SEO

How to appear at the top of search engine results

There are several steps to achieve top of search engine results page (SERP), or indeed the much talked about AI generated featured snippet that now takes centre stage. And, achieving this is an ongoing labour of love between business owners and people like us. The important thing to focus on is creating high-value content that is meaningful to your audience, search engines and AI tools; making sure the content is informative, easy to digest and relevant. Google and rapidly evolving generative AI will both reward you for this. Below is a quick overview. See examples of optimised high-quality content that we have written.

Quick links

1. Website and page structure
2. Keywords
3. Links
4. Site health check
5. Google Business Profile
6. Want to know more?

Website and page structure

Ask yourself, is your website content easily scannable to your site visitors? If not, then it’s also not scannable to Google. Informative, concise detail or longer content organised into clear sections headed by a Table of Content, is what works. Also, make sure your site menus are easy to use and navigate – in order for people to reach the content they want to see quickly. Another win with Google and AI tools.

Keywords

So keywords just for keyword sake has been out for a long time now but they are 100% essential to high-quality content and our favourite part in all this. Research by comparing your content to your competitors and what comes up in Google search is a sensible place to start. As is studying the keywords that people search for in your analytics. But we also use the Google Keyword Planner and other keyword research platforms such as Ubersuggest to gauge the number of searches a keyword gets each month in your target location. These keywords need to be added as naturally as possible into your blog posts as well as headings/first paragraphs across your website; along with behind the scenes in the meta data.

Links

Link like you’ve never linked before. Internal link building on a website adds value so that Google can index your site’s pages. So consider which bit of content would be also useful for your audience to see once they’ve read the page they’re on. Add a link as needed. Broken links must be monitored too. Equally, backlinks drive traffic to your site. They’re important for SEO because they signal to search engines that other websites rate your content.

Site health check

Keep on top of the health of your site. Check areas such as your site functioning as a responsive site, 404 errors, out of date plugins and themes you might use, and that your images are optimised size-wise. Size still matters, it’ll affect the site speed which also matters in Google’s eyes.

Google Business Profile

Last but not least, ensure you have a Google Business Profile set up properly, complete with reviews. Reviews are key.

Want to know more?

This area is ever evolving, particularly when it comes to AI. If you want to have a chat about how your website can be optimised for search and AI, get in touch. In the meantime, have you heard of SXO? This takes you on a step from SEO. Examine what exactly is SXO here.