Google will only show the top 3 Google Maps business listings on the front page of Google, or letters A, B, or C – this is sometimes referred to as the “3 pack”. Prior to their update in 2015, Google displayed up to 7 Google Maps business listings, or letters A – G, and these were commonly referred to as the “7 pack”. You be wondering how to find the geographic center of a city, as this is a question I used to ask quite frequently.

If you focus on these techniques alone, you’ll drive more organic traffic to your website and improve your search rankings without risking a Google penalty. Finally, the proximity of the business location to your targeted metro area plays a key role in your rankings in Google local search results. Meaning, if your goal is to rank letter A / #1 in the local search results for “Atlanta personal injury lawyer”, then your law firm’s physically address should be in the city of Atlanta. The more relevant the proximity of your business is to your targeted city, the better you will rank in the local search results.

The chart quite clearly shows a gradual increase in the number of backlinks that a webpage has as you move higher up page 1 of Google. With the help of the amazing team at Accuranker and also Ahrefs, I’ve gathered a huge variety of data points on over 1 million different URLs that rank on page 1 of Google. I also had the help of the amazing, Dimitris Vlachos, who supported on the data collection and organization. The keyword here is ‘helpful’, not long for the sake of being long, and not thin, How to rank #1 on google weak content with the same information that everyone else is sending out. A backlink is a hyperlink that comes from a page outside of your website.

Also, you can greatly influence your rankings in local search by focusing on external factors which are elements outside of website and your Google My Business listing. How you get the linking domains it up to you, sponsored posts, guest posts, etc. The best in 2010 were in-content article links and today it’s still the most effective way of link building. I’ve seen this factor more than any other to create huge upward movements in search engine rankings. I talked a little about this in a study I did of the HubSpot blog, where the 100 top performing blog posts had, on average, over 80% more keyword-focused anchor text than the rest. While paid search ads are a great way to gain immediate exposure on this go-to search engine, you should also be working to build up your organic rankings as well.

From there, every additional article that covers related subtopics (i.e. cold calling tips, best email outreach templates, etc.) should link to others in the cluster as well as back to your main resource. Most content management systems have built-in features that allow you to do this before you hit the publish button. Additionally, you can use a free mobile usability testing tool such as Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test that will provide you with similar insights. There are many tools available on the market that allow you to test your website speed. I recommend checking out GTmetrix or Google PageSpeed Insights. These tools are free, simple, and provide valuable insights about site speed that allow for easy optimizations.

A website owner needs to develop an effective and long-term approach to link building rather than earning links through non-authoritative websites. In this article How to rank #1 on Google, acquiring backlinks from other websites is one of the important ranking factors. On November 4, 2016, Google announced mobile-first indexing. This means that a website’s compatibility with mobile now directly affects its search rankings. In the past, web designers built desktop versions first, then mobile. Today, with mobile usage surpassing desktop, websites should prioritize mobile versions to provide a better user experience.

To leverage our links for maximum power, it's best to follow a few linking guidelines with every new page we create. Since we're now linking our topically related pages together, we now want to make sure to optimize our linking strategy for maximum SEO impact. On the last note, it's typically ideal to link internally to one of your own pages if you can, but don't be afraid to link to other websites.

Instead of focusing on a handful of keywords or even a few hundred, I just focus on increasing my overall organic traffic. As long as it keeps climbing quarter over quarter, I’m happy. The majority of your traffic should be coming from long tail phrases. You don’t need to organically rank for a keyword to get traffic for that keyword. Just remember to match the searcher’s intent and mimic the organic results to drive traffic.

When talking about search, we use the term “organic” to refer to search results that are unpaid. This is different from pay-per-click advertising , which is a strategy that focuses on paid traffic generation. Create a keyword strategy to target terms your target customers are searching. Google My Business strives to equip consumers with as much information about a business as possible, before even encountering that business. This includes what it’s like to be at that business, so be sure to upload photos that depict not only the products and services your business offers but also the atmosphere and people that frequent it.

As a small business, you don't want to be competing against large organizations with outrageous marketing budgets. Of course it's possible to outrank them using tactical SEO practices, but chances are that you will end up LOSING facing off these giants. With that in mind, the rest of the steps in this post to ranking #1 will be focusing on ranking ORGANICALLY. Natural/organic listings (usually free and includes featured snippets, blogs, local listings , news, images, videos, maps, places, and social updates. Thus, reaching that top position would mean increased traffic to your website and the potential for sales to catapult.