at Fanatics Inc. In this role, he oversees the creation of social content, content amplification and all SEO efforts for the Fanatics network of partnersites.
Dennis Koutoudis
These days in order to rank high on Google you need to utilise a combination of strategies I would say, such as: a SEO optimized & mobile friendly website, on page SEO, Social Media signals and engagements with your content and of course quality backlinks amongst numerous other factors.
Dennis Koutoudis, is a successful entrepreneur, a recognized LinkedIn expert, a Certified Social Media professional & speaker. He is the Founder & CEO of LinkedSuperPowers (over 2 million Social Media Followers) an ISO 9001:2008 Certified Social Media Consulting Company specializing in optimizing the LinkedIn Profiles of both individuals & corporations.
Dennis Seymour
To rank high, I always look at it in 2 fronts. You must have perfect on-page SEO and have some sort of off-page SEO campaign. We know that off-page promotion isn’t always possible for every single content or page if you publish a lot so the most successful strategy for me is definitely just optimizing the page and optimizing it well. Spend time to really understand what will bring in traffic. Simple tweaks can net you high rankings with long term payoffs. All I can say is it just works. That’s why I run a course about it now.
SaaS Entrepreneur, Productivity Geek.
Publishing content that is helpful, it doesn’t have to be long or anything, just useful & to the point. Then promote on every channel you can including FB ads, newsletter, sponsorship, etc.
Founder of WPKube.
Dom Wells
It’s interesting that you mention “strategy” in this question, because I am guessing what most people will answer will actually be tactics. For tactics, there are all sorts of different things you can do to rank high in Google; white hat links, grey hat, black hat, quality content, good keyword research, on page SEO, the whole works. As I said though, these are not strategy, they’re tactics.
The best strategy is to add value, and promote that value. Essentially this means “Write good SEO friendly content, and build links to that content”. The methods you use to research your keywords, write your content, and build links are actually modular. What works for you might be different than what works for me. Just remember the strategy though, and the tactics will get you there.
Dom Wells builds and ranks affiliate sites. He also teaches others how to do the same, and offers services to help them get there faster. He’s been features in Entrepreneur.com and other industry publications for his efforts.
Don Seckler
Targeting your prospects problems and pain points. The first thing your prospects search for are solutions to their problems. Create content with answers to their problems and questions and you can rank higher for those searches.
Don was in the trenches trying to monetize digital as the web came to life in the mid 1990’s and has been developing and executing successful digital marketing campaigns since then.
Eric Enge
I do think that it boils down to the creation of great content and effective promotion. Great content requires truly understanding user needs related to your page, and addressing them in an effective way. Keyword research, looking at people also ask and the search suggest tool can help you identify those needs, but so can talking to your customer service people to see what people ask about frequently.
Effective promotion is about attracting attention to your site and content, and done well, this will attract links. This can only work if the content is good enough to be worthy. That said, you need to learn how to reach media and bloggers, and to gain their trust, and to show them something that is worth their writing about.
You should also actively develop influencer relationships because these can bring a lot of leverage as well. I know, this all sounds like hard work! But, it’s the type of work that leads to sustainable competitive advantage, and that leads to long term success in SEO as well.
Eric Enge is the CEO of Stone Temple, a 70 person digital marketing firm. Eric is also co-author of The Art of SEO and US Search Awards 2016 Search Personality of the year and Landys 2016 Search Marketer of the Year.
Building killer backlinks through content marketing.
Founder and Digital Strategist since 2003.
Ewan Kennedy
The proliferation of new SERP features and the increase in space given over to bigger paid search ads, is resulting inevitably in the shrinking of traditional organic results space. Google is aiming to satisfy the user requirement as much as possible right from within the search results for example by providing links in the knowledge panel to telephone numbers and driving directions.
Google does not want you to leave Google unless you’re clicking on a paid advert! It makes sense from a user experience angle since it reduces the clicks required to find satisfaction by obviating the need to visit another website. My strategy for getting to the top of Google is the same as that for getting in the knowledge panel or in any of the other SERP features. My S.I.T. strategy is about Specificity and Incisiveness in Targeting.
It also extends to paid search. I try not to do anything without knowing exactly what I am trying to achieve, how I intend to achieve it, why it will work and how I will define and measure success. For content, topic depth wins the day. The easiest way to differentiate yourself is to go narrow and deep by specialising and covering a topic better and more comprehensively than anyone has done before. Many people are churning out blog posts without having specified clear objectives or targets and may end up wasting a huge amount of time and money.
SEO Consultant, founder of AdJuice SEO Services and keep fit enthusiast.
