3 Tactics To Get To The Top Of Google Search In 2021

Last year, I wrote a book called How to Get to the Top of Google Search for Penguin Random House New Zealand. It remains the bible that small businesses across New Zealand and Australia use to dominate search rankings. This month, I’ve had several requests from businesses to provide some tips they can use to improve SEO without spending a fortune on an SEO agency or website development. Below, I’ll detail three simple tactics that could make a big difference for your site in 2021.

1. Create Quality Blog Content

Content is one of the top three ranking factors the Google algorithm considers when deciding which websites will appear on the first page of results.

Start a blog for your website if you haven’t already and generate new content regularly. Develop content that can establish you as a trustworthy authority on topics relevant to your brand. Quality content helps Google understand your business, builds trust, drives engagement and generates links back to your site when people share your posts elsewhere!

2. Drive Engagement with Digital PR

Digital PR is the practice of pitching branded content to online publishers, who then link back to your site and cite you as the source, creating quality backlinks by building brand awareness. Many businesses today find that it helps them generate better quality links and expand their brand reach.

Link building has been a cornerstone SEO practice for years. Google uses the number of links back to your site—along with the quality of the sites linking back to you—as a major indicator of your websites value when determining search rankings. However, the practice of link building can be arduous and time-consuming, which is why so many businesses today outsource it to experienced SEO agencies like ours.

With a digital PR strategy, you can target sites with higher domain authority (whose backlink to your site Google considers more valuable), passing the over lower to mid-level authority sites that a more traditional link building strategy would usually include. Digital PR takes some time and effort, but the potential benefits are worth it.

3. Build an Internal Linking Network

Google assigns a certain level of quality to each page on your website, which we call “page authority”. Some pages have higher authority than others, and those may not necessarily be the pages that you consider most important!

You can redistribute some of that page authority through “internal linking” or linking from one page on your website to another page on the same site. Look for ways to link from less important pages on your site to more important pages, such as core product or service pages. This distributes what we call “link equity” from one page to another, and helps Google understand which pages on your site are most important.

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