How to Rank Higher on Google: 12 Effective Techniques for Success

People are looking for answers and solutions to their pain points online, but are they looking for you? As high as 93% of all web traffic comes through search engines, and 68% of online experiences start with a search engine. That means businesses must be proactive in their attempt to capture users’ attention and provide relevant answers to their search engine queries. And the way to get there is through search engine optimization (SEO).

To help you learn how to rank higher on Google so people can first see your instead of competitors’ offerings, we’ve put together these 12 effective SEO strategies. 

1. Understanding Google Rankings

The first step in ranking higher on Google involves understanding the ranking process. Contrary to popular belief, the sheer volume of content or keyword packing actually hurts, rather than helps, a site’s SEO ranking criteria. Google has vastly reworked its algorithms (and continues to update them regularly) to prioritize relevant and valuable content. To succeed at Google, focus on providing information users need and want, aligning with their algorithm.

Your website pages must: 

• Deliver the information your audience needs when they make the search query
• Answer customers’ questions effectively and accurately
• Act as a funnel for visitors to turn into paying customers of your product

Search crawlers use algorithms to measure the usefulness of a website based on these and other factors. They’ll raise or decrease your site’s ranking based on them, which can have either a very positive or very negative impact on your business performance, to say the least. As such, it’s vital to get SEO right if you intend to conduct any business on the internet. 

2. Keyword Research and Optimization

Knowing buyer intent is the most important factor when choosing your keywords. Who is your customer, and what makes them more likely to buy a product? For instance, a small business looking for help with SEO may look for a company that’s “experienced” or has specific industry knowledge. Let this inform your keyword strategy so that your keywords grow in specificity and target the exact customer you want. 

You’re not seeking a generic “buyer.” You’re searching for the specific person who needs your services at this very moment.

Widely available keyword optimizers like Google Search Console or SemRush can help broaden the net and actually reel in some valuable fish. You can use these tools to conduct keyword research to get an idea of what words and phrases your desired customer base is using. To do this effectively, try the following: 

• Focus your effort on long-tail keywords that elevate specificity.
• Build authority with low-difficulty keywords before shooting for more competitive ones.
• Examine the keywords your competitors are using and look for areas they’re not focusing on yet. 

Don’t forget transactional keywords or words used that clearly signal the buyer’s intent. For example, are your target customers searching for “affordable shoes?” It likely means they’ve already decided to buy if the price is right.

3. On-Page SEO Techniques

You can employ several methods to improve the SEO of individual website pages. For starters, each website’s keywords must be organic and aligned with that website’s purpose. It’s neither sufficient nor efficient to have generic content on websites—fluff websites can actually hurt your SEO rather than help it. Understand what each website page is meant to do and supply it with relevant keywords for achieving that goal. 

There’s a concept in SEO called LSI, or Latent Semantic Indexing. It’s a kind of passive keyword optimization method that contextually joins different keywords (including long-tail phrases) together into a more systematic whole. In other words, it’s the entire verbal and holistic “message content” of a website. Contextually relevant keywords can gather more “hits” from the algorithm over time, which increases the odds of search crawlers linking to your site.

You can accomplish this by: 

• Writing shorter, more readable paragraphs that facilitate skimming and include LSI keywords embedded into the content
• Using large, germane, and interesting subheadings framed around your keywords
• Including bulleted lists for specific keywords that attract the eye of both humans and site crawlers alike

Think of LSI as making your website so relevant to that specific search query that it becomes a magnet. And not just a magnet for search queries but also for featured snippets on the Google front page. To say this technique can greatly enhance your site’s visibility would be an understatement. 

4. Content Creation Strategies

Content creation is one area many businesses often get wrong. The point of content is not to bring all eyes on the internet to your site but to bring the eyes of people genuinely interested in your product who are willing to buy it. Never forget the difference between the two: the first will generate hits on your website metrics, but the second will keep you in business. The first visits once and never again, whereas the second becomes a repeat and valued customer. 

How do you turn someone into a repeated and valuable customer? By giving them value through the content you provide. That’s why your content should seek to position you as a thought leader in your industry, and that’s why it must be as far from generic as it sounds. You can achieve this by: 

• Publishing content consistently, as regular publishing intervals teach your audience what to expect from you
• Fact-checking yourself and using only trusted sources so you can become a trusted source yourself
• Linking to other respected sites in your field, as they will often reciprocate to you and help build your authority

5. Technical SEO and Performance

Technical SEO is all about the internals of the website, including: 

• Page loading speed
• Connection security
• Link integrity
• Optimizing for different displays
• Image compression

Each factor plays a vital role in your site’s performance, which further influences SEO. After all, no one wants to navigate a broken, messy website while searching for a product they need. If a prospective visitor comes onto your site and nothing loads because your Java plugins are malfunctioning, he’s going to back-click out of there right away. And you’ll lose a customer in the process. 

The way around this is to conduct regular technical audits of your website using other computers and mobile platforms. See how the website looks and feels when accessed from devices like those your customers use. This can help you see things from a fresh point of view and decide whether those flashy banner ads are worth it or not (they almost certainly are not). 

Be sure to use multiple device types during these audits. People access the web through a range of devices, and you want your website to work on as many of them as possible. 