Fili Wiese
Focus on what users want is the ultimate ranking strategy. Even from a technical point of view poorly optimized websites, which however supremely cater to their audience needs and expectations do well in Google Search. Google loves websites which are appreciated by users.
Delivering -better yet- exceeding user expectations is a foolproof method to do well in Google organic search results. Once that objective is consistently met, it is advisable to claim even more SERP real estate and to optimize for site performance. Nowadays, providing an Uber fast online service is part of providing an excellent experience to users and goes well hand in hand with the unique selling proposition which remains prerequisite for any lasting, substantial online visibility for a brand.
Fili Wiese is a renowned technical SEO expert and former senior Google Search Quality team member. At SearchBrothers.com he offers SEO consultancy services with SEO Audits, SEO workshops and successfully recovers websites from Google penalties.
An in-depth keyword research based on a brainstorm session in-company with a technical URL and structure setup with a decent strategy with state-of-the-art content production. Social media content boosts and white-hat SEO link building to finish it off.
SEO and online marketing specialist from a shithole, named Bruges, Belgium!
Gabriella Sannino
You need unique content, or at least in-depth, interesting content; you have to have something worth linking to, something worth sharing. While an intuitive interface, user-friendly design, and speed make a difference, quality content is the most important factor.
Along with that quality content is understanding where to put it. And it doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about blog posts, product descriptions or whitepapers. Your content plan has to take each stage of the buyer’s journey into consideration.
These steps include addressing questions, assessing pain points and having actionable CTAs in place for conversions. Ultimately, ranking high on Google is a conglomerate of steps. Each step will get you closer to the goal of conversion and a healthy bottom line. However, when you start with great content as a foundation, you have better results and a better ability to measure, tweak, rinse and repeat.
What I love is writing about marketing, social, SEO, relevance, ruffling feathers and starting revolutions. When I’m not multitasking around Level343 I sneak away and go sailing.
Gareth Cartman
Pick your battles and play to your strengths. That’s a very top-level strategy, but I think it applies across the board. Unless you’re a major brand, you can’t win at everything, so choose what you want to rank for carefully – not just in terms of what you can rank for, but where you can get a return from the organic channel, and play to your strengths.
Generally, you strength will be your knowledge or your experience – the more you can prove that knowledge or experience, the more you’ll engage people, get them to come back & convert them. We are seeing that the quality of content and design is being rewarded because Google is clearly measuring engagement – i.e. dwell time, pages per visit, whatever signals matter most within your area. However, we should see that as a given.
Behind that you need a solid foundation of technical excellence and a common-sense strategy where you focus on a particular area, and you prove that you’re the best. It’s not just about keywords, it’s about owning a whole topic and covering as many bases as you can within it that are relevant to you. Google only wants to return the best search results (so that people keep coming back to Google), so focus on being the best search result.
Gareth is Director of Digital at CLD, a Berkshire & London-based digital agency working with organisations such as Johnson & Johnson, Hytera & UCAS.
Glen Dimaandal
It might sound like a cop-out but it’s the truth: I stick mainly to the fundamentals and do them as well as we possibly could. These are our main areas of focus:
Technical SEO: site speed, robots.txt validation, XML sitemap optimization, minimizing crawl errors, crawlability, precision in selecting which pages need to be indexed and which ones shouldn’t be, pagination, canonical links for necessary content duplication, internal linking.
On-Page SEO: We focus on optimizing all the traditional elements such as: title tags, meta descriptions (to boost SERP CTRs), H1 tags, image alt tags, anchor text, content breadth.
Local SEO (for localized sites): Google My Business optimization, local citations , name, address, phone information placement with Schema markups, – local link acquisition.
Off-Page SEO: outreach-based link building, link baiting.
Usage Signal Optimization: CTR optimization , bounce rate reduction, UX enhancements.
Glen Dimaandal is the founder and CEO of GDI Online Marketing, an SEO company based in the Philippines.
Gregg Anderson
The old playbook for outranking your competitors in Google no longer works. It’s not enough to add keywords in your title, meta tags and body of text — Google is looking for context & depth, not just content. We’ve seen huge success and big jumps in ranking by focusing on providing depth around a keyword, which means figuring out the related keywords and writing articles that cover that topic in-depth. This is the age of semantic search. Google is going to rank your content higher if your page has the best, most up to date, thorough and valuable content out there on that topic. This means taking your subject, doing competitive research, and writing something better than everyone else ranking for your keyword.
So what does that mean exactly? Well, you need to figure out which keywords and phrases are related to your topic. Then you need to weave those keywords together into an article that offers a topic both useful to your audience and in-depth enough to show Google that you are an expert on that topic. Only then will you begin to climb the rankings. If you can get strategic with your internal and external links, using the hub and spoke method, then you will really start to see results.
