How to Rank #1 in Google in 2024 (Live Demo)

hey in this video i'm going to show you how to rank number one in google step by step but this won't be like other generic videos you'll find on youtube instead of me throwing generic tips at you you're going to see exactly how to rank for a specific keyword so like you just follow my live demonstration and your rankings won't prove so if you're excited about this video drop a comment below with let's do this and let's jump right in hey so my name is nathan gotch i'm the founder of gotcha seo and i've led hundreds of successful seo campaigns and i've trained thousands of seo professionals in my program gotcha seo academy in fact the simple process i'm about to show you is how we grew a client's organic search traffic by 1 352 so if you're new here subscribe and hit the bell button so you can get first access to the newest seo training and tactics let's jump right in so in this live demo i'm going to show you how i would help a randomly selected local business improve its google rankings step by step and the target business is a plumber in springfield illinois rickrayandsunplumbing.com let's get started okay so the first thing we want to do is want to simply put the target domain into semrush here and then i just want to see does this domain or this client or this campaign that you're working on does it have existing keywords that we can go after and really there's only two ways to do keyword research either you're going to focus on existing keywords if they have keywords that are ranking in the top 100 or if they're a brand new website or they've never done seo before you're gonna have to go down a different path but in this case this particular website does have existing organic keywords so we're going to do is we're going to go to positions and then we're going to do is we're going to focus on keywords that have bottom of the funnel intent which means keywords that have a high probability of becoming qualified leads for this particular business so in this case it looks like emergency plumber is a very important keyword for this particular business so we're going to want to do is we're actually going to go to the filter by keyword and we're just going to put emergency plumber in here and now what we want to do is we want to see what the top volume is for that particular keyword phrase so in this case it looks like you really can't go wrong with any of these variations and we'll be optimizing for both of these anyway so you don't really have to decide which one you want to go after but ultimately sometimes when we're trying to decide what variation is best typically go with the one that has the best volume so that's the first thing we want to identify these transactional bottom of the funnel keywords so obviously this one is very important but there probably are some others which we can also filter out by springfield which will probably show some other really good keywords that they want to go after so looks like plumbers springfield illinois once again another important keyword they probably want to tackle bathroom remodeling it looks like they do bathroom remodeling as well and it looks like they do garbage disposal repair so this is an interesting one because this is garbage service springfield illinois which is not the intent of what this particular page offers so that's one thing you've got to be careful is we don't ever want to target keywords that have poor intent relative to what the particular business is offering so in this case garbage service is not the same as garbage disposal repair these are very different things very different intent so this is a keyword we would not want to try to rank for so we pretty much just want to disregard this because you intend to sew off now looking through here it looks like heating and cooling companies yes they do work with water heaters but this probably isn't super relevant either and then also sump pump springfield illinois it looks like they do sump pump repair so we probably want this to be a little more specific more like sump pump repair springfield illinois not so much just sump pump because that could be buying a new sump pump and that may not be something that they offer it's just important to go through here and look for keywords that are hyper relevant to what they actually offer make sure that the variation of that keyword is super granular to the intent of what they actually offer because we only want hyper relevant traffic going to these pages because if it's hyper relevant it's going to have a tremendously high conversion rate so when you're going through keywords always focus on these types of keywords first because these are the keywords are going to drive the most revenue now the funny part is when you actually optimize for these bottom of the funnel kind of transactional or investigative keywords a part of the process is actually having to build topical relevance to rank for these keywords so naturally you're going to have to go up the funnel to find these opportunities which i'll be talking about in a second but this is the first part identified these really lucrative keywords and then the next part of the strategy is going to figure out how are we actually going to go about ranking for these particular keywords okay so now what we're going to do is we're going to optimize for technical performance so what you want to do is actually run the site audit so under on-page and tech seo you're going to click on the site audit option and then you're going to enter the target domain into the site audit settings now you can change the limit of check pages you will have to see how many pages this particular website has so what you can do is you can go copy the domain name like this and then we'll go into google and then if you just do site colon this will show us how many index pages this particular website has so in this case it has 15 so it's not a very big website so we don't need to do a massive crawl because there just aren't that many pages that exist so we can actually put this down to a hundred and it'll be fine