5 Tips to Get Your Website to the Top of Google Without Paying

Google first page

PPC Advertising is costly. Spending a lot of money on AdWords or Facebook Ads to advertise your business may hurt your revenue (if not implemented in the right way). If you wish to know how to get on the first page of Google without paying, then follow these simple yet effective techniques that will show you positive results within a few weeks of implementation.

The happiest bloggers/website owners are those who generate a lot of website traffic through organic ways (search engines). Although getting more organic traffic to your website is hard, but not impossible.

I’ve seen people who made their website appear first in google search with less than 10 backlinks. Yes, you heard it right!

This is definitely possible if the Meta tags and content are optimized properly (based on the keyword competition though). Whether you’re an individual, a small or large business owner, you would love to get on the first page of google without paying, isn’t it? Well, we all do.

To be honest, Google’s first page is guaranteed ONLY IF the webpage has been optimized in the right way.

Target the long-tail keywords

Targeting the long tail keywords is one of the easiest ways to get to the top of google without paying. The search volume for long-tail keywords is not as much compared to the main keyword, but they’re worth considering.

When a user is searching with a long-tail keyword that is more specific, he is likely to be purchasing that product or service. Moreover, the competition for these keywords is much lesser compared to broad matches. So you’re likely to rank higher with these keywords in less amount of time.

Let me explain with an example: The user who searches for the keyword “internet marketing” is just looking for the meaning of this specific keyword.

Imagine you’re a service provider; in this case, you need to target the long tail keyword “internet marketing services in Hyderabad” where the user is actually looking for a service provider.  This type of keyword converts the best compared to the broad match.

Although the long-tail keywords don’t bring you much traffic, but they convert the best. It has been proven that long-tail keywords are easy to rank for, as the competition gets filtered out. This also helps your website rank higher for local search.

Optimize your Title tag with keywords

For those who don’t know what a Title tag is: it’s an HTML element that comes within the <head> section that describes what the webpage content is about.

From an SEO perspective, the Title tags are one of the most important ranking factors. Getting your website to the top of google searches is an ever-green subject and hard to obtain in a short time.

But On-Page SEO can change the game in no time. The very first thing you need to do in On-Page SEO is to focus on Title tags. The better the Title tag is, the higher your website will rank on Google search. A question may arise in your mind “how do I write a better Title for my webpage in order to rank higher on Google search?” Well, the easiest way is to use the primary keywords at the beginning of your Title tag.

Let’s take the previous example to understand in a better way: Suppose a user searches for internet marketing services in Hyderabad, the Title of your webpage on search results will appear as <title>Best Internet marketing services in Hyderabad – Your Website Name</title>

The blue clickable text that you see on the Google search results page is a Title tag. The long-tail keyword in your Title tag doesn’t just help your webpage rank on the first page but also increases the CTR (Click through Rate). Remember that the optimal title length is 50-60 characters long according to Google. Each of your website’s pages must have a unique Title tag in order to avoid any duplication.

Add LSI keywords to your content

LSI stands for Latent semantic Indexing. Using LSI keywords in your content is one of the most recommended & best practices to boost your SEO traffic.

This method is also beneficial to prevent any kind of penalties from Google.

Confused how?

The Penguin, which is Google’s core algorithm, populates and penalizes the websites/blogs that are stuffed with the same set of keywords on a webpage that is intentionally added to rank higher for that specific keyword.

This will eventually drop the rank of your website or webpage on Google’s search results page. Instead of repeating the same keyword again and again (also known as keyword stuffing), using LSI keywords in your content will make it look natural & improves the quality of the content as well.

The better your content is, the more your webpage will appear for different keywords. This will eventually boost your organic traffic. Sounds amazing, isn’t it? Well, you just need to find the best LSI keywords & add them in the content in the right place. That’s it!

If you mastered this technique, then it’s the easiest way to make your website appear first in google searches. Where can you use LSI keywords? There are multiple places where you can use LSI keywords. You can use it in Title & Meta tags, headings, anchor texts, and body content. Finding these keywords is pretty easy.

You can either try Google Keyword Planner or Google search results page to find out the best LSI keywords that are related to your main keyword.

Compress your images

Why optimizing image is a major Google ranking factor? Well, most of my clients had websites with a total page size of approximately 3 MB – 10 MB (this includes the JS files as well).  However, the images had more than 50% off that size.

Fast-loading images are extremely necessary if you wish to show up your website product images on Google image search (Do not forget to add Alt text to images). One of the most common reasons why websites don’t rank on the first page of Google is due to the slow loading time.

You need to understand that images can have a big impact on SEO if the website is loading slowly. Google loves fast websites, and so do internet users.

More than 40% of internet users leave the website if that doesn’t load within 3 seconds. Once they leave your website they will give a very bad impression and will never come back again. Reduce the file size as much as possible. There are multiple ways you can do it. I recommend you opt for these two easy ways:

  1. Choose the dimensions of your image wisely. You need to scale them based on the width of your page.
  2. You can use plugins or online tools. There are many plugins and online tools out there that can reduce the size without sacrificing the quality of your image. I personally use Smush it WordPress plugin and Tinyjpg to compress the images.

Optimize your heading tags & content with keywords

<h1> to <h6> are the heading & sub-heading tags that are used to describe the paragraphs in an organized way.

The H1 tag is one of the important ranking factors as they help search engines identity what the page content is about. Content is king. Google loves fresh and unique content. A website that gets updated regularly with unique content has a higher chance of being ranked on the first page. This doesn’t mean you will rank higher if you have a blog post of 2,000 words but lacks quality. What really matters is how good the quality of the post is. How good you are in implementing the keywords within that article.

Based on my personal experience, I’ve seen many websites ranking higher with less than 800 words whereas their competitors were having blog posts of more than 2,000 words and still lagged behind. This is why I say, the quality of the content matters the most, not the quantity!

If your blog topic has so much to talk about, then you just keep on extending more words by adding the perfect LSI keywords. This way, you will have higher chances of getting to the top of google search results.

If you own an e-commerce website, then you can implement a jQuery script to limit the text on the page with the “show more, show less” function. In addition, you can create unique content of at least 300-500 words by repeating the keyword once along with the LSI keyword. Add H1 & H2 heading tags with the keyword within them.

How long will it take to see the results reflected on Google search?

Well, it takes time. It may take a week or two or even a month. This depends on multiple factors, i.e. if you have a sitemap installed on your website or not, whether your blog is updated on regular basis with fresh content, how good your internal structure is, etc. You may fetch the edited webpage manually through the Google search console & request for indexing. If you are confused about how to get to the top of Google search results without paying a penny, then you can simply follow these tips and check the results yourself.