Gregg is the co-founder and director of business development for 41 Orange Marketing, a HubSpot Silver Partner specializing in online marketing and lead generation for real estate brands.
Focused and consistent long-tail strategies for searches with little competition.
Director of Marketing at Home Care Delivered and owner of OptimizePrime, LLC.
Hazel Jarrett
Step one: Increase the Website’s Quality Score. To rank high on Google you need to increase your website’s Quality Score. This score is based on how likely searchers are to find the content of the page engaging, helpful and relevant to their search. Low quality, thin and duplicate content will hurt search rankings.
On the flip-side, a website’s quality score increases substantially if it has only valuable, higher-quality pages in Google’s index. Any content that doesn’t give much value to the reader should be culled, or re-written to a greater depth. All new pages should be the best on the internet for that topic. Research and go deep, add details and facts, include examples and answer related questions too and pay attention to your on-page SEO.
This will grow your website’s overall Quality Score, please your potential and existing customers and improve your rankings, conversion rates, and sales.
Step two: Promote. Diverse, authoritative and high-quality backlinks remain an important Google ranking factor. Promoting your high-quality and link-worthy content well will lead to other industry authorities reading and linking to your content.
Getting your content in front of the audience that matter will lead to increased traffic, engagement and sales.
Founder and MD of SEO+ A UK SEO Specialist with a reputation for delivering no nonsense SEO that works. SEO+ are a well-known bespoke Devon agency that helps UK businesses grow with high quality, organic traffic that converts – for long-term results.
Isabel Romero
The zoo of Google and its animals are evolving like Pokemons, they already act in real time and are part of the own algorithm of Google. All this makes changes in the Google results and the swaping of positions are increasing. This together with the GEO SEO makes the results different depending on each person, tastes, preferences and browsing histories.
From my modest opinion I believe that SEO refines and, once and for all, will have to be integrated into a global marketing strategy. The most successful strategy is the one that clearly defines who is the “ideal customer you want to reach” and find out your intentional search, beyond high volume search.
I am a SEO Copywriter consultant. Actually I work as a project manager at ULab and also cooperate with Metricool and Quondos. I”m a speaker and a teacher at different universities, business schools and SEO/Marketing events.
Technical audit + UX oriented approach + content strategy.
SEO expert and content strategist – author of several books.
James Barrass-Banks
Link Building – from national publications. The links built not only deliver link juice but if the content being placed is good enough it will often get picked up by other sites which builds additional links. Plus traffic will flow from all of those to your site. It’s tough but a well placed link can be very rewarding and if the content can be refreshed every year you’ll continue to build more and more backlinks.
A Digital PR Specialist at BlueGlass with an addiction to NFL and chocolate.
Janice Wald
The strategy is a two-pronged approach. You need to find keyword terms with a high search volume and a low level of competition to rank for that word. The keywords should be long-tail if possible. Fortunately, free tools exist which can help with this. If recommended three, I would pick KWFinder, SEMRush, and Ahrefs, which isn’t a free tool. They all show keywords, their search volumes, and their degrees of difficulty.
Janice Wald is an author, a blogger, and a blogging coach. She blogs at MostlyBlogging.com where she shares tips for bloggers and marketers. Wald has been included in over thirty expert interviews and interview panels.
It has always been a combination of:
1. A well optimized site – on both sitewide and page-level fixes.
2. Set of robust content assets that exemplifies the expertise of the brand, can effectively target search queries that matter to the business, attract/earn links and also positively impact the site’s conversions.
3. And associating the site’s brand with other authoritative entities in its web space through relationship-based linking and other form of content partnerships.
Jason Acidre is the author of Kaiserthesage. He’s also Co-founder at Xight Interactive, where they provide white label SEO services to SMBs, startups and enterprise-level companies.
Jasper Verelst
Good rankings are the result of a combination of factors. In my opinion, a well SEO optimized website with good SEO content, is the absolute basics and at the same time a major factor! That’s why I always prefer building a completely new SEO optimized website from the ground up to optimizing an existing website for SEO.
With good 301-redirects, there’s almost no risk to losing your rankings (but you gotta give it some time). Building links on authoritative websites by guest posting, is also an important strategy of mine. It’s also an easy way to get links. This strategy took my personal website after 8 months to position 4, 3, 2 and eventually position 1 on a highly competitive keyword here in Belgium.
I am a Belgian self-taught freelancer, SEO copywriter and SEO specialist. I went from being a newspaper journalist and editor to an online content specialist with an own online business. Travelling, soccer and animals are other passions of mine.