for everything else i would do websites just to keep it so that scm rush's crawler actually crawls the website not something else and then you can keep all this other stuff exactly the same and then just click start site audit okay so once a technical audit is done you're going to see this page here and it's going to show you all kinds of things so that can be somewhat overwhelming so let's kind of focus in on a few things that are really really important so first of all crawlability is by far the most important thing because if the website is not crawlable it is not going to be indexable and if it is not indexable you're not going to be able to rank so you absolutely need to get this squared away so let's go ahead and take a look at what semrush is showing us so based on this there is not anything that's super alarming it looks like there's some permanent redirects that's not a problem as long as they're intentional and it looks like there's one 404 error once again yes we should fix that but it's not gonna make or break the seo results and then the most important part here is this section here which is the page's crawl depth and we'd never want this to be more than three clicks deep especially for a tiny website like this it should really never exceed two or three clicks so in this case everything looks good now the next thing we're going to look at is the core web vitals because overall the user experience is a very foundational element so we need to make sure the user experience the page loading speed is really on point because if it's not anything else we do after that is not really going to matter because that needs to be really really good so let's take a look so based on scm rush's analysis and they're really just pulling from the google api to get this information but ultimately this website is not doing super well on core web vitals so this is definitely something we'd want to go through and clean up and get this all optimized because anything that's going to negatively affect user experience is likely going to hurt seo performance so from there you can just click on the issues tab and then we can see some of the issues that semrush has brought up it says there are two internal links that are broken that's not going to be something that's going to really destroy the rankings or destroy the seo but it is something you probably do want to tackle i'd say it's more like a level 3 type of action meaning it's not super important but it's something you should do one time permits ultimately we already know there's a 404 and but overall really aren't a whole lot of technical issues which is great now there are some notices looks like there's a few redirects there's one page only has one incoming internal link and this can be something that we would want to fix but overall this website is doing pretty well from a technical performance so there's really not a whole lot to do other than just optimizing for core web vitals so that's a very good thing and when you're working with smaller websites there's not usually going to be a whole lot of technical issues and if there are they're going to be pretty easy to fix so i would focus heavily on corporate models in this case and that should correct pretty much most of the issues that this website is encountering from a technical seo perspective so before you ever do on-page seo you should make sure that the content itself on the page is sufficient so what you should do is go to on-page and tech seo and then go to seo content template and then enter the primary keyword that you want to rank for so in this case going to be plumber springfield illinois and then click create seo template so once it's done then you can see some of the key recommendations based on the top 10 for this primary keyword so you see the related keywords you'll want to tackle you'll see the backlinks that you want to acquire that other competitors have acquired you'll see the average readability score and also you'll see how long the content should be or at least how long you should aim for so in this case 717 words is appropriate now what we want to do is actually go up here to the real-time content check and you're going to want to paste the content from the page that you're trying to rank in this editor okay so as you'll see i just pasted this in here without any formatting at all just to keep it really really simple now what we want to do is see ultimately what is scmrush telling us so in this case it looks like overall the seo score is not great the readability is not terrific and overall the originality is not great either but keep in mind the originality is not really going to make sense because what scm rush is going to do is it's actually going to crawl our existing page and it's going to say that it's not original but in this case we know that it is so i wouldn't worry about that particular score so a couple key things here just keep in mind because i pasted this in here without any formatting so a lot of these recommendations are not going to be accurate ultimately this score is not going to be accurate either so for example the article has no headline yet well that's not true it definitely does have a headline but the one section i would be looking at here is the seo section so the primary keyword is not really being used in this content at all and also any additional relevant keywords are not being used either so plumbers in springfield plumber springfield illinois these are basically just variations of the same keyword so once again we're going to need to add those keywords to this particular content to be able to really perform well and in the next part that's where i show you the on page see i'll show you how to add those keywords in there but overall as far as the content goes it looks like it's long enough it's actually a little too long according to sem rush so there is an opportunity to maybe cut it down if there's some stuff in here that's not super relevant but overall the content itself is probably fine it's not great you know a lot of room for improvement the plugin i'm using here is