Knowing how to position yourself on Google for free is perhaps one of the best kept secrets, since it literally depends on an algorithm from a multi-million dollar company that barely reveals such information.
I have been doing this for 5 years now and through experience I have found everything.
Blogs and businesses that I have successfully positioned on Google:
And many other websites where I have not been able to do it:
To date I have created: 54 websites or businesses and 6 years have passed since I started in this world of SEO.
So to put together this post I sat down to think what were and are those SEO positioning rules or those strategies that have differentiated the successful blogs and businesses that I have created, from those others where I have failed.
Why did some websites get a lot of traffic and others not? What factors were those that achieved these results? What things could I have done differently?
In this content you will find literally everything you need to:
- Position your website in Google with the correct strategy.
- Understand which things are important and which are not.
- Focus only on what generates results.
Let's get started!
How to position yourself in Google? (Step by Step)
Let's start with the tour so you can position your website in the first places of Google without paying.
1. Being smarter than the rest
It is very important to have the right mindset and psychologically understand everything that goes into doing SEO.
SEO is a medium-long term game, there is no doubt about that.
It is not a method to become a millionaire in 6 months, doing SEO is a profitable business that can generate many conversions, and yes, of course there are people who have become millionaires with this, but since it is a medium and long-term journey, you must enjoy the process so that it truly bears fruit.
The magic of SEO is in making the least possible effort in terms of time and resources to obtain the highest possible results.
The first mistake of all the people who get into this is to want to attack incorrect keywords.
I made this mistake myself with my first digital marketing blog.
I concentrated my efforts on ranking for the keyword “digital marketing”, a word as generic as it is competitive, ignoring the other keywords that are real opportunities to get traffic:
The first recommendation that I can give you is to start your keyword research with one or several generic seed words and from there, investigate as much as possible all the other possible combinations that originate.
For that you can use tools like Keyword Shitter , Ahrefs , Semrush and KW Finder .
2. Keyword Research to the extreme
The keyword research or search for keywords is one of the most important processes to be able to position a web page in Google.
Why?
Because finding the perfect opportunities and the ideal keywords will allow you to move faster towards the goal than your competitors.
To find your most relevant keywords you should ask yourself:
- What is my website about and what do I want to offer?
When you have that result you will ask yourself the following:
- What keywords would I like to appear for? If you had to pay Google Ads for keywords… which ones would you pay for?
For this I always like to go to concrete example cases.
This blog in which you are reading the content seeks to be the SEO blog that solves absolutely all your queries about SEO.
So if you were to pay for keywords these would be:
- seo tools
- seo audit
- what is seo
- learn seo
- seo courses
- seo statistics
- seo consultant
- ahrefs
- how to position my website
And many other keywords.
This is how for each of those keywords I have generated content that answers that query, and this is how traffic is obtained.
Recommended posts to delve into keyword research:
- How to do a keyword research?
- The best SEO tools on the market
3. The weaknesses of your competition
The problem with keywords is that everyone sticks with the same keywords as the competition.
Precisely to work more intelligently, we must also find those keyword gems that our competitors have not found.
For that we can use several SEO tools and it takes a nice investigation, but I will give you an example.
Let's say I want to position myself in the coffee niche and I find a list of several competitors searching for a generic keyword such as "types of coffee" among them are:
- cafemalist.com
- cafesexpress.net
- cafesabora.com
- quecafe.info
Using a tool such as Ahrefs , I analyze the profile of each of my competitors:
According to the Ahrefs tool, cafesabora is positioned for 11,500 keywords.
Going into more detail we can see all the keywords for which the page is currently positioned and on the right we can see what content it has created to do so.
This is a good start to start with our keyword research and also to check at a quick glance:
- Which keywords are the most coveted and competitive.
- What estimated search volume each keyword has.
- According to my approach I can determine which keywords interest me the most and which ones do not.
4. Find valuable keywords
The funniest thing about all this is that we are not only finding the content that our website has to have as a priority, but we can also try to find those diamonds in the rough that our competition is not taking advantage of.
Lately I always tell the same story, but with my coffee blog I discovered a keyword that according to SEO tools had no or very little traffic.
Despite this, I made a content about that keyword.
Result: The content generates me an average of 1,000 clicks on average.
What I want to convey is that not even the best positioning tools can accurately determine the clicks you are going to receive for a keyword, that is where creativity comes into play to find those diamonds in the rough ready to be exploited.
5. Content assets
What are content assets?
The assets or resources are the elements that will help you create a differential with your content, and this differential will help you increase the CTR and therefore position yourself better in Google.