Jeff Beale
The most successful strategy to rank in Google for me would be videos well tagged in YouTube, embedded on the page, with relevant content written to support the video. This helps in two ways. The first would be the media provides good time on page and the second would be that the written content provides good keyword relevance. Also you have the opportunity to rank in Google video, web and YouTube as an additional benefit.
I am a Marketing Strategist that help companies make sense of their omni-channel marketing through optimizing their efforts through automation.
Jeff Ferguson
Great content on a properly built site that naturally attracts relevant inbound links. Sorry, did you think it was magic? The firms that want to sell you tools or package deal SEO solutions will tell you otherwise, but it’s both not that hard and incredibly hard at the same time. SEO is a collection of marketing and site development best practices that would work even if search engines didn’t exist – the trick is being great at those best practices and the rest will come. Don’t fake it – make it.
Jeff Ferguson is the CEO and Founder of Fang Digital Marketing, a boutique digital advertising media agency, specializing in search engine, display, social, and mobile marketing. With over 20 years of online marketing experience, Jeff has led the online marketing efforts for companies such as Hilton Hotels, Kimberly-Clark, InterActiveCorp, Experian, and Napster.
Jeff Millett
I’ve found that when I’m trying to rank businesses higher in today’s top search results the most important aspect of my SEO campaigns is Link Building, with On Page SEO in a very close second. What’s the secret to Link Building? The (not so secret) secret to Link Building is to create a backlink profile that is completely natural and very real. We were told years ago by Matt Cutts, former head of Google’s webspam team that “The object is not to make your links appear natural” but that “your links ARE natural” and this statement stands true even today.
The best way to build a natural backlink profile is to ‘naturally’ promote your website on awesome websites. Tactics including influencer outreach, super-niche directory submissions, local directory submission (if you’re a local biz) are among the strategies a legitimate business would use to naturally build their brand, even if they were not trying to rank higher. And what about On Page SEO? On Page SEO tells search engines what your business is all about. It’s essential!
I’ve seen the slightest changes to a website’s On Page SEO give it the added traction it needed to push it up in the search results. Let’s sum it all up … Clarifying your businesses intent with On Page SEO and associating yourself with high authority websites that produce relevant content, have strong traffic and a legitimate social following is incredibly helpful when trying to increase your brand’s reach and naturally improve rankings.
Jeff Millett is the owner of WebsiteRocket.com and has been a full-time SEO consultant since 2010. His SEO knowledge and experience has allowed him the privilege of working with dozens and dozens of businesses online both small and large.
Jesse Ringer
Detailed and diligent keyword research is my secret to dominating the search results. You need to understand the search landscape of your market before you can rank high. Find your niche. Take the time in the beginning to understand the intent of the terms you want to target. It’s not enough to pursue the terms with a lot of traffic. Your keywords need to drive the users that will have a positive impact on your bottom line. When you’re starting out, identify the niche terms that are being underserved and own those topics. Once you’ve established your site in those result, start targeting more competitive terms.
Jesse Ringer is a Vancouver-based SEO consultant. Since 2012, he has worked with a variety of local companies, startups, and national brands improve their online presence. He helps clients with on-page & technical audits, conversion optimization, site launches, and analytics tracking.
Jim Bader
Its all about creating quality content and then amplifying it with strategic promotion. As it has always been, you need a search engine friendly site architecture and navigation that bots can easily crawl, using organic search optimization best practices, but most importantly you need to publish quality content that users will find interesting, and will want to share with others.
Jim brings over 15 years of search engine optimization and Ecommerce experience to the team. He has held a variety of SEO leadership positions, with agencies and managing successful in-house teams for companies including CVS Health and Choice Hotels International.
Joel Dreher
If I had to condense ranking on Google down to one particular strategy, it would be private blog networks. They flat out work. However, it is only a matter of time before the big G begins an update that will penalize websites using this method. It happened a few years ago and many people lost their entire business overnight. If you must take this route, ensure that you build your own network of sites. Invest in a good “how to” guide for building PBN’s and enjoy the rankings. At least for now!
Joel is a former educator and coach who has been making money online since 2002. Along with personal eCommerce and affiliate sites, he also does client SEO and web design. He lives in beautiful sunny Florida and enjoys surfing and scuba diving.
John Lincoln
There are many different ways to rank in Google. International rankings, national rankings, ranking in language specific versions of Google, local rankings, news, video, Google carousel, knowledge graph, instant answers and more. You can rank a home page, category page, service page or blog post.
The most important thing is to determine where you need to rank to accomplish the goals of the business. As far as ranking in general national Google in the USA. The best thing you can do is reverse engineer all the top ranking pages, their links, their facts, their figures, the questions they answer, etc and create a similar plan. In addition to that, you wan to have an overall high quality website which I believe is best accomplished by become a though leader in a topic.
