Why is it important to be on Google’s first result page?
Every day, billions of searches are carried out on internet. This number which keeps growing shows the importance that we give to IT tools and search engines to find answers to our questions nowadays. As a business, your aim is to be ranked among the first results on these same search engines in order to be visible to your prospects. But in parallel, the content available online keeps growing. You can ask yourself how to get there and which methods are the most efficient?
In a former article, we explain the importance of optimisation of your website for search engines. Today we are going to focus on Google. The objective of this article is to explain why it is primordial to understand how SEO works. This will give you the keys to better your ranking when someone does a search. Do you own a website and want to gain in visibility? Follow our guide!
Table of contents
1. Google: a prominent place in research
Used by a big majority of internet users, in 23 years, Google has become a reference when it comes to search engines. In this leadership position, the business owns it to the capacity to offer relevant and personalised content to each user. Google has for a long time now made it its propriety and we can say that the efforts have paid off!
“We help you find exactly what you are looking for.” (Reference: Google)
Before we explain how Google proceeds to refer their pages, let’s go back to the giant Google in a few figures.
Google in a few figures
Today, Google has billion of daily users over the world.
- 92% of internet users in the world use Google to carry out their research.
- 8 billion searches are executed each day on Google or an average of 91 000 each second. It is 2 billion more than 5 years ago.
- 60% of Google searches come from mobile devices.
- 15% of searches treated daily by google are unpublished.
Google is also a colossal investment to put performant robots in place. In order to understand the user’s searches better, the business has decided to integrate artificial intelligence into its programs.
“Even if we do not manage each time, we work tirelessly to avoid that the bad quality or non-pertinent content shows up in your search results.” (Reference: Google)
In response to all the new searches each day, Google has recourse to automated systems that provide the most relevant and reliable information possible.
What you need to know about SEO
You might have understood, with google the watchword is “relevance”, it is probably the reason why we appreciate using it so much. But have you already asked yourself how Google offers its results? Let’s see what happens when you carry out a search. When a user starts a search on Google the robots execute an instant search throughout all the pages indexed to offer the most relevant results to the users.
Today, on Google, it is various “hundreds and thousands indexed web pages […] where the size is way superior to 100 million gigabytes”, throughout which you need to sort out space in a couple of tenths of seconds. The robots will search all the pages containing the keywords entered in the index. Once found, Google sort according to more than 200 criteria’s like the content of the page, the expertise level of the sources, the language or the position.
What to remember on Google
Very perfectionate on its functionality and regularly updated to always be more performant, using google nowadays is basically unavoidable. as a business this tool is primary to understand and master if you want to be actors in your SEO.
2. What interest for your business?
Now that you know how Google works, you are allowed to question yourself: why should I be worried about my ranking? The answer is simple, to be visible to your audience! For most of the sites, traffic from search engines said “organic traffic” represents approximately 50% of global traffic. It is a key element to make yourself known.
Indeed, the numbers speak for themselves: being on the first page of Google is having the possibility of being noticed. When an internet user carries out a search if he does not know you, he will not be looking for you, expressly, there are high chances that he will never discover you if you are not part of the first one in the ranking.
“The result in 1st position has a click rate 10 times more important thank the link in 10th position.” (Reference: Blog du moderateur)
The objective of any business is to find its target by standing out from the competition. This is what good SEO allows. It helps you stand out from the mass and gain visibility by increasing the traffic on your website. See it as a virtuous loop where the more clicks you generate, the more chances you have to gain in popularity and to find more clients. You should however keep in mind that Google has made the client used to find what they are looking for on the first go with the least effort possible. The consequence of this makes the results after the first half of the page invisible. You can imagine that starting from the second page it is even worse.
“On a search, 75% of clicks are on the first 3 results.” (Reference: Blogdumoderateur.com)
Even though these numbers show off the reality, do not despair! Creating a website and content to obtain good positions is not enough, but it is possible to better your SEO thanks to simple actions. Keep in mind that today SEO is the best way to improve your ranking on Google. These actions should however be sufficiently methodical and regular to be successful! You don’t feel capable or fear not having enough time to devote to it? Get help from capable people, the investment is really worth it.