6. Link Building and Local SEO

Link building follows closely upon content generation and making yourself into a thought leader. What motivates other sites to want to link to your website? Why, when they perceive something of value to their own readers, of course! Linking like this offers a mutually beneficial means for both of you to grow your website traffic, so it should be used as frequently as context and relevance allow. 

This also matters a great deal for local SEO. Remember, specificity is key in SEO, and few things are more specific than where someone lives. Yes, there are many plumbers and electricians in the nation, but there aren’t so many electricians from the west side of Minneapolis. Targeting local SEO traffic like this instantly narrows your specificity by several orders of magnitude. 

There are many ways to drive both your link-building and local SEO performance at the same time, such as: 

• Encouraging satisfied customers to leave glowing reviews on Yelp, Google Reviews, and other prominent platforms
• Establishing business pages with Google, Bing, and other search engines so that your brick-and-mortar headquarters appear on the map if someone searches in that area
• Getting yourself written into business-specific directories in your region

The simple goal here is to make yourself visible. This isn’t marketing—there’s no active selling of your services to needy customers here. Rather, you’re making it easy for the right people to find you.

7. Tracking and Measuring Success

Success depends on measurable performance metrics. It’s not enough to steer organic traffic your way if you don’t have any visibility into how that traffic changes over time. Your metrics should focus on highly valuable characteristics, such as: 

• Number of clicks
• Amount of highlights or impressions received in Google Search Console
• Demographics of your website visitors
• The actual behavior of users while on your site
• Bounce rates

Let’s focus on bounce rates, for example. This is a measurement of how quickly people leave a given page. If they log in and out in a matter of seconds, it could indicate something seriously unappealing with the website, such as a technical issue that must be taken care of right away. You’ll never know issues like these are even happening if you’re not regularly tracking and measuring your site’s performance. 

8. Mobile-First SEO Optimization

Mobile-first optimization is otherwise called responsive design. Your customers won’t all access your website from a single device type, so your site must work well on whatever device they use to access it. That means mobile devices, in particular, as more than half of search traffic originated on mobile devices in 2024. 

Google search crawlers are far more likely to favor mobile-friendly sites for their SEO rankings. That’s because mobile optimization broadens the number of users who can access that website and makes it easier for them to find what they’re looking for. 

A website that can work on many devices is more useful to larger groups of people, and this increases its value for search engines. Leveraging this value makes algorithms more likely to favor your site. If your SEO rankings aren’t meeting expectations, improving your mobile design choices is one of the first things to attempt.

9. Creating Evergreen Content

Evergreen content works hand-in-hand with content generation to amplify the value and performance of your website. Simply put, to be “evergreen” means to always be relevant. It’s the opposite of trend or fashion-based content that simply reacts to the latest happenings in the industry. 

The right evergreen article can generate revenue for many years to come. Examples include: 

• FAQ pages
• Guidebooks
• Tutorials for how to use your product or a product adjacent to it

There’s a tendency for evergreen content to fall by the wayside in the face of trendier content that’s perhaps more immediately relevant to your customer’s day-to-day interest. That’s not a bad thing in itself, and it has an easy fix: regular remarketing of your older and most useful content to keep it fresh at the top of the audience’s mind.

10. Leveraging Social Signals

Social signals consist of messages and interactions with your potential user base across the breadth of social media platforms you use. These include : 

• Likes
• Shares of your posts
• Comments on those posts

Social signals are an excellent way of figuring out how much attention, or “buzz,” your social media activity generates among your desired audience. The keyword here is “desired” because it’s not actually helpful to your goals if you have an audience that never purchased your product. 

You can enhance these social signals by making your social media activity more eye-catching. Try to use simple content that makes it easy for others to understand and share it. That means using high-quality images and magnetic headlines that draw eyes straight to themselves. With time, you can and will elevate the visibility and recognition of your brand.

11. Enhancing User Engagement Metrics

User engagement metrics, as the name implies, consist of several factors to gauge just how interested site visitors are in your content. This is most readily measured by the quality and quantity of their interactions with that content, especially in terms of: 

• Amount of time spent reading the page
• How long it takes for them to click on a new link
• Whether they engage with your call-to-action links
• How many pages per session they read while on your site

Pages per session, for instance, can tell you just how navigable your website is. If someone follows your website content and links in the intended order, it’s a good indicator your site logic is working. The reverse is also true, of course. 

User engagement metrics go a long way toward improving your site’s SEO performance. It can tell Google that your site is pleasant for users to interact with—and that it should favor it in rankings. 

12. Additional Tips for Success

What we’ve discussed in this article is just a small handful of the full range of SEO techniques available. You can employ many other customizable and adaptable strategies depending on the needs and scope of your business. For example, you could try: 

• Using interesting title tags or meta descriptions loaded with powerful and leading language to increase your click-through rates
• Economizing and merging different but related websites into one stronger, more cohesive package to make it more likely for crawlers to index your site and raise its rankings
• Keeping your internal and external links updated and relevant

In reality, you can never be quite finished with SEO because it’s an “optimization” process. There’s always another optimization you can make, and the ever-changing rules of search engine dynamics mean you’ll always have something about your site to modify. This process of continual refinement is how you can gradually and organically maneuver your website to the top of the rankings for your field.

Conclusion

Consistency and hard work go a long way in SEO, but working with Single Origin can help you achieve the desired results faster. We specialize in creating customized and data-fueled SEO solutions for businesses of all sizes. Contact us today to take your first step to higher search rankings.