Finally, if you are just doing SEO you are really missing out. It should be a component of your digital advertising and because Google favors sites with branded traffic to a degree, it helps to have those other initiatives to support your rankings. That also helps with Google’s new artificial intelligence ranking factor.
John Lincoln is CEO of Ignite Visibility and one of the top digital marketing consultants in the industry.
Joseph Stevenson
Our most successful strategy is page speed at the moment and AMP integration. The mix of both has skyrocketed rankings of our clients and our own website. We use Google Page Speed check to verify our sites are always in the high 90s.
Joseph is an SEO Consultant, Author and Public Speaker. He has been working in SEO for over 17 years based out of Las Vegas NV.
Juliana Hughes
SEO is no longer about optimizing your site for keywords, it is about mastering the user performance on the web. Helping clients redesign their websites to a mobile responsive design has made significant improvements all around, but creating quality content to share across social channels for link juice and indexing has enabled my clients to remain on top of their industry’s search results. In other words, if your content is not relevant or competitive, no one will link to or share your content.
But when you repeatedly create engaging and share-worthy posts, you will find far greater SEO success and overall viewership. Additionally, by adding and optimizing your social share and follow buttons for every page of your website, you will make it that much easier for users to share your website on social media!
Experienced Digital Marketing Professional, with a background in design and visual communications. Creative, ambitious, and self-motivated. I am highly effective and successful in link building and managing SEO internet marketing strategies for clients worldwide.
Ken Lyons
Creating content that can acquire links, even if it’s only a handful of links. Given how hard it is to earn links these days, a piece of content can rank well in a competitive niche with just one or two deep links from a solid domain.
Ken Lyons is an online marketer and co-founder of Measured SEM and Digital Examiner, free resource for expert, actionable digital marketing advice.
Krystian Szastok
Gaining competitors backlinks is by far the most successful tactic. As long as your client is a genuine business or has a close match competitors in their market, who have larger backlink profiles – you can use a tool like Majestic to find their backlinks and replicate them.
SEO for 9 years in UK now, runs his own consultancy.
Lars Koudal
Most successful strategy for ranking on high on Google? Doing technical SEO right. Ranking high on Google involves many practices, but the most important in my experience is getting the internal technical SEO right. The technical SEO review process is what I have found to give the biggest impact for my customers and it can often help propel the website to the first page.
Reviewing the Google Search Console suggestions for missing and duplicate HTML tags and fixing all missing links / 404 error pages is my first step in getting a website to top positions. Next step would be to review the content and combine it with a good internal link structure to help push the website even further up the Google SERP.
I might do new tech, but I am old school. – I graduated as a Media economist in 1996 and have for the past two decades worked with online media in many forms.
Laurent Bourrelly
There is a On Site SEO strategy, which I used very successfully for myself and my clients since 2008. In French, I call it “cocon sémantique”, which I translate by “topical mesh”. In short, the strategy consists of effectively interlinking topically related contents. It’s starting to get known how topical SEO affects one page, but I take it further by surrounding the page with related content.
The search engine looks at the content of the page, and will look around the page if there is additional related content surrounding the page. What you applied one page needs to be extended in site. Semantic analysis for SEO has come a long way, and we have in France a strategy and tools to help you give Google exactly what it wants. Everything will be available in English very soon.
Search Engine Hacker, Content Creator, Keynote Speaker since 2004
Maddy Osman
The single best strategy for ranking high on Google is to create incredibly high-quality content. It starts with keyword research, onsite SEO best practices, the use of semantic keywords, and both typical/emerging SEO best practices as a whole.
It’s also important to be aware of Google’s mobile-first indexing initiative, and making sure that the website behind the content is up to snuff. But at the same time you’re satisfying the search engines, you have to make sure that the content you’re creating is just as appealing to your human readers. Don’t settle for second best. The content you create should be the single best resource for the topic. Anticipate and answer all questions about the topic. Loop in some expert opinions – whether they’re readily available on the internet, or you have to do some interviews yourself.
Include plenty of images to keep readers interested and to demonstrate your points. By focusing on quality even more so than SEO, it won’t be difficult to encourage backlinks. That’s not to say that everything will just fall into place, but it will make it easier to go about promotions if the content itself is awesome.
Maddy Osman creates engaging content with SEO best practices for marketing thought leaders and agencies that have their hands full with clients and projects.
Manuel Mas
The most powerful and successful strategy is make things correctly done for the user. Give them the best content, great information, well structured text, and add to it some social signals (Share it on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc…). ¡This is 80% of SEO done on your own! And then, contact your network, make possible that some links go directly to your content and will go up like a rocket.
