3 Advanced Ways to Increase Your Google Ranking

Three months ago, I posted “3 Instant Ways to Increase Your Google Ranking”. This article discussed three effective and straightforward methods for boosting your website’s organic traffic on Google:

Creating content (E.g., Hosting a blog)
Improving the webpage quality (Performance, accessibility, etc.)
Creating backlinks

These three things are the cornerstone of being a factor for search engines in the first place. Every website should focus on these three points before moving on to more advanced topics, which we will look at in this article.

1. Increase Credibility and Trustworthiness

Just like you don’t like calls from unknown and dubious numbers, Google doesn’t like websites that look untrustworthy. Instead, Google ensures that users are directed to high-quality and trustworthy sources of information.

Have you ever wanted to buy something online, and the store seemed untrustworthy? How did you proceed? You probably searched for online reviews. Maybe you looked at the website's imprint to search for contact details. Or maybe you just googled “Is store XY trustworthy?”.

That’s how you can imagine how Google distinguishes dubious from serious websites. When Google crawls a web page, it evaluates various aspects to determine its trustworthiness.

If a website is only two weeks old, has no imprint, advertising popups virtually slay you, and users leave the site immediately — Then this is probably a very untrustworthy website. Consequently, Google will rank it further down in future results.

On the other hand, if a website is already ten years old, the domain is registered with contact details, users regularly spend a lot of time there, and it links different social media channels with thousands of followers — Then the website can be trusted, and Google will rank it higher.

It follows that you can do these things to increase the trustworthiness of your website:

Contact information: Make sure to have valid contact information on your website, including an email address, phone number, and physical address. This allows users to reach you and gives Google the image of a reputable website. Also, having a clear and easy-to-understand privacy policy and terms of service on your website can help establish trust and transparency with users and Google.
Age of website: The age of a website is essential. If you start from scratch, the most obvious way is to wait. But you could also consider buying an already trustworthy domain to give yourself a head start.
Social Proof: While Google states that social media is not directly contributing to SEO ranking, it can still contribute to your brand exposure and trustworthiness. Having links to your social media accounts on your website shows Google that your website can be trusted.
Security: Having a secure website (HTTPS, SSL) is a must-have for Google. Not having an SSL-secured website will give you a significant disadvantage.
Domain Registry: Make sure your domain is registered with the same contact details as it is stated on your website. This can be checked by doing a who.is search, showing the registration information for a specific domain.
Professional Design: Avoid using too many pop-ups and intrusive ads, and make sure the website loads fast. This will not only increase the trustworthiness of your website but also the user’s experience, which we will look closer at in the next section.

2. Improve User Experience

Now we’ll turn our attention to one of the most important topics of all. We want our users to have a great experience on our website to make them stay as long as possible.

Many points in this article go together, and you can not clearly separate them. Improving user experience will naturally increase the trustworthiness of your site — because if many people use the site for a long time, then Google concludes that the site can be trusted.

Page speed

Making sure your website loads fast is probably the most important thing you can do to improve your site's user experience. Users are less likely to stay on a website that takes a long time to load.

Walmart reported that for every 1 second of improvement in page load time, they saw a 2% increase in conversions.

Additionally, a study by Google found that 53% of mobile users will leave a website that takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

Ensure that your website loads fast by using techniques like minifying code, lazy-loading, caching, and optimizing images.

Navigation & Semantic HTML

Make sure your website is easy to navigate. This is important not only for your users. Also, Google must be able to navigate your website.

Using correct semantic HTML elements can be the first step to making your website accessible for Google and people with disabilities who rely on screen readers or other tools.

Semantic elements = elements with a meaning.” — w3schools.com

While non-semantic elements like <div> and <span> tell nothing about its content, semantic elements like <button> , <nav>or <table> clearly describe its meaning to both the browser and the developer. There are roughly 100 semantic elements available.

#1 Example — Buttons

Theoretically, we can make every HTML element look like anything we want. Let’s look at two buttons:

They look entirely the same, don’t they?

