How to get on Google’s first page organically

How to get on Google’s first page organically is a tedious job that often feels like you have to pay to appear there which is not really the case. 

75% of users do not scroll past the first results page which is why you can’t afford to be on the 2nd or 3rd or 10th page.

This depends on so many factors like, the quality of content you produce on your website, how good you are at SEO and how much content there is. In this article, I share with you some easy tips on how to get to google’s first page with illustrations.

Conduct long tail keyword research

Web visitors are constantly changing the words they use to search for a company or product they want information on. In order to narrow the search, they use more words to find exactly what they are looking for. These are called long tail keywords.

For example, instead of typing in, “nonprofits that support children in Uganda” , they instead will most likely type, “small nonprofits that support children in Kololo, Uganda.” 

What to do:

1. Use tools like SEMRush to help you do keyword research, track keyword positions and monitor what words your competitors are using.

2. Optimize your SEO by adding exact locations and web pages to use more keywords in your headlines and sub headlines because these are the words that Google crawls when bringing search results. 

Produce top quality content 

Many modern websites these days run a blog too but oftentimes, organisations do not update the blog page regularly. When they do, the content is not well written and Google automatically disqualifies such pages. Once the words are not readable, it won’t crawl the page. 

What to do:

1. Hire a good writer to write compelling and grammatically correct stories for your blog page. 
2. Get to the backend of your wordpress blog and login. Go to posts > all posts and hover over the article title you want to edit, then click edit. Scroll to the very end and check the readability status of your blog. Restructure your sentences until they are unhighlighted.

Write meta descriptions for your pages and blogs

Make sure your pages and blogs have meta descriptions. A meta description is an HTML element that describes and summarizes the contents of your page for the benefit of users and search engines. 

It draws readers to a website from the SERP (Search Engine Results Page), and attracts them to click on your article or page. That’s why you must invest time in creating these tags because they are an important part of search marketing. 

A compelling meta description has the power to raise the click-through rate of your organic search results. That means more of the people who see your page in the search results will actually click through and land on your site. That means more traffic for you, even if your ranking stays the same.

What to do

1. Make sure your website was built with SEO. If not, contact your web design agency to purchase an SEO plugin for you. There are also free plugins although they provide limited options. 
2. On your blog posts, click article by article to edit and improve SEO. If you’re using word press, scroll to the very end of the article and choose a focus key phrase first. This key phrase is what a web user might type in. 
3. Don’t use too many words and try to repeatedly use the focus keyword that you have chosen. If it lights in green, it means it’s good to go. 

Add alt text to images when possible 

Alt text is the written copy that appears in place of an image on a webpage if the image fails to load on a user’s screen. This text helps screen-reading tools describe images to visually impaired readers and allows search engines to better crawl and rank your website.

What to do

1. Add an alt text

In most content management systems (CMSs), clicking on an image in the body of a blog post produces an image optimization, where you can create and change the image’s alt text.

In WordPress, when you upload a featured image for example, you’re given an option to add an alt text. Ultimately, image alt text needs to be specific but also representative of the topic of the webpage it is supporting. 

2. Use effective image alt text with SEO 

• Describe the image, and be specific. Use both the image’s subject and context to guide you.
• Keep your alt text fewer than 125 characters. 
• Don’t start alt text with “picture of…” or “Image of…” Jump right into the image’s description. Google will identify it as an image from the article’s HTML source code.
• Use your keywords where possible, but sparingly. Only include your article’s target keyword if it’s easily included in your alt text. For example, if your article’s focus keyword is “Unique Christmas campaign,” and you have a photo of a Save the Children Christmas poster, you might use “Save the Children Christmas campaign poster” in your alt text too. 
• Don’t cram your keyword into every single image’s alt text. Identify the image you think is most representative of your topic, and assign it your keyword. Stick to more authentic descriptions for the photo. 

Go ahead and apply those tips and watch to see how your organic traffic changes among the pages or blog posts that you optimize. It might be frustrating at first but the more you practice, the better your SEO gets, click-through-rate and rankings.