How to Rank on the First Page of Google: A Step-by-Step Guide

In today's blog post, I'm going to show you exactly how to rank on the first page of Google, step by step. In fact, I used this exact formula to rank on the first page of Google for competitive keywords like link building tools, backlinks, and SEO checklists. I'm Brian Dean, the founder of Backlinko, the place where marketers turn for higher rankings and more traffic. And if you want to rank number one on Google, you'll love the actionable steps in this blog post. Keep watching.

How to Rank on First Page of Google

I have a confession to make: I used to hate SEO. That's mostly because my first website wouldn't rank no matter what I did. It was super frustrating. I hated SEO! And to make matters worse, I was following all the advice that I read from so-called SEO experts: "Create great content," "Add keywords to your page," "Make sure that your site loads fast." Yeah, that stuff can help a little, but it's not going to rocket your site to the top of Google's first page. When I realized that, I decided to run lots of SEO experiments. I tested title tags, backlinks, anchor text, internal links, and more. Over the years, I started to put the pieces together. Flash forward to today, and I rank number one on Google for tons of competitive keywords, like nofollow links. "Success Magazine" recently called me "The world's foremost expert on search engine optimization."

Okay, enough bragging. Now it's time for me to reveal the process that you can use to rank on the first page of Google, step by step. So let's kick things off with step number one: find three keywords.

Step 1: Find Three Keywords

Your first step is to find three keywords. These are keywords that you'll create content around in the next step. Here's exactly how to find great, low-competition keywords.

First, head over to AnswerThePublic. This free tool finds questions that people ask on forums, blogs, and social media, and it turns those questions into awesome keywords. The best part? The keywords that you get from AnswerThePublic are usually long-tail keywords. In case you haven't heard of them before, long-tail keywords are just keywords that are long and very specific. For example, a keyword like "keto diet" is a short-tail keyword. But "keto diet breakfast recipes" is a long-tail keyword. Even though not a lot of people tend to search for long-tail keywords, they're also not super competitive, which makes them perfect keywords to go after if you're just starting out.

Another great way to find keywords is, believe it or not, Reddit. Just head over to a subreddit where your target audience hangs out and take a look at the topics that people are talking about. You can even pop these topics into AnswerThePublic to find long-tail versions of these topics. Finally, head over to explodingtopics.com. This is another free tool that bubbles up trending topics in industries like tech, health, fashion, marketing, and more. And because these topics are relatively new, the keywords that people use to find information on them aren't usually that competitive.

Step 2: Create Epic Content

I recently teamed up with BuzzSumo to analyze 912 million articles. One of our more surprising findings was that most content on the web doesn't get shared or linked to. In fact, we found that 94% of all articles online have zero links. Zero. And there's a simple reason for that: most of the content that people publish isn't that great. If it's not great, it's going to get lost among the millions of blog posts, tweets, YouTube blog posts, and Twitch streams that come out every day.

So for your content to stand out, it can't just be good or even great. For your content to be something that someone else would want to actually link to, it needs to be epic. Now, there's no formula for creating epic content, or else everyone would do it. But there are a few things you can do to increase the odds that people will share and, more importantly, link to your content.

First, you want to publish content that's long and in-depth. The BuzzSumo study that I mentioned earlier uncovered an interesting nugget: longer content gets more links than short content. Specifically, long-form content gets an average of 77% more backlinks than short content. Does this mean that publishing longer content will automatically bring in thousands of links? Of course not. But publishing in-depth content that covers an entire topic comprehensively can increase the odds that people link to you. For example, this post from my blog is 4,700 words long. Because this post has everything there is to know about link building in one place, over 1,000 different sites have linked to it.

Next, you want to add a hook to your content. A hook is something that would make a blogger or journalist want to link to your content. Your hook can be a stat, a case study example, a unique strategy, a rare interview, a tool or widget, or even a visualization. Basically, anything that makes someone else say, "Wow, I need to link to this," can work. For example, a few years ago, I published a case study of how I increased my blog's conversion rate. The hook in this case was a specific case study that people could reference. I also wrote about a unique strategy in that case study called the content upgrade, which was another hook. Because my page wasn't just high-quality content but included several hooks, lots of people have linked to that post.

Step 3: Keyword-Optimize Your Content

On-page SEO has changed a lot over the last few years. Back in the day, keyword optimization was all about stuffing your page with keywords. But that doesn't really work anymore. Instead, the goal of on-page SEO today is to give Google context about what your page is all about. Yes, you still want to use keywords on your page, but you also need to help Google understand your page's overall topic. Here's how to do it.

