By Oliver Brainerd
Robots are your friends when you want to get a higher google ranking. That’s not a joke. Successful digital marketing, like all marketing, is measured by how successfully it turns people into your loyal fans. When it comes to digital marketing, robots serve as gatekeepers to the attention of people. In this context, most of the most significant robots are controlled by Google.
Google uses an awful lot of machine learning and artificial intelligence to build ever-evolving, almost organic algorithms. These algorithms imitate human attention and take their cues from human interests. They are robots, and they are designed to learn from your behaviors and, in theory, find you what you’re looking for before you start looking for it.
Wherefore! Figuring out how to get a higher google ranking is a question of figuring out how to make friends with Google’s robots. This means cunning manipulation of their instincts (Google analytics), it means bribing them (Google ads), and it means reacting to the behavior of the robots (through analyzing Google trends).
Mastering your relationship with robots is the answer to these important questions:
- How to get my business on top of Google search…
- How to rank for a keyword fast…
- How to rank higher in organic search
- How to get a higher Google ranking…
Fortunately for you, we know a few trade tricks, and we are happy to tell you some of them.
First, some definitions. Tools are far easier to use when you know what they’re called.
Google Analytics (Analytics)
When people interact with digital content, it produces data. When that data is actionable, in the marketing business we call it analytics. The raw data has had a cursory and usually automatic analysis done on it before we start using it, and at that point, we can do further analysis. Analytics.
Google Analytics in particular is data collected by Google. They include data like…
- Demographic information
- Search behaviors – what sites they visit, how long they visit, terms searched for, etc.
We use these data analytics to keep our marketing teams informed. Informed marketing teams can make better strategic marketing decisions. In particular, Google analytics data can help marketing teams make decisions about using Google algorithms in their favor.
Google Ads (Ads)
When you pay a marketing team to run your digital marketing, your budget, basically, goes into two buckets:
- Their talent, including their design skills, their knowledge of market trends and realities and human behavior, etc.
- And ad spend
We can pay Google to float our advertisements in front of the faces of more people. Not only that, through the application of analytics, it is possible to design campaigns that show up in front of specific faces. We design automation to do it. This is a useful thing for business owners and marketers alike. So many people instinctively visit Google for so many of their daily tasks, it is a good place to run advertisements.
Google Trends (Trends)
Trend data is in the toolbox of a digital marketing professional. Similar to Google analytics data, Google trends data is data gathered by Google from user behavior. Where Google Analytics is a data set empowering you to look at how users are behaving on the internet in general, trend data takes a more holistic approach to how the whole world, in general, is using Google right now.
We’ve all heard that term: “in trending news”, or “it’s trending”. These variations on a theme refer to the data Google gathers. You can take a look at what people are paying attention to right now. Another valuable thing for marketing professionals to take into consideration when they build marketing strategies.
How to Get a Higher Google Ranking (Support)
There is one simple trick to ranking higher on Google: throw a massive budget at ad spend. That is a sure-fire way to create a spike in your traffic.
That has its drawbacks. A massive budget doesn’t work by itself, and in fact, it might not be the most effective long-term strategy for raising your Google rankings.
Creating long-term and effective results in raising your Google ranking is more complicated. There’s a science to it, which is good news. It isn’t luck, and it isn’t just messing around. There’s an effective way to get a higher Google ranking organically.
Like any other science, there’s a lot that I could potentially say about it. I’ll do a really fast overview to give you an idea.
The first step to an effective strategy to get higher rankings in Google is…
- Have a strategy.
Algorithms are methodical. Your approach has to be methodical too. The “best practice” changes every year, since the algorithms are adaptive. So creating an organized plan of attack and basing it on current research is the best first step. Have a strategy.
Next.
- Figure out your keywords.
Get your keywords figured out. Every industry has terms unique to it as well, and this is the important thing, terms people believe relate to it. Google uses industry-specific terms in its algorithmic sorting. Pepper all your digital marketing material with industry-appropriate terms.
Suppose you have a term that you would like associated with your brand. It might not be industry-specific, but it’s important to your brand. When you need to figure out how to rank for a keyword fast, there is a strategy for making a term rank in Google. This strategy essentially consists of couching that term in a network of terms related to your industry and business. (WordStream) Google responds to behaviors. Build the behaviors, they will come.
Then…
- Get your branding solid.
Since Google responds to consistency, maintaining a consistent face for Google helps your rankings.
The Hundred Thousand Foot View of Marketing
That’s the zillion-foot view of digital marketing. Knowing how to rank higher in organic searches is simple.
- Have a strategy.
- Use keywords well.
- Solid branding.
It’s simple…but it ain’t easy. You can do it. It’s like building a better computer: anyone CAN do it.
So you can do it. Or, you know, you can look into outsourcing it.
(Plug, plug.)
Make friends with robots. That’s the key takeaway. If you want to know more about how to get ranked and don’t want to do it yourself, reach out to us for a free consultation.