How to Rank Higher on Google: Top 17 Strategies for 2022

How to Rank Higher on Google: Top 17 Strategies for 2022

This section is mainly only about SEO basics for those of you who may not be familiar with the world of SEO. Make sure you check these boxes if you want to rank.

1. Target the Appropriate Keywords

First and foremost, you need to know who you want to rank for. And of course, you want to rank for the terms your ideal customer is plugging into the search box. These are keywords, and you’ll need keyword research tools to identify what’s appropriate for you to rank for.

Here are the factors involved in identifying the best keywords to target for ranking on Google:  

Volume: How many times a month the word is searched.  

Competition: How difficult is it to rank for that keyword.  

Your domain authority: Domain authority affects how easy it will be for you to rank for keywords. If your site has been around for a while and you’ve been publishing quality content for that time, it will become easier.  

Relevance: There is no point in ranking for a keyword that will not drive qualified traffic to your site.

Pro Tip

If you’re just getting started with your SEO strategy, your best bet is to start with low-volume, low-competition keywords so you can gain traction, and then build up over time. What constitutes “low” will depend on your industry, but starting keywords in the 90-400 range may be appropriate.

2. Check Keyword Intent

In general, there are four main types of keyword intent: informational, commercial, transactional, and navigational. Now for SEO, you are mainly looking at keywords with informative intent. But even within the keywords that have your informational intent, what kind of information do you need to find when searching for that keyword.

For example, I have some screenshots that I have accumulated from good websites and features and was looking for a keyword to target with. I found keyword website ideas, I saw that it had a search volume of 2900, and I liked it. But when I Googled it, I could see that the results were not for businesses looking for ideas for their websites, but side hustlers looking for their next idea or beginners looking for their next project. were for developers.

If I target that keyword from the screenshot of my website, it will not rank. But if I target it for “website design ideas”, that’s another story now.

3. Write lengthy content about it

The Key to Ranking High on Google? In-depth, long-form content on the keywords you’re targeting. Now, this is most evident with blog posts, but you can do this for landing pages as well.

For example, our free Website Grader landing page ranks on page one for the keyword “website grader”. At first glance, it may seem that there is not much material in it. But scroll to the bottom of the fold and you’ll find a wealth of words in the form of frequently asked questions.

Pro Tip

Note that I said long-form stuff in depth. Google doesn’t like thin ingredients, so skip the fluff and go right for peanut butter.

4. Do Your On-Page SEO

This is the bread and butter of ranking high on Google. Get all the deets in my complete on-page SEO guide or this video:

Here’s your little checklist:  

• Keyword placement: Make sure your keyword is in your meta title, meta description, at least two H2s, image file name, image alt text, URL, and naturally in the body of your page.
• Internal linking: Add links to pages from at least three other pages on your site.
• External Linking: Include 1-3 links to relevant, trusted pages on your page.
• Optimize meta description: Keep it 155-165 characters and tell the reader what value they will get by clicking on your page.
• Ok, so how to rank high on google. But you may have already done all that work. Maybe you are already ranking high and want to rank higher. If you are, keep reading.

5. Long-tail, Target Question Keywords

For the most part, the keywords that come in the sweet spot in terms of volume and competition are going to be long-tail keywords, but long-tail query keywords are a bonus because they tend to be more broad-based than top results. provide opportunities to show. , via the super-high-volume keyword—people’s ask section.

For example, the search volume for “social media marketing” is 32K (yow). WordStream is the number one result and Sprout Social is at number two. But in between those two results is the PAA clause. If a reader expands to one of these questions, whatever page is answering that question is now above the #2 result in Google.

You just never know which long-tail keywords Google will pull in the PAA, allowing your posts to rank higher than #2 results for high-volume keywords.

Pro Tip

Do not target PAA queries to rank on Google through them. Instead, target long-tail query keywords for the primary purpose of ranking for that keyword, with the secondary goal being some additional ranking through PAA.