A content asset can be:
- A downloadable PDF
- an ebook
- An info product
- an exclusive gift
- Anything that gives value to the user who made that query.
To translate it into examples, the word “seo audit” is very competitive and for a long time I was in the first places for that search.
All thanks to this:
I include a free template that people can download, and also a PDF, that is, I give 2 gifts.
These types of differentials are what separate you from the competition in the SERP's and help you position yourself in Google.
Think for each of your content how you can make it a unique piece that is difficult to replicate.
6. Detect search intent
Many times when we want to create new content, we ignore the fact of investigating the SERP's to understand what search intent is behind a query.
That is a very big mistake.
If we want to position ourselves in Google, we must know for sure what the user expects to find.
Many of those times, we overlook it because we think we understand the intention behind a certain keyword or search.
However, it is always important to check within Google the results that the queries in question return.
This has the main purpose of being able to understand what the search engine understands about what the user intends to find when performing a certain search.
This might sound a bit muddled, so I'm going to do an example so you can get a better grasp of it.
Imagine that I enter the word "motorcycle" in the search engine and as you can see in the image, the SERP's show different types of results:
- The definition of motorcycle, related questions about differences between motorcycle and moped, who created the first motorcycle. All of them informative
- Google My Business listings of local businesses that sell motorcycles, which have a navigational search intent
- Results of companies that sell motorcycles, Honda, Yamaha, which are commercial.
On the other hand, if I search for "buy yamaha xmax 125" the results will be purely transactional, since I go with the intention of buying that particular motorcycle.
By understanding search intent we can profile our content towards success and towards the top of Google.
Without this it will be very difficult to position yourself.
7.EAT
EAT in English means eating, although this acronym does not mean exactly that, the truth is that we must "eat" the competition and be an expert, authoritative and reliable site in the subject we work on.
Expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, is the English meaning of these letters. Translated as experience, authority and reliability.
That said, today positioning niches can be much more work than years ago. Not only that, but many times poorly made niches die at the same time or even before they are born.
Our goal should be to create sites that are "experts" on the subject, that have authority -mainly obtained with links- and that we are reliable for the community and our target audience.
How is it achieved?
There are some essential elements to be a reference site in your sector:
- Very complete content, studied and better than the competition
- Get quality links from industry reference sites
- The publication of contributions of constant value
- Use references and data with reliable sources
The EAT is not a ranking factor by itself, yet it is one of the things that will make your site rank and keep it there for many years.
Create a trusted site with patience and you will see results in the medium and long term.
8. Core Web Vitals
If I say LCP, FID and CLS you may think of medications or recreational drugs. No doubt that their names give to imagine it.
The Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay and Commulative Layout Shift are the three elements that make up the Core Web Vitals measurement of your website by Google.
This set of indices that attempt to measure the user experience of a navigator on a website is a very important positioning factor for Google.
Increasingly, the search engine prioritizes a good user experience to position its content... or not at all.
That is why the loading speed and the correct optimization of our content or pages will help us climb positions in the SERP's.
The LCP translated as Deployment of the largest content, in simple words is how long it takes the url to load its largest content, be it an image, a hero, a video or whatever.
The FID whose meaning in Spanish is Delay of the first entry, is the time it takes for a user to be able to interact with our website.
For example, the time it takes to click on a link or menu item.
Finally, the CLS, Cumulative design change, considers how stable our website is in its loading process.
That all the elements load correctly, without big jumps and in their place is a good omen that our CLS is adequate.
If you want to delve into the subject, I recommend my post Guide to Core Web Vitals and what they are .
The important thing to take away from this point is that you should not ignore the importance of CWV and loading speed within the SEO of a website.
That is why when you get to point 11 you will see more about the loading speed.
9. Google My Business for SEO
Every time the North American company executes an Update in its algorithm, it tends more and more to correctly discern the pages that add value from those that do not.
Increasingly, the aforementioned EAT and the quality of our content are playing a more relevant role.
Google tries more and more to bring the answer closer to the user in the most logical and appropriate way possible.
For this reason, the computer giant increasingly bases its positions on an algorithm that, in addition to providing the best answers, also provides security and confidence to the user they are looking for.
This is where Google My Business enters the world of SEO.
Here you can see the GMB file of my digital marketing agency. In it you will be able to observe the address, reviews, photographs, the website, useful information and much more.
Let's think of it this way: My website has a physical location somewhere real. In the eyes of Google or any person, it will be more credible, therefore more relevant.
If we add to that that we will receive reviews from real people, that we can leave our contact number, that we can include photos and images, and of course our address, then GMB becomes a key tool in digital marketing.