It´s not difficult to make things well done in order to rank in Google, just give what the user wants. Analyze your headings, good copywriting is a must, deep link your content, give references from other webs and spread the article. No magic is needed, just good work. With this, links will come and your content will have a spectacular ranking boost.
Ecommerce Consultant, webmaster and SEO Expert in Spain.
Marcus Miller
This kind of question really needs context to answer effectively. If you are a local business then Local SEO likely has the best potential. If you are national business then sensible link building and content marketing may help you rank for the greatest number of queries. In all cases you will need to build authority to provide the foundation for these other tactics to deliver. You will also need to take the competition into consideration to know what is feasible.
At Bowler Hat we try to look at strategies that have an instant positive effect and that help improve SEO at the same time. Typically a content led approach with content pieces developed on the site with promotion of these by social ads, guest posts and digital PR delivers the goods here. This needs tieing into a marketing funnel with some clever lead generation but if we can feed the marketing pipeline whilst building scope through the content and authority with the guest posts and digital PR then we are doing good work.
Another often overlooked part of the picture is how the website is put together. You must consider mobile friendly design, structural SEO, content marketing and so much more to create a platform that supports all of your other SEO efforts.
Head of SEO, PPC & Digital Marketing at Bowler Hat. Big search and marketing geek. Focused on integrating classic marketing smarts with expert tactical knowledge of Search and Social.
Mathias Ahlgren
With so much new content being published every day on the Internet and no more “easy to rank” niches around, content promotion is one of the key strategies you should start doing right now to rank higher on Google. So stop publishing content, and pray it will rank high! Because churning out content just won’t cut it – not even for outstanding pieces of content – any longer.
It’s easy to fall victim for the shiny object syndrome, but before you move on and start thinking about what your next content piece should be about, you need to focus on content you just published, and promote it. You should at least (at a bare minimum) share it across your social channels like Twitter, Facebook, Google+ etc., but also leverage medium.com and broadcast it on content sharing and syndication sites like bizsugar.com, inbound.org, growthhackers.com etc. You can also answer relevant questions on quora.org and include a link to your post in your answer (just remember to be upfront about that it’s your own content).
But that’s not enough, it used to be. To increase the likelihood of your content ranking high on Google you also need to promote your content by doing email outreach to influencers and finding high quality sites to guest blog post on. Sometimes I miss the good old days when hitting publish (no praying was needed) on a 500 word article was all it took to rank high on Google.
I’m a search engine and affiliate marketer from Melbourne, Australia.
Matt Cilderman
Cilderman Solutions’ strategy for helping smaller websites to rank high on Google goes beyond the basics of proper on-page optimization (keyword themes, image SEO, etc. ) and in-depth, useful writing/content.
Ever since 2015, when Google began its rollout of RankBrain, user signals have grown in importance: time on page, click through rate, etc. What do you do if you are a small business that doesn’t have a lot of visitors to send those signals to Google? How do you start climbing the ranks? You spend a few dollars on an Google Adwords or even a Facebook advertising campaign to get the ball rolling. I have repeatedly seen that $5-$10 is all you need to start.
This usually has 2 benefits. You get traffic that sends positive signals to Google about the quality of your content. You may also earn a link or two to further increase your rankings.
Cilderman Solutions, LLC is a digital marketing company based in Elmwood Park, New Jersey that works with local, small businesses in Bergen and Passaic counties. However, we have also worked with nonprofits, tech startups, app developers, and international companies, helping them share their message with the world.
Creating high quality content that targets a specific keyword (that seems to be easy enough to rank for).
I’m an experienced copywriting who has written words for some of the UK’s biggest brands.
Matthew Hunt
Inbound Link Building – This is where develop campaigns to either crowdsource people to link build without knowing that is what they are doing by running paid contests and leveraging sites like Facebook. And to put fuel on the fire to reach journalists. You can run ads to people based on job title and workplace on both LinkedIN and Facebook.
It’s a great way to get more attention to your content. Now it only works if your content “stands for something”. Make sure your content stands for something. Draw a line in the sand. You either stand for something or nothing at all. Another good one is to jump on weird holidays… https://www.daysoftheyear.com/ – it gives you fun ways to create interesting content… even make up a “new day”, heck, Amazon did with Prime Day and so did Alibaba with Singles Day. Think of things you can get “attention” on and then it’s easy to build links and get PR. Think “inbound link building”.
Matthew Hunt is growth hacker who helps fortune 1000 companies get more traffic and improve their website conversions.
Michael Cottam
Original, rich, detailed content. Google has gotten pretty good at evaluating the quality and thoroughness of content on a page, and pages that 2-3 years ago didn’t have the backlinks to get into the top 100 results can now be on page 1 if the content is good enough. Original images matter; original text, of course…hyper-rich content like maps and embedded video matter. And the text content needs to cover all or most of the subtopics and related terms that Google finds on other pages that rank for that target term.
