The first rule every content marketer learns is that Google is the end all be all. Here’s a shocking statistic to illustrate just how thoroughly Google controls the search engine business. From January 2010 to April 2019, about 90% of all desktop searches, on average, were done using Google.
The question is: Are you getting your share of the Google search pie? Unpaid organic Google traffic is valuable for a host of reasons. Chief among them is that it’s free. What business can’t benefit from having a zero-dollar customer acquisition cost?
Now, it can take the better part of a year or more before Google trusts a new website, and only then will it serve you to its users. That said, I relied on search engine optimization (SEO) when building my final expense insurance business. And from that experience and what I’ve seen work for other website owners, there are simple steps you can take to help radically shorten the length of time needed for Google to show your new website in its search results.
Step 1: Subscribe to HARO, and place it at the top of your daily to-do list.
HARO stands for “help a reporter out.” Basically, HARO is a free service that connects journalists to experts who can contribute content to help them write their stories.
When you subscribe, you’ll receive an email three times per day. Each email will contain a list of topics journalists need feedback for. If you see a topic that aligns with your area of expertise, you can respond directly to the author via HARO’s platform. If the reporter decides to use your content, they will oftentimes include a backlink to your site because you helped them do their job.
There are hundreds of variables that Google considers when deciding which websites show up in search results. It’s still widely accepted that backlinks from other domains are one of the most influential variables. Having more links from other sites can translate into higher rankings in Google.
Acquiring backlinks is one of the hardest tasks for any website, let alone a brand-new one. When HARO emails you, time should stop. You should treat these queries as your highest priority. Aim to instantly respond to all appropriate queries. If you do this every day, you will regularly land high domain authority backlinks that you would never acquire through another medium. These links can drastically shorten how long it takes for Google to trust your website.
Step 2: Create helpful resources that aren’t meant for your consumer traffic.
Put together some thorough non-promotional resources meant to educate users about a topic that has some relevance to your chosen field. For example, if you have a home loans company, for your website you could create resources such as “How To Rebuild Your Credit After A Bankruptcy” or “A Senior’s Guide To Understanding Reverse Mortgages.”
Whatever resources you create, they shouldn’t promote your company. They are meant purely to be informative and helpful in an objective way. The goal with these resources is to leverage them for backlink acquisition. As previously stated, backlinks heavily influence your website’s exposure in Google.
Once you have your resources created, you can reach out to websites that may benefit from displaying a link to your resource on their website. Quick access to your resource could add value for their users. Not all of the websites you contact will link back to you, but some likely will.
The beautiful thing about building backlinks via resources is that it’s easy to do, scalable and it works. It just requires some sweat equity. You don’t need to be an SEO guru or a full stack developer. You just need to be willing to grind out the work.
Step 3: Regularly produce new high-quality, long-form content.
Link building is of paramount importance for all websites no matter how old they are, but it’s particularly important for new websites. Until Google trusts your site, it won’t risk showing the site to users. As a website owner, you must accept that you’ll always be link building. It comes with the territory.
At the same time, at least once per week, you need to produce new long-form content that is meant to appeal to your consumer traffic. The pieces you create should be industry leading and better than anything else you’ve come across out there. The quality of the content is much more important than quantity.
To surpass another website in the search results, you must do a better job of answering a user’s question. Only extremely high-quality content will achieve this result.
How do you know what to write about? Given that you’re an expert in your field, you probably already know what phrases users search for in your industry. Create articles meant to answer their specific questions. Using the earlier example, for a home loans company website, you could create a post about the difference between various loan types. In it, you could explain how each type of loan works, their pros and cons, their costs, example monthly payments, when someone should choose each type of loan and anything else you think a consumer might want to know. This would be just one of many articles you could write as a way to answer your customers’ questions.
You can also use SEO optimization tools such as SEMrush to further investigate relevant keywords your customers search.
Ranking in Google isn’t rocket science. Sure, there are lots of nuances to dominating your competitors in the search engines, but at its core, SEO is merely a combination of high-quality content plus backlinks. If you consistently execute these three steps, you up the odds that your website will show up in Google so fast your competitors will think you’re cheating.