The truth is that learning to use GMB is nothing to write home about, but even so, handling it correctly, continuously and professionally may take us a lot of time that we don't have.
It is in this framework that incredible tools such as Local Viking arise .
With this tool you will be able to connect all your GMB listings, schedule new posts in each of the listings, track the local ranking for your keywords, edit and synchronize our Google My Business accounts in one place.
You can also program images to be uploaded to your files, create reports and much more.
I recommend you try it, if you have your business in GMB and if not, what are you waiting for to create your file in Google My Business?
You also have this post that helps you create your GMB profile and everything you need to know about this fantastic free Google tool.
10. Schema Markup
When we talk about Schema or structured data, we refer to an HTML code that is inserted into our website.
Said like this, it has nothing interesting or unusual, however this code will make our results in Google's SERPS stand out from our competition.
Not only that, but also the Schema makes Google understand what our website is about.
There are many types of Schema that we can place on our website. There are also plugins dedicated to it exclusively like All In One Schema Rich Snippets or Schema App Structured Data , as well as plugins that have it built into their arsenal of utilities like Rank Math .
Some of the different types of structured data that we usually find more frequently are: Articles, events, people, local businesses, recipes, reviews, videos, organizations, products, restaurants, books , courses and many more.
In this image we clearly see the Recipe Schema in Google search results.
Tailor your Schema Markup to the type of business or niche you have, and let Google do the rest.
Note: Here I also leave you a content that shows you all the rich snippets that Google has available to us.
11. Load speed
How to position yourself in Google with a slow website?
Quite complicated.
The loading speed is extremely important for the user experience and also for Google.
It is estimated that most users leave a website after 5 seconds without loading, and that the ideal would be a loading speed of less than 3 seconds.
We don't have to be so drastic if our website doesn't load like lightning in less than 1 second, nor do we get 100 all the results on our WPO, but we still have to optimize it to try that no user returns to the SERP' yes
Since 2018, loading speed has become an important ranking factor for Google. That is why we should not leave it aside and overload our site with too many codes or plugins.
Nor should we be obsessed with it, there is no point in getting a 100 in PageSpeed Insight and that our content has 0 in quality and value.
If you want to delve deeper into WPO and loading speed, I recommend you visit the WordPress loading speed guide.
12. Title and header optimization
To position your articles in Google, it is essential that they have a consistent structure that benefits crawling, indexing and classification by the algorithm.
For this, it is essential that our posts manage to have organized and useful content that favors the user experience.
One of the most important points when it comes to positioning a post is the correct use of headers or Hs within it and also a correct use of the SEO title.
So that the optimization of titles gives us a plus in our positioning and not the other way around, it is important to highlight some points.
12.1 Use of keywords in the SEO title
The headers must coincide with the most important keywords that we want to position and are one of the keys to knowing how to position ourselves in Google.
If in our post we are going to talk about the benefits of coffee, the ideal would be that our H1 just mentions the words “Benefits of coffee”.
Example: 16 best benefits of coffee: What are they? (2021)
12.2 Hierarchy of headers
It is logical that if we want to talk about the benefits of coffee, our H1 (one per post) is Benefits of coffee.
However, later we can delve into other Hs, such as "Benefits of coffee in the morning" "Benefits of black coffee" "Benefits of preparing ground coffee" among others.
Titles should always go from the main keyword to less important keywords.
12.3 Titles and headings: short and attractive
A title with many words bores even the most interested and not only that, but it will also sometimes make it ambiguous, due to its lack of punctuation or syntax.
Optimizing a title for SEO requires saving words that don't add up, using the keyword correctly and avoiding confusing Google bots and the user. keep it simple!
13. Internal linking
Many times to position ourselves, it is enough to take some relevant actions that allow us to pass our competition.
However, it is also true that when there are strong competitors in the SERPs, you have to optimize and optimize as much as possible, to get that head start on your rivals.
Internal linking is important for several factors that are relevant:
- Improves the user experience, being able to refer you to other relevant posts that may be of interest to you
- Help Google to crawl our website and improve indexing. A correct interlinking helps the spiders to follow a logical sequence and to know all the urls of our website that we are interested in positioning.
- It helps to give relevance to the urls that interest us the most. As a general rule, the URLs that receive the most internal links are the most important. Therefore, Google will prioritize your content over others.
If we want to position our site, it is essential to have a logical order in our internal linking.
There are many schools to determine a correct interlinking, there are those who prefer to link in a 100% natural way, others from the easiest to position to the most difficult, others in a mixed way...
It is important that when choosing a style or creating your own personal style, always follow the same guidelines on the web. Do not mix randomly as that can be quite confusing for the user, for Google and also for you.