Michael is a technical SEO consultant, specializing in on-page optimization and penalty recovery. He is a Moz Associate, and a past board member of SEMpdx.
Michael Ferrari
A solid on-page content strategy focusing on user intent can work wonders—in particular, making sure each page on your site answers as many relevant questions as possible for searchers. For instance, if your page is selling a pair of shoes, make sure the content says everything a buyer may want to know about them:
What are they made from, how do you clean them, what outfits go best with them, and so on. I’ve seen a lot of clients bump up to the first page and rake in a ton more qualified traffic just by trying to anticipate users’ questions and creating content that answers them.
Online Marketing Consultant at Pen Cap Online Marketing
Michiel Heijmans
In one sentence: “Be the best result.” It’s as simple as that. If you want to rank number one, make sure you offer the best information on your subject. It doesn’t matter if you are a popular newspaper or the local bakery. If your story is interesting and well-written, you have a chance to rank. Just make sure that Google also feels that you answer the user’s question best. Once again: be the best result.
Your page has to fit perfectly in your site structure. You need to market your information right so that other people will link to your content. You need to become an authority for others so that they will refer to you. Your site has to work perfectly on both desktop and mobile devices. Maintain that quality website with quality content. Everything has to align; we like to refer to this as holistic SEO. And furthermore, make sure to update your existing information regularly to keep it relevant at all times, so you’ll also stay that best result.
Michiel built his first website on GeoCities, around 1995. After studying marketing, he worked at various agencies as an internet marketeer. In 2009, he started an internet consultancy agency. He joined Yoast in February 2012 and became a partner in 2015.
Mike Lagman
I’d say Cross-Channel Marketing. To rank higher on Google, I don’t think relying too much on SEO can help. You need a multi-channel approach. Aside from the usual things I do to improve SEO (i.e link building, content, on-page optimization, etc.), I tend to attract visitors through other channels like social media, PPC and other paid promotions.
This helps improve my engagement metrics like Bounce Rate, Time on Page and Exit Rate. Google will see your website valuable if it has better engagement stats, thus helping it rank higher. We implemented this strategy to one of our clients in Spiralytics. Our client created a blog to improve its traffic. We immediately saw growth from our paid channels (which is normal), but overtime, organic traffic grew as well. Here’s the strategy:
– Build unique & engaging content
– Optimize content for SEO (internal links, title tag, h1, etc.)
– Paid promotions on Facebook & Twitter
– Link building
Rankings went up for our main keywords then monthly organic traffic grew by 4900% in 5 months. We started with 300 organic visits/month, now it’s around 15K organic visits/month.
A Search Strategist in Spiralytics with over 6 years of experience in SEO, Content Marketing & Google Analytics. I’m also an aspiring Travel Blogger at The Brew Diaries.
Mohammed Alami
When it comes to positioning websites on Google the relevance of the content compared to the keywords searched is the key for success. So, the first strategy is to choose your keywords wisely according to the volume and difficulty by not hesitating to choose long tail keywords. Then you must align the content so that it is SEO friendly. The elements of the page shall send a strong relevancy signal to Search engines on the chosen topic: Title, description, Headings, copy, images and so on.
Then you need to popularize this content by first linking it internally with rich anchor texts and then promoting it on blogs and social media to get backlinks. Incoming links remain the main ranking factor still today. Now the semantic web is gaining importance and we are seeing more and more rich snippets all over the SERPs at a point where it becomes important to mark its content with micro data such as Schema.
The most popular mark ups are Organization, Article in the case of a blog and reviews in the case of products. But SEOs should not hesitate to dig deeper and seek all the means to benefit from this language of description easy to implement and able to increase by 30% the click through rate on the search results if rich snippets are shown below the page.
Mohammed Alami is a professional SEO Expert and Consultant in his own right, an entrepreneur, an engineer, and Master E-Commerce specialist.
Nate Shivar
Creating in-depth content that ranks for a range of long-tail terms, then optimizing based on the data.
Nate is a marketing educator & consultant. He’s is from Atlanta, GA and has built profitable (and sometimes award-winning) campaigns for businesses ranging from consumer brands to local service businesses. He’s a fan of the Open Web and despises cheap marketing tactics.
Nikolay Stoyanov
The best working strategy for me has been guest blogging. If it’s executed the right way it can be a very powerful weapon in your SEO arsenal, not to mention it’s still considered a white hat strategy (if you don’t abuse it, of course). Just run some searches in Google for relevant sites with KEYWORD + “write for us”, collect all data in a Google Spreadsheet, extract everyone’s emails and start outreaching. Happy link building!