grammarly to fix this so if you do have grammarly this would be a good idea to go through and clean this up you can also use hemingway you can take this content we'll copy it we'll put it into hemingway and the easiest way to make it better is just go through these simple recommendations on hemingway to make the content better and ultimately make it easier to read and you'll see there's 11 out of 150 sentences are very difficult to read six are hard to read so there's a lot of opportunity to improve this content overall this is what we personally do so whenever we're trying to improve a page what we do is we run it through hemingway we clean it up here then we run it through grammarly we clean it up there and then once that's done then we do the on-page seo but keep in mind the content itself needs to be different and unique compared to the competitors that we're going after and that's the most critical part it doesn't matter if you do all this if the content itself isn't actually unique that's really important so overall this content there's a lot of room for improvement we would be excited about this because ultimately they're doing pretty well we look at the keywords their ranking looks like position 29 for plumber springfield illinois with the content being not the best that it can be and the overall on-page seo performance is not great so improve the content and optimize it which i'll be showing in a second and there's really no reason that this page shouldn't go up in rankings okay so now that we know what keywords we want to go after and there aren't a whole lot of technical issues what we want to do now is you actually want to optimize the on-page seo so we want to optimize the existing pages before we even think about creating any new pages so what you can do is just go right now cm rush go to the on page and tech seo section and then click on on page seo checker and then create the project and once you've done that go ahead and click continue and then semrush is going to crawl and collect the keywords that they're already ranking well for so you can of course do the auto import but if you want you can also do a manual type of situation as well but in this case the keyword profile isn't huge so we'll go ahead and just let semrush pull the ones that they're already ranking for it looks like the ones that we showed earlier plumbers springfield illinois is in there so want to go ahead and tackle that so based on sdm rush's analysis they believe that we could increase organic search traffic by over 1 000 if we implement these changes that they are recommending now one thing i would do recommend is go ahead and connect google analytics because it's going to show you the balance rate and the total time spent on the pages and other ux type of ideas so it's the only thing you do want to do if you want to get more comprehensive data about each individual page now there's a lot you can do here but one thing we want to do is we want to focus in on the pages that matter the most so the first thing you're going to want to do is go into the optimization ideas and find the page we're trying to optimize so in this case we're going to want to optimize the home page and we know that we want to rank specifically for plumbing springfield illinois so we're going to do is we're going to edit keywords and we're actually going to get rid of the ones that are not relevant to the home page so we'll get rid of all these and we're just going to focus in on the primary one that we want to rank for which is plumbers springfield illinois so go ahead and do that all right so now scm rush is going to show us all of the potential opportunities for on-page seo on this particular page and keyword target that we're going after now in this case they say there is no keyword cannibalization so that's a great thing it means there are no other pages on the site that are targeting this specific keyword which is plumber springfield illinois or any variation that's a really good thing and that's always the first step when we're thinking about how to optimize an existing page we just don't want to be any keyword cannibalization because ultimately if you have that it's going to compete against the primary page you're actually trying to rank so it's not a good thing and ultimately looking at this it looks like they want us to include the target keyword in the title tag and in the meta description in the body and in the h1 tag so it looks like overall this page is not optimized particularly well you can come to that conclusion based on what scm rush is telling us but we're of course going to look at it from a manual perspective as well and it looks like there's also some opportunities to enrich the page content which is adding more topically relevant keyword variations to the page ultimately so there's a bunch of opportunities here for that and then we need to also acquire backlinks and ultimately we want to acquire backlinks that the competitors have to at least match them but then if we want to beat them we actually have to acquire more backlinks than them because we want to show google that we're the ultimate authority in this particular vertical and for this particular keyword but more on that later so now we're just going to go through and see if we can optimize this page better from disappear on page seo perspective now of course we do want to look at from a pure content perspective and overall user experience and overall the design and user interface but ultimately right now we're just going to focus on purely the on-page seo now right here this actually looks pretty good the design's pretty good it looks like they have a lot of kind of bottom of the funnel type of content which is exactly what they should be doing so overall this is pretty good it probably will work it just needs a little refinement and a little better optimization so when we look at this you can use this detailed plugin which is a free plugin to see what the title is like but if you actually just do right click while you're on google chrome go to view page source and then search for title