How to Rank #1 for a Keyword in Google
If you want to know how to rank #1 for a specific keyword in Google I’m going to go over everything you need to know if you want to transform your website into a customer or lead generation machine I’ll show you all my best tips, tactics, and secrets.
To get there fast let’s dive in, you need to succeed online if you run a business you probably want to be found online for what it is you offer right well in that case you’re definitely going to want to show up at the top of Google searches.
But what exactly does it take to get there you know there’s a lot that goes into proper SEO including what you put on your pages itself you know how you structure your pages and what content you put on your pages.
But going into 2020 it’s still important to have a lot of good external signals to your site which means backlinks of course a backlink is just any time another website links to your site but the other thing you must know about backlinks is they are not all created equal you know some come from really on reputable spammy sites and some could come from Forbes and on top of that some links are actually called nofollow links.
This means Google knows not to really count them they can still help in some ways but they really aren’t counted in the traditional way that Google normally counts a link so one of the biggest factors that really make a link help you rank for a certain keyword is the anchor text or the words on the other website that link to your page or form that hyperlink.
So in this case it would be the words and I think the reason it’s such a big signal is simply because that really shows Google what your page is about because not only are they seeing that keyword on your page but other website thinks your page is so much about that topic.
That’s the words that they chose to use to link it now lots of SEO experts as well as Google themselves kind of go on record saying anchor text isn’t really that important anymore I think it’s just because they don’t really want you to manipulate it but so many tests have proved.
Otherwise, it is still a very important ranking signal in 2020 so you’re going to want to pay attention to it so that sounds easy right, just build a bunch of links with the right anchor text for the terms you want to rank for.
Not so fast there’s a catch Google really hates being manipulated and they don’t want anyone to go out there seeking links in a perfect world for Google they want every link just to be earned.
Back in the day, Google was not super smart about this tactic so you would just go out and get as many links as you can and you would just optimize the anchor text to be the keyword you want to rank for and you were good to go.
But since then Google’s rolled out the penguin update which basically seeks this kind of thing out and analyzes anybody with too many links that say the exact same thing it looks unnatural like you had something to do with those links rather than a bunch of sites owners just liking your content and naturally sharing it.
If 10 different websites were all to link to your website what are the odds that they would all use the same keyword phrase when linking to your site so let’s say you’re a locksmith you know I bet some would use a locksmith in your city the name of your business itself or the actual website address.
What wouldn’t happen is all 10 of those websites using the same phrase locksmith and Phoenix it’s unnatural and Google’s just going to slap that down so the problem is if you ever want to rank for a keyword you do need some of these exact to match anchor text links.
But you can’t be too aggressive about it I’ll show you the plan I use to figure out how many overall links you’re going to need how many should be exact match anchor text and how you can go about building them safely.
So the first place we’re going to come is kW finder short for keyword finder now I’m assuming you already have the keywords that you want to be found for, go ahead and get started so let’s keep going with the locksmith in Phoenix example
let’s just type that in there and we’re going to click on find keywords now we’re not actually doing this today to find the keywords because it remembers again.
I’m assuming you already know the keywords you’ve researched, you want to use but what we’re doing right now well we’re paying attention to the competition.
So basically, it’s going to show you these are all the guys that are showing up in the Google search right now for this term and it shows you the top 10 so basically the name of the game here is just to do a little bit of recon and see who’s here and how likely you are to beat them and what you need in order to beat them.
So we’ve got right at the top we have Yelp this is very common, especially for service-based businesses you’ll see the Yelp listings at the top quite often and it’s going to be pretty hard to beat Yelp, to be honest, they’ve got a high domain authority at ninety-four not just so you can’t beat them I’ve seen it happen.
But what I would want to focus on right here is this guy right here popalock.com so that just sounds like a local locksmith to me so what we want to pay attention to are.
You know basically these ranking signals we’ve got domain Authority which is just how strong the overall site is page Authority which is the same thing but talking about that specific webpage, not the site itself and then we’ve got citation flow trust flow but what we really want to look at or the number of links right here.
So it’s showing they have seven only and their number two shows backlinks okay so right here that page is loaded so basically it’s going to show all the backlinks they have which shows a lot more than seven but don’t get fooled because a lot of these are broken links that are no longer active so what we’re going to do is we’re gonna filter this list out we’re gonna click on only active.
