Establishing a solid online presence is critical for any business that wishes to prosper in today’s digital world. At CueCamp, we believe that the secret sauce is not just having an attractive website but also ensuring that your potential customers can locate you without difficulty. One of the best means to accomplish this and, frankly, one of the least understood, is to have your business outrank competitors in Google search results. In this blog post, we’ll explore how Google’s search ranking algorithm works and, more importantly, what you can do to make it work for you—so that you can outrank your competitors in Google search results.
It’s important to know the fundamentals of Google’s search ranking system before we get into the strategies. At its most basic, Google searches the web for all the different pages available, then picks the ones it thinks best fit the particular search being asked. When it does this, it tries to evaluate not just the content of the page but also the reasons why that content might be a good fit. Five different “conversational” factors guide this evaluation. The first is relevance: Does the content match the searching user’s intent? Next is quality: Is the content informative, engaging, and well-structured? Then comes authority: How credible is the site? Often, this is determined by how many other trustworthy sites link to it. After that comes user experience: Is the site easy to use, mobile-friendly, and fast? And finally, what about engagement metrics: Are users interacting with this site in a way that suggests it’s a good fit for what they’re searching for? Focusing on these factors can give your site a better shot at showing up higher in Google search results.
How to Outrank Competitors: An SEO Primer
At the core of a prosperous digital marketing strategy, there must be Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. This is primer SEO for you:
- Research Your Keywords: Unearth the search terms your ideal customers are using and blend them seamlessly into your content.
- On-Page SEO: Dial in title tags, meta descriptions, headers, and images. More important, ensure that your content has a clear hierarchy and is effortlessly scannable for our friends at Google as well as for your humans.
- Quality Content: Write something for heaven’s sake. Make it worthwhile, make it useful, make it easy to digest, and, for the love of all that is good, make it engaging.
Link Building Strategies
Links pointing to your content from respectable websites show Google that your content is high quality and trustworthy. Here are some ways to get those links pointing back to your website to help you outrank competitors:
- Write for Other Blogs: Find reputable blogs in your industry. Write articles for them. Include a link back to your site in the article.
- Work with Other Businesses: Find businesses in your industry or a related one to partner with. Work with them to cross-promote your businesses.
- Research: Conduct studies that are important to your industry. Write articles about those studies. Do so in a way that makes them sound interesting and in a way that also makes them shareable.
User Experience and Perception
Your search rankings can be substantially affected—positively or negatively—by how users perceive your site. There are several ways to make a perceivable impact on how users interact with your website, and thus how they perceive it. First, see to it that your website is equally responsive on both desktop and mobile devices, as more and more people are using smartphones to access the internet. Second, check to ensure that your site is loading quickly. A variety of tools exist to help you identify issues and fix them, if any are found. Finally, have a look at your site from the perspective of a first-time user and ask yourself whether or not navigating through your content is a straightforward experience.
Local Search & Google My Business
It is vital for local businesses to optimize their websites for local search so that they can be found by prospective customers in their area. Here are several steps you can take:
- Google My Business: Your listing can be a local search engine. Ensuring its optimization can push your appearance in local search results.
- Local Keyword Usage: Google is smart but not necessarily as smart as your content. You need to signal to it that your content is about something locally relevant.
- Customer Reviews: Good reviews don’t just help your business look good; they also can help place your business in local search results.
Social Media Tips
Although social media signals might not have a direct effect on SEO, these can drive significant traffic to a website and boost brand visibility. Making the most of social media is a worthwhile endeavor, and it’s possible by doing these three things:
- Be Engaging: Share not just your content but also engage with your audience, and even have conversations with them. For some brands, it might make sense to only be present on one or two platforms. For others, six might be too many and one might be just right.
- Be Promotional: Use ads to target specific, fairly narrowed-down demographic segments.
- Be Collaborative: With whom and with what can you be a part of? Use your platforms to engage with the potential audience on the other end of your collaborators.
At CueCamp, our focus is on expanding the online visibility of businesses such as yours. We accomplish this, in part, through custom website design, but primarily, we engage in a much more detailed and exhaustive practice known as SEO. SEO—that is, Search Engine Optimization—can be thought of as a (more or less) scientific process. It involves (again, more or less) some fairly straightforward math and, more often than not, some “hidden” multipliers that many of your competitors either don’t know about or, if they do, aren’t using to their fullest advantage.
Prevent your competitors from getting all the attention. Reach out to Michel Sharritt at michel@cuecamp.com to set up your no-cost consultation. We’ll get you started on the path to much better placement in Google search results and much greater visibility online.