They look the same, but the difference is that we can use the second button by keyboard, finger, voice command, or other assistive technology.

Why is that? Let’s look at the HTML:

You can see that the markup of our buttons looks different. The first one uses a div and the second a button tag. The corresponding CSS is just making the parts look the same.

Using the <button> tag for our second button automatically gives our page built-in accessibility features. Those features are missing from the other div button.

#2 Navigation

Let’s have a look at another example. Many websites contain HTML code like this to indicate navigation, header, and footer:

But, there are HTML semantic elements we should use instead: <nav> , <header> , and <footer> . Here is, for example, the semantic meaning of the <header> element by quoting from MDN:

“The <header> HTML element represents introductory content, typically a group of introductory or navigational aids. It may contain some heading elements but also a logo, a search form, an author name, and other elements.”
That is how our website should look like using semantic elements:

That is how our website should look like using semantic elements:

Having this structure automatically gives our page built-in accessibility features and enables search engines like Google to access our website easily.

3. Keyword Research

Posting good content regularly is the first step. Maybe you have already set up a blog, as described in the first article, and regularly post good content on your website. By doing this, you are already 90% ahead of all websites.

Identify your target audience

Now it’s about posting not only good content but content for people your target audience cares about.

After all, there’s no point in posting great articles about the best soccer shoes if you’re selling tennis rackets.
Identify your target audience and create content around it. Consider demographics, interests, and pain points. This will help you identify the keywords they are likely to search for.

Use keyword research tools

Several keyword research tools, such as Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Moz, can help you identify relevant keywords for your website. These tools provide you with data about search volume, competition, and potential traffic for specific keywords. Personally, I use Ahrefs.

Even though the free version of Ahrefs is very limited, it still provides important insights into my organic keywords. It provides a table of all the keywords on my website. You can sort them by:

Volume: An estimation of the number of searches for a keyword over the latest month.
Keyword difficulty (KD): Keyword Difficulty estimates how hard it is to rank in the top 10 organic search results for a keyword on a 100-point scale.
Cost per Click (CPC): Keyword Difficulty gives an estimation of how hard it is to rank in the top 10 organic search results for a keyword on a 100-point scale
Traffic: Keyword Difficulty gives an estimation of how hard it is to rank in the top 10 organic search results for a keyword on a 100-point scale
Position: Keyword Difficulty gives an estimation of how hard it is to rank in the top 10 organic search results for a keyword on a 100-point scale
Here are my top 20 organic keywords sorted by Position:

Looking at the overview, it’s clear that the keywords “web highlighter”, “highlighter online”, and “online highlighter extension” are the most important for my PDF & Web Highlighter Chrome extension. For these keywords, web-highlights.com ranks in position 2–4. But it wasn’t always like this. Unfortunately, Ahrefs free plan does not include the position history chart. But you would see that in the last month, I focused on getting those keywords to the top.

Identify keywords with high potential

Now you know for which keywords you rank best. It’s time to identify the most relevant keywords for your target audience.

My general process looks like this: I sort my keywords for position and go down the table. Then I look at relevant keywords for my target audience. Furthermore, I look at keywords with high volume and moderate difficulty. Then I focus on creating quality content around those keywords on my website. By doing this, you will quickly see results.

One important note: The “keyword stuffing” strategy, where you just bluntly pack all the keywords on your website may have worked decades ago but is nowadays penalized by Google. In fact, it can actually harm your rankings. Instead, try to incorporate your keywords naturally into your content without overdoing it.
It’s also important to remember that keyword research is an ongoing process. Continuously monitoring and optimizing your website’s content and meta tags to ensure they match your target audience's interests and search intent will help you stay ahead of the curve and rank highly in search engines.

Final Thoughts

Google wants to have legit and trustworthy sites at the top. Therefore, make sure to focus on increasing your website’s credibility and trustworthiness. Also, improving your user experience will not only benefit your users, but it will also positively affect your SEO ranking. Finally, conducting thorough keyword research and incorporating the right keywords into your content can help drive targeted traffic to your website.