How to Rank Higher on Google With Your Article

Articles compete for attention in the online world. Ranking on Google’s first page is an astounding achievement for any business with an online presence. This means the content is well-written and engaging.

All articles may have more or less the same content, but getting that first-page exposure on Google needs comprehensive search engine optimization (SEO) tactics. In this case study, we’ll show you what strategy we used to help our client’s articles have better rankings.

What We Found

Our Findings 

The website's existing articles don’t follow an engaging article template. A well-defined prototype or template helps organize thoughts, ensure consistency, and effectively communicate the intended message to visitors.

Key Observations

1. Many articles aren’t getting attention from search engines.
2. Published articles, especially the long-form content, don’t have a table of contents. 
3. The existing content doesn’t have key takeaways at the beginning.

What We Did

Our Approach 

SEOLeverage suggested an updated prototype article to guide the client's content creation process. A prototype that provides a clearer structure for presenting ideas, making it easier for readers to follow and understand the content. It ensures that the article flows logically from one section to the next.

The Steps We Took

We implemented the following strategies to make the new content competitive in the search results: 

1. Perform keyword research and gather relevant keywords with good search volume and achievable competition using SEO tools.
2. Recommend SEOLeverage’s prototype article to ensure the content is engaging, well-structured, and easy to read, with clear headings, short paragraphs, and bullet points.
3. Align the content with the search intent behind the search queries.
4. Encourage content writing recommendations that come with well-structured content outlines to provide unique insights, comprehensive information, or solutions to specific problems.
5. Optimize title tags and meta descriptions, including the target keyword in the title, in a natural and compelling way.

What Results We Achieved

Upon checking in Google Search Console, the results are shown below after applying all the steps and monitoring for progress:

One of their new articles following the suggested SEOLeverage prototype article has gained more clicks, high impressions, increased click-through rate, established position in search engine results pages for the target keyword on Page 1, and is now ranking for 85 other relevant keywords.

How To Get a Higher Google Ranking With Your Article

You might think it’s hard to hit the top of Google searches, but that’s not always the case. It combines strategies to make your website visible and relevant to search engines. Here are some tips from an SEO expert.

1. Conduct keyword research.

Look for relevant terms in your industry that you can incorporate into your article with SEMRush, Ahrefs, or Google Keyword Planner. Pick the keywords with a high search volume but low in competition. Researching keywords allows you to build your content around them to make your website relevant.

2. Take care of SEO.

Optimizing your website and content will help drive more organic traffic and boost local ranking. All of the tips in this section are geared toward technical SEO, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO. 

Technical SEO involves optimizing websites for crawling and indexing purposes. To do it, you need to:

• Use a responsive layout for your website to improve usability, mobile-friendliness, and page speed. Include clear call-to-action and functional buttons to make your article easier to navigate.
• Utilize structured data markup so search engines can understand your content even better.
• Keep your URLs short, descriptive, and optimized with the target keyword. Separate each word with a hyphen.

On the other hand, on-page SEO optimizes content and other areas in a website page. Begin your on-site SEO tactics with these tips:

• Insert target keywords in the title tag, meta description, headings, and paragraphs throughout the content.
• Use the keywords naturally in your content. Avoid keyword stuffing to prevent reduced search rankings.
• Resize images and add descriptive filenames and alt text for each one to make your site load faster.

Off-page SEO means optimizing outside of the website to gain traffic. Here’s how you can do it:

• Prioritize internal linking by putting links on your pages to other pages on your site. Get high-quality backlinks from credible websites as well. Write guest posts for other websites, collaborate with influencers, and partner with different businesses.
• Share your article on social media. Pair it with infographics, images, and videos to generate engagement and help impact your search rankings.
• Optimize for local SEO to focus on local business when applicable. Provide accurate information on your Google business profile, such as operating hours, address, phone number, and email. Let your customers leave positive reviews and reply to them promptly.

3. Regularly publish content.

Posting informative, high-quality, and engaging content is helpful to reach out to audiences and readers. Make sure your content addresses the needs of your target audience. Some of the content you can create are blog posts, videos, infographics, and pillar articles.

A content calendar can help in organizing your schedule for releasing content. Use an outline and writing guidelines to have a standardized way of writing each article. Incorporate all the keywords you researched seamlessly in your content.

4. Monitor your SEO efforts.

All of these SEO strategies are not a one-off task. You have to monitor and refine them over time. Track your website’s performance using Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Determine the ideas for improvement and create solutions to address the gaps in your SEO campaigns.

Final Words

Ranking your article higher on Google is a long-term effort. The results may not show in real-time as tracking and monitoring are required for each ranking factor, like content and keywords. Create high-quality content consistently and optimize your website on and off-page to improve your rankings.

Do you want to rank your article higher on Google? Then get in touch with us so we can begin working together!