you'll be able to see it in here as well now this title here is not what i would personally do if we were trying to rank for the keywords that we're going after we'll go ahead and just do inspect here and this is kind of a funny thing that you can do in google chrome is you can actually change this to see what it's like so first of all we want to put the primary keyword that we're going after which is plumbers springfield illinois and just to make it more natural we'll do plumbers in springfield illinois and one thing to actually make the variation even better is we'll do the 24 7 just like they have because it's probably something they found that's good and then we can do 24 7 plumbers in springfield illinois now if you wanted you could do the near me query but more than likely that's probably not driving a whole lot of traffic but if you wanted to but the problem is you're starting to split this primary keyword up so i don't usually like doing that but overall this title is pretty good because you'll see the only slight variation that i've changed here is just the 24 7 plumbers near me in springfield illinois and one thing we could do if we wanted to try to inject even more keywords in there is we could do actually spell out illinois here and then we can do the acronym like that so now it's 24 7 plumbers near me in springfield illinois now we have the full phrase in here now if you want to get more granular you can make it just plummers springfield illinois without anything else you want to get more specific and we want to do it like this we could just literally do plumbers springfield illinois like this and then just the brand name like that and this is also a very effective format because now we're optimized specifically for that keyword phrase that we want to go after and ultimately that's going to improve performance now what they're doing with the 24 7 and the near me type of variations they're trying to capture more long tail traffic but ultimately if you mention those on the page in other areas you're probably going to rank for those anyway so you don't really need to jam them into the title but if you want and it is a low competition keyword you certainly can do that but i don't really think the plumbing repair is one that's necessary but also we know based on the keyword research that plummer is the primary variation that attracts the most searches so we really want to optimize for that super well so optimizing for the correct variation of this word is important so instead of plumbing we want to do plumbers because when people are searching for plumbing issues they're not looking for plumbing they're looking for plumbers they're looking for the person that's able to solve that problem so those slight nuances really do matter so that's the first thing is we want to optimize the title tag and then we also want to optimize the meta description as well so putting the primary keyword in the meta description in a natural way also very important as well but then after that once we've tackled those two parts we want to optimize the h1 tags so if we go back to the detailed plugin we'll look at headings you'll see that their h1 tag is buried way below on this page so the h1 tag is way down here but proper user experience we want to have the h1 tag up here and we want it to have the primary keyword in it so just by adding plumber springfield illinois in the h1 tag and pushing it above the fold that's going to have a huge impact on their overall keyword performance so very easy fix but it can have a huge huge impact and then after that we also want to include the primary keyword in the first sentence on the page 2. so i would include it in the h1 up here and then also in this little sentence here now this looks like it is a heading if we go ahead and look so first of all they're using too many headings you don't need this many headings you could just use one h1 and then all of these can be paragraph tags and then you just change the style of them these don't all need to be heading so we can have h1 a paragraph and then we include the primary keyword in the h1 and the first paragraph and then after that you don't need to do anything super aggressive you can include it maybe one more time down here and ultimately if the address is actually in springfield illinois so that's terrific and then the last piece of this is is this using schema markup so we'll go ahead and look if the address is and it's not it's not using structured data so i would highly recommend using schema to markup this address just so google can understand this page even better ultimately having more data to understand the page better so that's really that all that i would do and then ultimately making sure the word count is appropriate given this particular query and looks like they have a video which is terrific most websites don't have videos so they're already way ahead of the game there and overall this looks great i would avoid using any stock photos so hopefully this these are pictures from them actually operating on the job that's super important always use real life pictures from what you're actually doing but overall this is a low competition keyword so just by adding the keyword to some core important locations and adding some variations here to support natural language processing nlp they're going to do a pretty good job but the most important thing is adding that exact phrase to the title the meta description the h1 and the first sentence if we can get them in those locations you're going to perform substantially better okay so once you've found your keywords you optimize for technical performance you've improved the content and you've performed on-page seo the next part of this process is we want to try to build more topical relevance and what that means is we need to create new pages around the overall topic that we're trying to rank in so in this case it's going to be plumbing the goal of doing this is ultimately these supporting assets will drive relevance to our core keyword that we're actually trying to rank for which is plumbers springfield