So it gets rid of all the broken links right away and we’re also gonna click on do follow this is only going to show us those valuable do-follow links, not the nofollow links which are more just standard directory links that don’t do as much good so now we have a much clearer picture of what exactly these links are.
I’m gonna go ahead, we can see the anchor text as well and this is really what I want you to look at so the anchor text this first one says NA I think that probably means it’s probably an image link meaning it probably makes their logo that’s a link up to their website
But all the rest of them it’s pretty clear why they’re ranking number two because they’ve got locksmith Phoenix Arizona all the way down here which is actually putting them in a huge risk of danger of being overoptimized so while they’re still ranking today Google could come up with an algorithm update tomorrow that would wipe them off the map with this so you know I’m counting here they’ve got six exact match anchor links and so basically what that says is you want at least seven.
Okay so now you know how many websites you need links from but here’s the other thing you can’t just get them all right away that’s gonna look unnatural again so what you need to do is kind of drip them out a little bit and the amount of time you need to drag it out for is gonna really depend on the age of your site and how many links you already have so if you’ve been around a while and you already have a lot of links you can probably go a little faster.
But if you’re brand new it’s gonna look really suspicious and shady if you just get a bunch of links right away so you’re gonna want to go a little slower in that case so I’m gonna give you a little schedule here so if you’re a newer site you can think of this as a monthly schedule if you’re if you’ve been around for a bit you can think of this more as a weekly schedule.
okay so in week/ month 1: >> Trust building links
>> Nofollow
>> Social profiles
>> Directories
then in a week/ month 2: >> Authority links
>> Naked URL (website.com)
>> Branded anchors
So if your locks if your locksmith company is called Acme Locksmiths that’s what you would want to use as well and basically, you’re gonna want to try in week or month two to be building around 20% of the total links you need now moving on to
Week/ month 3: >> Authority links
>> Branded anchors
again that’s your company name and now you can start by trying for
>> 1 or 2 exact match anchors.
so that’s the keyword phrase you want to rank for.
In this case, the locksmith and Phoenix go ahead and do a couple of those and then do some
>> Blended
So basically you’re blending your business name with the keyword so would be Acme locksmith in Phoenix and in this timeframe, you’re gonna try to build out around 30% of those total links you need alright moving right along to
Week/ month 4 – 6: >> Variety of links
>> Some related or synonyms keyword phrases.
and use anchor text based on that you know this might be something like a locksmith service in Phoenix or 24-hour locksmith in Phoenix or something like that.
Then you can go for a few more
>> Exact match keyword phrases
and then go for some more of those
>> Blended
so that would again be the brand mixed with the exact match so again that example was Acme locksmiths in Phoenix and these phases four to six and are you gonna want to spread that out getting that remaining 50% of the total links you need in the end you’ll definitely want a more exact match to links than your competition has but here’s the catch “you need to keep those two under 30 percent of your total links” so let me illustrate that point.
So “if your competitor has 7 exact match links”
- you want at least 8 exact matches
- plus a variety of 18 additional links
You know these should be naked URLs branded with your company name, synonym keywords, and related keywords, and you might even want more you know you also want total links than your competition has total links so you need to not only beat them in the exact match links being to beat them overall link numbers as well so it really depends on your competition level.
You may have very little work to do or you may have quite a bit of work to do.
As you research your competition it may look like they’re getting away with murder like they’ve got way too many optimized anchor text links back to their site here’s the thing though you don’t want to play that game just because they’re getting away with it because what’s gonna happen is Google get smarter all the time they’ve got new algorithms all the time and you don’t want to be caught with your pants down.
When they finally do the algorithm update that’s gonna get you in trouble so that’s why it’s really important to do things the right safe way so what about the quality of the links you’re gonna get you to know you’re definitely going to want to seek out good opportunities, not spammy ones so I want you to focus on websites with a Domain Authority of over 20 and a trust flow score of over 15 and keyword finder will show you those scores when you’re researching a website.
So I’m gonna recommend that you probably outsource your backlink building, SofCrust can build you quality backlinks and all that stuff that is affordable and the good news is you can control that anchor text with the links that we build for you.
I probably recommend getting SoftCrust.info foundational links packages they’re really affordable and like I say you can control the anchor text 100% we’ve got plans as cheap as60 bucks a month and if you do this I recommend going with standard English and our premium English just to save some money these aren’t really going to be read by people it’s definitely more of a pure SEO.
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