3. The different SEO levers to improve your ranking
The content
Web content evolves and grows constantly. With hundreds of new Web pages published each second, it is even more important to stand out with Google. There is no point in creating content in quantity or of poor quality. Googles robots are sufficiently efficient to determine the quality of a page, it will not be in your best interest. Always put the quality of what you publish first. It is much more determining for your ranking. To optimise your content many factors can be taken into account such as keywords or even meta descriptions, let’s go over the different elements.
“SEO will be dead when Google will be dead.” (Reference: searchenginejournal.com)
Keywords
In a former article, we explain the interest to choose the right keywords for your SEO. They are indeed the first elements allowing, you to qualify your content. It is crucial to work on them. To be competitive, we recommend that you vary them according to their nature. Generic keywords are certainly very searched for but have in fact very strong competition. Long-tail keywords being more specific are not searched for as much but are well-chosen compared to your offer, they allow you to touch your target by limiting the competition.
Title tags and H1 tags
Try not to mix up the tags that said “title” and the “H1” tags. The title tags correspond to the title of your page when they appear in your search engine results or on social media thumbnails for example. The H1 tags correspond to the title of your article. The number 1 means that it is the principal title. These two tags are different, they must not be identical. It is recommended that you vary the keywords to optimise the SEO and multiply your chances of being seen.
The meta descriptions
The meta descriptions correspond to the description that appears under the title on the search page. It is a small paragraph that should make you want (or not) click on your link instead of the competition’s one. Working well on this meta description is therefore essential. It is recommended to insert your keywords to facilitate the crawl of robots.
Alternative texts
This could seem anecdotal, but you should certainly not neglect the description of your pictures. As we have explained in this article, images play an important role in SEO. Alternative texts (or ALT tags) can describe your images for the people who cannot see like the visually impaired or Googles robots. These robots are not sufficiently efficient to analyse images, your role is to simplify the work manually. These title tags allow you to add a description and reuse your keywords to inform the content of your photo.
Beware, don’t use your keywords excessively. Black hat SEO is a practice consisting in deceiving search engines on the quality of a page or a site in order to obtain, for a given keyword, a good ranking in the results of the search engines. Although tempting to speed up the work on the SEO, these techniques are very strongly sanctioned by Google. Surly more penalising than SEO is done correctly, it is always better to take your time to enhance the SEO of your page than skipping stages.
External popularity
Make sure to integrate backlinks on your pages, they allow the robots to create new links to the pages available in Googles index. This method is simple can also contribute to making your content stand out. However, insure yourself that they are of good quality and that they come from a reliable source.
The internal mesh
The internal mesh also counts in SEO. Google is always attentive to the path that an internet user must run through to reach a page. The lower the number of clicks is, the more this will play in your favour. As we have seen above, Google wishes before anything brings the most precise and simplest answer possible for a user.
Response time
For several years, Google is more and more attentive to the charging speed. And if it is fast, the higher your chances of being well ranked will grow as it will ensure a better user experience. For this, many methods exist to grow the charging speed of your website. Even if some are relatively technic some simple ones exist which consist in eliminating unused content or even compressing data like images for example.
You now have the keys to optimise your website and your pages with the hope of arriving at the podium so coveted of the first page’s results. You have probably understood by now, SEO is certainly a constant and long-term task but doable. If you find this complicated, don’t worry. You can today easily better your SEO yourself. Nothing is obliging you to change everything the first time, don’t be scared. Start step by step with what you think is easiest.
In this article we introduced you to a couple of key SEO points with Google, but if the subject interests you don’t hesitate to inquire more about it. Internet is overflowing with advice and tips if you want to learn more. Be careful however not to skip any steps. If your results don’t seem satisfying don’t fall in the SEO black hat trap, beware! That could work for some time, but sooner or later, with Googles precision, you will probably lose. Arm yourself with patience, be methodical and rigorous. Attack one problem at a time if you wish, but above all don’t discourage yourself. SEO will not disappear from the horizons any time soon, the sooner you will tame it the more advantages you will have on your competitors. Believe us, the game is worth it! You are already used to optimise for search engines? Don’t hesitate to give us advice and tips in the comments, we would love to read them!
Pingback: SEO: 5 Chrome extensions to boost your ranking on Google - Bees Boost