illinois so the best way to do this on the local level there's a few different ways i'll just show you a couple quick ones the first one is take the exact keyword that you want to rank for and put it into google and we're gonna see what is google showing is there anything here that we can create content about right so a couple things we'll go down here and the one thing we want to look for are serp features so what is showing in google so ultimately right here with yelp we can see what are people saying about plumbing services in springfield illinois so obviously we can't really create content about that but this one here what are some of businesses with large number of reviews in springfield illinois once again we can't really create content about that but we're going on the right track we're still looking for opportunities now we'll go down here we'll keep looking for other surf features that might exist so as we scroll down we see thumbtack and we see that there's two opportunities here maybe to create some content so these are ideas that i would add to your list to possibly create content around these topics now one thing you want to keep in mind is if we can make the content geo-targeted relevant it's going to be way more effective now in this case what are the signs of a burst pipe well a burst pipe is a burst pipe and it's not really going to change depending on the location usually the variables that cause a burst pipe are pretty much going to be the same across really anywhere now one thing we could do is when we start to think about okay what are some ways to create really linkable content on the local level i would start to think about specifically in springfield illinois at what frequency do burst pipes happen how often do pipes burst in springfield illinois and what are some of the variables in springfield illinois that cause burst pipes so we could probably think that freezing is a part of it there's other variables that would likely cause it so getting really specific to the location whenever you can is going to be way better and way more effective to build topical relevance but ultimately anything that we can do that's really data driven so if you can have some sort of data-driven post about burst pipes in springfield illinois in 2021 or a history of burst pipes in springfield illinois then now we're really building tons of topical relevance but not just that we're also creating something that's really linkable on the local level so we could send that to local governments we could send that to colleges in that area we could really find tons of opportunities to drive links to this really interesting asset that's actually helpful it's data driven so data is the best way to acquire links we'll talk more about that but ultimately this is what you should be thinking about as far as creating more topical relevance then one thing you can do is actually take the core keyword and put it through this tool which is also asked so what it's going to do it's going to crawl through google and so based on this there weren't actually any results at all and that's okay that's not a problem because we searched something very specific but if you want what you can do is just make this a little more broad so we'll just do plumber like this and we'll see what comes up and what the tool is going to do is it's going to search google to look for the people also ask section it's going to give you all these ideas so what you can do is start to look through these and see if there's any opportunities to make these geo targeted relevant specific to springfield illinois because we don't really want to target these on national level like for example what do plumbers really do that's not a key word we're going to go after because ultimately that's going to be just nationally focused it's not going to be specific to the location now this one here how much does a plumber cost this is a very interesting one because how much a plumber cost is going to be very different in each individual location so how much a plumber is in los angeles is going to be different than how much it is in springfield illinois so this is an opportunity to create some sort of informational piece of content that's specific to springfield illinois you could create an infographic you could show specific data you can comparing springfield versus other states there's just so much opportunity just on this little query alone so this is the way you need to be thinking about ultimately using these kind of national terms to come up with ideas that are specific to that location okay so everything i've shown you so far is to be able to rank in google's organic search traditional organic search results so that's actually below the local pack so everything here i've been basically showing you how to improve performance in this section now keep in mind by improving performance in the organic results you're naturally going to do better in the local pack as well but in this case we look up plumber springfield illinois they're already ranking terrifically well they're doing a really nice job and one thing to keep in mind here is if you were one of their competitors their review count is superior to everyone else and reviews are really really important for local pack rankings they really are dominating on this front and they have a very high score on top of it so lots of reviews high score and they have an address specifically in the location that they're going after so we look at this they're specifically in springfield illinois and they're optimized with the appropriate category which is plumber so they're pretty much doing everything right and they have a bunch of unique images too which is what i always recommend doing having lots of unique images and they should just continue to add to this ultimately they would probably really benefit by adding more images of them actually on the job so every time they send a person out to do work they should be taking pictures on the job of the work they're doing and just be populating this listing making it deeper and deeper and deeper and