6. Make your information skimmable

More and more, Google is focusing on providing answers rather than just a list of pages. Hence the term “zero-click search”, where the user can find the correct information on the results page without having to click on one of the results.

This isn’t great for those of us who want to drive website traffic, but if you can’t beat them (Google is like Goliath on ‘roads’) then join them, and the source from which Google generates an answer Well, that’s the next best thing—and your way to rank higher.

The best way to optimize for this is to make your content skimmable. That way, Google can extract snippets of your content such as featured snippets, passage rankings, and even meta descriptions to produce answer-y results. This way:

    Use your title tag. Every website builder/CMS allows you to do this. Don’t make a title simply by increasing the size and weight of the text; Make sure they are wrapped in <h2> and <h3> tags. For example, in our How to Brand Your Business blog post, we have a clear H2 headline that reads “How to Brand Your Business” and then each step has H3s.

    Use specific headings. Unfortunately, SEO can sometimes limit your creativity. A person should be able to skim through your article titles to get some immediate answers. You can see below that Google bypassed the meta description we provided for the above post and created it based on H3s:

The easier it is for the reader to extract information, the easier it is for Google. So use lists, bullets, boldface, and headings… like a lot more.

7. Make a clear statement

No, not hate speech. What I mean is that, when you are specifically targeting the question keyword, even if it is a multi-part answer, make sure you have a clear statement somewhere in the post that is clear when restating the question. provides the answer.

Below we see the SERP “How long should a blog post be 2022.” Chances are, the Hooks Agency got Featured Snippet status because it has a sentence that reads “The best blog length for SEO in 2022 is 1,760-2,400 words” while Wix (the number two result) answers the question but rephrased it. : Not while installing.

And for the “how-to” keyword, you can end the post with a conclusion that says, “So in a nutshell, here’s how to [do X]: Then provide a list of strategies or suggestions from the post. The other option would be to have an overview section at the top of the post that gives a bird’s eye view before diving deeper into each item.

8. Include Meaningful Visuals

Including images on your page can help it rank higher in a few ways. First, it creates more engaging content that keeps people on the page for longer; Second, regular search results are becoming more visible; And third, it also gives your images a chance to rank in the image results.

But for blog posts you want to rank high, stock images and blank graphics aren’t going to cut it. You need images that illustrate concepts, add value, and match the intent of the keyword.

For example, the SERP for “January Marketing Ideas” is not only very visual, but you can see that Google is prioritizing screenshots of January’s social media posts and event landing pages.

So when you’re creating content on a keyword, Google it and get a feel for not only how important visuals are, but also what visuals are showing so that you can match what searchers expect.

Pro Tip

And if, like in the example above, you can see the title card images showing, create one!

Your blog template already creates a header image (like WordStream does), such that it would be redundant to have it at the top of your post, move it to the end of the post.

Or, see if your SEO plugin (we use Yoast) gives you the option to upload a social image. The image will not appear in the blog post itself, but it will still be associated with that post and be indexed in search results.

9. Have a Table of Contents

It’s an easy element to add to your blog posts that Google likes. Often, you’ll see Google add those links to a post’s meta description.

Here’s how to do it:

Go into the HTML view of your post and above each H2 or H3 you want to create a link, put this:

<a id=”section-title”></a>

Keep the quotation marks, and if you use more than one word, separate them with dashes or underscores. Then at the top of your post, write your table of contents and add a link to the # section heading for each:

For example, for this part of this post, I tagged it like this:

<a id=”high”></a>

Then at the top, I changed “How to rank higher on Google” to #higher. linked to

10. Verify Your Meta Headlines

Yes, you read that right. Your SEO title, or meta title, is the title that appears on the actual SERP. And similar to titles, Google doesn’t give you a whole lot of room for creativity. More often than not, a title similar to the one already ranking on page one is the way to go.

So while you can go with something a little more colorful (the title that appears on the page itself) in your H1 title, stick with 60 characters or less for your SEO title, front-loading keywords, and modifiers. Note the ones that seem to be popular, such as with the year in the title. How to Rank High on Google – SEO Title Example

Heading this post with something more constructive like “How to Rank Higher on Google: 10 Dangerous Pitfalls to Avoid” probably won’t help it rank.