14. Content relevance
Relevant, reliable content that responds to the search intentions of users is one of the most decisive things when it comes to being able to position.
For this, it is good to ask yourself some questions:
- Am I responding to the user's search intent?
- Is my content so complete that the user does not need to go to other results?
- Do I provide a good user experience?
- Do I know what I am talking about or am I using reliable and authoritative sources?
- Is my content original?
- Do I use the keywords that I intend to position correctly?
- Is the content relevant and purposeful to my website?
- Is it an interesting and evergreen topic?
These are just some of the questions I ask myself when creating content that is relevant to users… and to search engines.
To outperform the competition, you must create more complete content, with better sources and information, that respond to what the user intends to find and finally that manage to stay up there over time.
Spend as much time as possible thinking about and structuring your content, and then craft it smartly and neatly.
15. Audit your website
It turns out that you have created great content, original, unique, and yet for some reasons your niche does not finish climbing.
It could be that there are many factors for which this is happening and it is important for us to be able to know where those inconveniences are that do not allow us to scale.
Many times when doing a web audit we will realize that we have many links that throw 404, long redirect chains, urls with no index or no follow that we want to position, positioned urls that we would like to have in no index, and an endless number of possible errors. plus.
Auditing the website allows us to know in detail what the errors are on our website and correct them so that it gains health, which can benefit from being promoted in the rankings.
There are different ways to audit a website, with Screaming Frog, Ahrefs , Semrush , manually if our website is small.
If you want to learn much more about it, I leave you this great article I did on how to do SEO audits.
16.Smart Link Building
Is getting links very important?
Yes.
Should you do it for your niches?
Also.
The difference is knowing when to do it and when not to.
Many SEO beginners choose to do everything that has to do with SEO at the same time, that is, they create a website and they already want to get links, buy content, buy backlinks , sign up for courses and know absolutely everything. And hence they do a million actions at the same time.
SEO has to be strategic, there must be a strategy . You can't do everything at the same time, there have to be priorities.
That is why link building should be left aside in the first instance until you ensure the content and promotion strategy of the same that allows you to get traffic. From there you will have time to put strong link building.
17. Use SurferSEO
How to position yourself in Google if we do not know where we are failing?
Luckily to solve this there is Surfer SEO.
Surfer SEO is one of the best tools to optimize content.
How do I know?
Because I myself use it to ultra-optimize my content and increase positions in Google for the keywords that I am most interested in positioning, both in NichoSEO and also in my niches (and I have also applied it successfully on client websites).
The tool literally tells you what keywords you should include in your content for it to rank.
18. Tracking and re-optimization
Many times in SEO when someone talks about tracking they refer to checking that the content we create attacks the keywords we want in a good way and that, over time, our ranking in the SERPs goes up.
However, in my opinion, that is not enough. Post-optimization tracking is also necessary.
In the previous point we talked about SurferSEO, a tool that is used to optimize content, so now what we should do is check if this optimization has positive effects.
For this, there are A/B testing tools such as SEOTesting that allow you to test in an orderly manner if certain changes have positive or negative effects on content.
I leave you a review of the tool in case you are interested in knowing it in depth.
19. That the hosting and the domain are not a problem
I have repeated it possibly more than 100 times, but you cannot let your hosting be a limitation for your website to grow.
Use trustworthy hosting like: Siteground , Namehero or Cloudways .
Also buy your domain on trusted websites such as: Ionos , Siteground or Domain.com .
Sometimes it is worth paying a little more to hire a better hosting that has a better server load speed and save headaches with bad hostings that do not provide you with solutions tailored to your needs.
Conclusions on how to position yourself in Google
The number of seos, of companies dedicated to this, of new tools, of the continuous improvement of Google's neural network, and clearly of the immense number of niches, have made positioning a website much more difficult than when I started a few years.
That does not mean that positioning yourself in Google is impossible.
On the contrary, SEO is a discipline that manages to show its fruits in the long term.
Before it was possible to create a website and in a few months it will generate an attractive amount of money, but today that requires more effort.
If we want to have passive earnings and a site that remains in the top positions over time, it will not be possible to do it any other way.
We must create better content, do an adequate and professional keyword research, structure the categories and articles of our blog well, optimize and re-optimize the content, understand the search intent and try to be an EAT site are things that we must try to achieve.
It is also essential to be constant in the process. Without discipline there will be no possible results.
We must focus on improving day by day, both in our knowledge, tools, alliances and in our actions, since without them nothing can be achieved.
What do you usually do to position that has not been named? Do you have a plan that guarantees results in most cases? Tell me in the comments.
Top comments (0)