ultimately they can start to build a moat which makes it difficult for the competitors really to ever catch up so the more comprehensive your gmb listing is the better you will be so overall they're doing a really nice job one thing i would say is it looks like they're not responding to the reviews so i would have someone on their team go through and respond to every single review it's something very simple just oh thank you so much pamela we had a great time working with you and i look forward to working with you in the future you know real simple stuff but what we're doing is we're adding depth to this listing every time we respond to review we're adding more depth and more depth and now one other thing too it doesn't look like they're doing any gmb posting as well with google my business you can do posts and when you post a particular post with gmb it's expires in seven days so you should really be publishing every single week a new gmb post what this is going to do it's not necessarily going to directly impact your rankings but it's going to add depth to the listing it's going to add activity to the listing and it could drive more engagement on the listing so the more engagement there is on this listing the better it will perform so we really want that lots of engagement lots of dwell time lots of people clicking around this is all stuff that google's measuring so really really important one more engagement so if they want to maintain this ranking then they should be pushing really hard with those things i just mentioned also faq as well if there are people who are asking questions on the job maybe you could have them go ask actually in the gmb as well so overall they're ranking so there's not really anything else to do as far as general optimization but just as far as to stack different ideas on top of this there's some opportunities for them to really build a powerful moat which will basically make it impossible for the competitors to ever catch up and then the last thing you can do outside of optimizing google my business is you can see what the overall listings are online for this particular business so we want to make sure that all the listings online are 100 accurate from an nap perspective so that means name address and phone we want that to be consistent across the internet so semrush actually makes it super easy because all you have to do is just go and find the particular business that we're trying to improve and we'll find it in here by searching and we found rick ray and sons plumbing so we'll go ahead and take a look and see how they're doing as far as how consistent their listings are so overall it looks like there are some opportunities to improve their citations across the internet so it looks like they really are just missing a lot of citations so we need to go through create new citations but as we go through we're also going to want to improve and make these citations more accurate if there are any issues so we just want to have a lot of consistency so it looks like they used to have a different address here 500 north street so you would want to go through clean these all up make sure they're 100 accurate to the location that they're going after which is this 1514 west jefferson street so these slight variations of the w abbreviation versus west that's not going to make a difference but what really is going to make a difference is having the completely wrong address maybe even having the wrong actual name of the business as well so it looks like they put rick ray plumbing and sewer now they're rick ray sun's plumbing so want to go through make it consistent to whatever the google my business listing is as long as it matches a google my business listing you're going to be golden so go through clean these up you can of course do this manually or you can use scm rush to distribute this info whichever way you want but i recommend just to automate this and make the investment because it can be very time consuming to go through and do this yourself okay so the last thing we want to do is analyze the existing link profile for this particular website so what you want to do is go to link building and then go to backlink audit and then start the backlink audit now to get the maximum amount of data possible i do recommend connecting google search console as well so once the audit is complete we go through and just see what the overall toxicity score and according to scm rush there's nothing too severe here just because they really don't have a whole lot of links in the first place they only have actually seven referring domains so overall there's nothing to be too concerned about and even if there was at this small of a scale it's not going to be detrimental to their performance so in this case where there's just really not a whole lot of link data it just means that there needs to be more link building so there will be a video below this one you can watch that shows you all kinds of link building tactics that you can use but in this case what i would recommend doing is driving links to linkable assets like i mentioned earlier coming up with ideas that are specific to the location and specific to the topic that you're trying to rank and making those very linkable typically using data or infographics or something that people really like to reference or link to that's going to really help with the link building efforts much more you know it's only make it really natural you don't want to just go out and get links in an unnatural way and drive into the home page or drive them to service pages which people don't normally link to so that is how you rank number one at google step by step if you got value from this video please like it right now and subscribe to get first access to the next seo training thank you so much for watching and all the previous videos in this series will be below okay we'll talk soon

Channel: Semrush

Views: 42,447

Keywords: rank #1 in google, rank on google, seo, search engine optimization

Id: s9-vvkXynkU

Length: 29min 13sec (1753 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 29 2022