Your first step is to include your target keyword in a few important places on your page. That way, Google can understand that your page is about that specific term. Specifically, you want to add your keyword to these areas of your page. Next, it's time to give Google more context about your page. And the best way to do that? LSI keywords. LSI keywords are words and phrases that are closely related to your target keyword. Put another way, they are terms that tend to show up next to your keyword around the web. For example, if your target keyword was "Fresh Prince," LSI keywords would be terms like "Will Smith," "90s TV show," and "Bel-Air." When Google sees these LSI keywords on your page, it makes them say, "We're confident that this page is actually about that topic." You can find these LSI keywords by searching for your keyword and then scrolling to the bottom of the search results. The bold suggested keywords here usually make great LSI keywords. Then sprinkle in a few of these LSI keywords on your page, and you're good to go.

Step 4: Optimize Your Content for Users

Back in the day, Google would rank pages based almost 100% on who had the most backlinks. Yes, backlinks are still important, and I'll show you exactly how to build backlinks in the next step. But to rank in Google today, backlinks aren't enough. Your content also needs to be optimized for users. That's because Google pays very close attention to how people interact with your site in the search results. If they notice that people are clicking on your site and then quickly heading back to Google, they'll down-rank you. But if they see users sticking on your page, that's a sign that you're giving Google searchers what they want, and you'll usually get a rankings boost.

Here's exactly how to optimize your content for users so they stay on your page. First, structure your content so people start getting actionable info ASAP. In other words, you don't want to start your post off with a long explanation about why the topic is important; that's only going to make people bounce. Instead, use a short intro, then get right into the steps, tips, recipes, workout plans, or whatever you're going to cover in your post. For example, in this post from my blog, I don't get into a long backstory about why SEO is important. Instead, I have a brief, five-line intro, then it's time for the first strategy.

Next, make sure that your content's design is on point. Studies show that people largely judge your site based on design first and content second. So if your site looks like this, you can expect a really high bounce rate. Now, that doesn't mean that your site needs to win any design awards or look fancy. In fact, in my experience, a simple design tends to work best. For example, if you look at this post, there's nothing remotely fancy about it. But it does have a clean design that makes it easy to read and skim.

Step 5: Build Backlinks

Are backlinks still important for SEO? Yes. In fact, Perficient Digital has been tracking the importance of backlinks over the last three years, and they found that links are basically just as important today as they were since they first started tracking them. If you follow the steps so far by creating epic content, optimizing it for users, and adding hooks, you already have a strong foundation for building backlinks. It's just a matter of getting your content out there to actually build those links. And the best way to do that? Broken link building.

In fact, I used broken link building to get this link from a super authoritative website. Here's how it works. First, find a broken link on a page that you want to get a link from. I personally use the helpful Check My Links extension for Google Chrome, which is free. It automatically crawls all of the links on a page and identifies broken links. Next, you want to find a post on your site that will make a good replacement for the dead link. For example, I recently found a broken link on this page, and after looking through my site, I found this post that would be a pretty good replacement. Now, it's not a one-to-one match to what the person linked to, but it's close enough. Finally, reach out to the person that runs that site and ask them to swap out the dead link for a link to your content.

For this process, you can definitely work with an email script as you send these out. But I definitely don't recommend sending out the same generic email to 100 different people. In fact, an outreach study that I recently did with Pitchbox found that personalized emails got 32% more replies than emails that used the same exact pitch for everybody. For example, you can see that this broken link building email that I recently sent out is super personalized.

Bonus Step: Use Unique Images

Now, before we close out this SEO tutorial, I want to show you a quick bonus step: use unique images. Can using stock photos on your site hurt your Google rankings? As it turns out, they might. The folks at Reboot Online recently ran an interesting experiment. They created 10 brand new websites, all optimized around a keyword that they made up. For the experiment, on five of the sites, they used five stock photos that were already used on a bunch of other websites. And for the other five, they actually took their own images, making them 100% unique. So what did they find? They discovered that the five websites that had unique images, which are the green lines in this chart you see here, outranked the sites that didn't use unique images, which are the red lines from the chart.

So, what's the bottom line? Whenever you can, try to use unique images in your content. These can be pictures that you take with your phone, illustrations that you make in Photoshop, or screenshots that you take yourself. As this study showed, unique images seem to have a direct impact on rankings.

Did you learn something new from today's blog post? If so, make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel right now. Just click on the subscribe button below this blog post.

It's free. Now I want to turn it over to you. Which technique from today's blog post are you going to try first? Are you going to try broken link building? Or are you going to try adding unique images to your page? Let me know by leaving a comment below right now.

Also Read: How to Rank #1 for "Blogging Tips" in Just One Day