Nikolay Stoyanov is a well-known Bulgarian SEO expert with over 8 years of SEO experience. He practices 100% white hat SEO techniques and has a vast experience in keyword research, on-page optimization, SEO auditing and link building.
Nitzan Gursky
As a company that serves intent-driven ads to the right users in real-time, we aim to create unique, high-quality and relevant content on our blog, which will provide our audience with an actual added value. From writing about the hottest online trends and tools, through hosting guest bloggers who share Case Studies, to including clear tips and action items for our readers to easily adopt – content is indeed the king.
In addition, since over 50% of our ads are currently presented on mobile devices, we have implemented another SEO strategy – ‘Mobile-First’. Whether it’s creating each page and blog post as mobile responsive, or designing every campaign with our mobile users in mind, adopting this Mobile Strategy is also a very recommend way to rank high on Google.
Nitzan Gursky is the Marketing Team Leader at Infolinks. Infolinks generates revenue to more than 100K publishers, with a suite of advanced ads powered by real-time intent targeting.
Philip Verghese Ariel
Immediately after hitting the publish button, I take the time to promote it on my major social sites like Facebook, Google plus, Twitter, LinkedIn and some of the G+and Facebook forums, also, I find time to share it on some of the internet marketing sites like Inbound, Bizsugar, Growthhackers, klinkk, kingged and other article sharing sites like Indiblog, All top etc.
I follow the ratio of 80:20 theory, ie 80% promotion and 20% for developing contents. Yet another strategy I follow in this regard is visiting niche related sites (having good DA) and post comments on such blog posts. It is found and proven that it is a wonderful strategy in this regard. These are some of the mastrategiestegy I follow to get ranking high on Google.
Philip Verghese, otherwise known as Ariel, is a multilingual content marketer and blogger who manages different sites in English as well as in Malayalam. He also creates Expert Roundup Posts for his sites as well as others.
Philip Zeplin
I think it’s important to note, that any strategy will always depend on the specific website, and sometimes even the specific industry. With that said, I think it comes down to two important areas: having a website that is set up technically correct, with proper use of header tags, canonicals, responsive design, and so forth. The second being great in-depth content. A website won’t rank if either of those are not done properly.
Sure, you can have the best content in the world, but if your H-1 tag is “Blog” for every post, and the page takes 20 seconds to load, it won’t matter. Likewise, even if your site is technically optimised in every way, if there is no good content to actually delve into on the site, you again won’t rank, and won’t get visitors.
Even better if the content includes great images, links to other relevant information, on-page video (preferably YouTube), and encourages the user to engage and share. Of course, none of that will matter if you neglect keyword research. Sure, the days of extreme importance on Exact Match is gone, but keyword research is still incredibly important in figuring out user intent, general volume, and what questions users may need answered.
Working as a YouTube & SEO Consultant at iProspect Denmark, Philip has over 8 years of experience working with SEO, and 7 years working specifically with YouTube SEO. Founder of NovelConcept, and a Master Class speaker at VidCon.
PJ Germain
To rank high on Google and the other major search engines, it’s imperative to have a PLAN. How will you create your pages and articles to help each other and also how will you create powerful backlinks so that the search engines stand up and take notice. Keywords, on-page and off-page SEO work together to create a synergistic page-ranking machine. Plan each phase of this out carefully to truly rocket past your competition.
Successful online marketer, SEO consultant and residual income creator.
Quentin Aisbett
The single greatest SEO strategy I’ve found is to first establish customer personas. Beyond simple keyword research, I want to identify the audience’s intentions and what influences them. This drives our content creation and on-page optimisation.
If I nail the persona then I’m confident that I’ll be generating higher click through rates from search results. Whilst the value of CTRs from the SERPs is a debated topic, our internal testing proves it to be a successful tactic. If I can better understand the audience, I can also create more engaging content that keeps the audience on the page longer.
Again being able to increase average time on site is another tactic we’ve found to improve rankings. This includes implementing some of their key questions as sub-headings as users tend to scan the page first.
Data-driven marketer working with SMEs to generate business leads. Keeping one-eye on AI.
Rafi Chowdhury
Picking keywords which are low competition. Creating absolutely the best pice of content around that keyword. Sharing on social media.
Rafi Chowdhury is the founder of Chowdhury’s Digital and co-founder of myCampusHacks. He helps companies like Vapetek, Shapes Brow Bar, Win Hyundai, Wound Care Surgeons, and Easley Transportation grow their revenue. Examiner.com calls him the go-to guy for traffic generation, SplashOPM says he is one of the top Growth Hacking gurus on the web, Start-up Dhaka says he