To rank even higher, or to improve your rank for really tough keywords.

11. Get Backlinks

A backlink is a link to your page from another website and is a heavily weighted ranking factor.

Now if you are creating quality content and promoting it on social media, you might be getting backlinks already. But you can also be proactive in getting backlinks to specific pages. You can learn here how to get backlinks.

12. Mine Your Search Query

Search Console will tell you which query is driving people to see your page in search results and which query is causing them to click.

This can help you find additional keywords to target with pages of your own, along with additional titles to add to a page. If you’re already ranking for it by mistake, you’re sure to rank when you intentionally target that keyword.

In the image below, “best ad sentence” is a query we are getting impressions for. If I think it’s a keyword, I might want to write a blog post on it or use it as a title in an existing post.

13. Target Keywords With Videos And Tutorials

Video content is becoming more and more visible on the SERPs, and in some cases, it’s the only opportunity for a topic to rank higher. For example, take a look at the SERP for “how to advertise on Facebook”. Between ads, people also ask, about Facebook’s organic results, and videos, the “top” true organic page result is the result on the page.

But if you create video content on this topic, you can rank in the highest possible position for an organic result (since you’re not going to outdo Facebook).

14. Targeted Pages Already Ranking

Sometimes it can be easier to move a post from the ninth to the fourth position, for example, from page nine to page four. Not only this, the former will increase the traffic much more than the second.

If you have a large website, use an SEO tool like Ahrefs or Semrush to filter your organic keywords by position and see if you have a page that fits this bill, then see if you can add it again. can be customized.

Pro Tip (aka Plug)

Receive an instant SEO audit with our free website grader.

15. Perform SERP Analysis

This is another strategy where you will need an SEO tool. If you want to rank at the top of a particular keyword, you’ll want to do a SERP analysis to see what exactly it’ll need – and if it’s realistic.

For example, if I want to rank highest in all the land for “small business ideas,” I can see that I’m competing with HubSpot—specifically, a page on a site with a domain. There are 4,589 backlinks from 1,100 different domains. Rating of 93.

16. Add Schema Markup

Schema.org markup is not a ranking factor, but it can help improve your visibility in search results and make your results more clickable. Schema markup is a way to tell Google even more specifically the types of content on your page, which can help it appear in rich results. There are a variety of rich results—articles, breadcrumbs, events, FAQs, how-tos, job postings, FAQs, and more.

You can use Google’s Rich Results Tester tool to see which content on your page is eligible for schema markup.

For more help on this, see our post on Schema Markup to see which one might be most useful to you.

17. Check Your Technical SEO

A lot of technical SEO is done at the site level, but there are a lot of page-level optimizations you can do to improve your rankings, such as making sure your images are compressed and sized properly and There is no indexing problem. You can view a page’s main web details, mobile usability, and more in Search Console.

Also, be sure to do manual mobile usability testing—as in, don’t just use Google’s mobile-friendliness tester, but visit the page from a mobile device to make sure elements are rendering properly. There are some things a code-crawler just won’t pick up on.

How to Rank High on Google: Recap

And all. SERP has come a long way from the list of 10 blue links. Google is prioritizing visual, excellent, recent content to build rich SERPS that provide immediate answers. Use these tips to rank higher, higher and higher so that you can build authority in your niche and meet your website traffic and conversion goals.

In the name of clear statements (tip #7), here’s how to rank higher on Google in 2022:      

• Target the appropriate keywords
• Check Intent
• Write lengthy content about it
• Do your on-page SEO
• Target long tail, query keywords
• Make your information skimmable
• Make a clear statement
• Include meaningful visuals
• Keep a Table of Contents
• Borify your meta titles
• Get Backlinks
• Target your search query
• Create Video Content
• Targeted Pages Already Ranking
• Perform SERP Analysis
• Schema Markup
• Technical SEO