How to Keep Your #1 Rank on Google

One of the hardest things to do with your website is to rank #1 for high-intent queries that bring potential customers to your website.

If you can set up a base for your website so you are ranking #1 locally for important keywords, you can sustain an entire business from this. One of my clients receives over 30 leads a month through organic SEO, but that hasn’t always been the case! Let’s talk about how we did it.

Upgrade Your Website Structure

The structure of your website will make it easier for Google to understand what you’re targeting, as well as work to display your content more effectively across organic Search. As you can see in this screenshot, Google will use information from your website structure and content to display information in what are called snippets. Snippets are the elements that are displayed to users on Google. In this example of an organic snippet, this business is able to display its top-performing service to high-intent customers.

Snippets are automatically created from page content. Snippets are designed to emphasize the page content that best relates to a user’s specific search: this means that a page might show different snippets for different searches.

In this quote from Google, you can see that snippets will actually update based on the intent of the query. If the search is very conversion-focused, Google knows to display conversion-focused snippets that will convince the user to click-through.

Consider Your Website Framework

Depending on the types of framework you are using for your website, you may be limited to SEO optimization from the side of someone who is not a developer. Many website frameworks like Wix, Weebly, and Squarespace limit your abilities to update your website meta & title tags or even Schema. These platforms may require you to pay extra, and then the aid of a developer to truly achieve SEO-friendliness.

WordPress is one of the most SEO-friendly website framework’s that exists. Using tools like Yoast and Jetpack, you can quickly build an SEO-friendly website that is able to maintain the ranks you have built with another website framework.

Recently, I migrated a website from Joomla to WordPress that was ranking for several #1 keywords. The owner of the website wanted to start seeing more traction across other keyword pockets to increase the number of leads the website was getting per month. In the Joomla framework, we were limited by outdated plugins and a practically unresponsive community.

As we switched to WordPress, I was able to maintain all #1 ranks the website was holding, as well as gaining some low ranks on other keyword pockets.

Post Everywhere and Be Consistent

Now that organic SEO is your focus, it’s time to create a strategy for building a base for your new traffic. This starts from posting everywhere you can, and being as relevant to your potential customers as possible. Here are some places to think about posting content:

Social Media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter)
Google My Business
Blogs

Using these strategies for posting content around the web will ensure you are working towards creating new customer channels.

Maintain Your Content Quality

As you write more and more content for your website, it’s important to maintain content quality with being consistent. For me, I am able to create the most content when I have several article topics that I create before starting to write. This helps me chug through content and not really worry about directing my ideas.

It’s important to use heading tags to organize your content. Similar to a word document, h1, h2, and h3 tags will help Google understand and start ranking your website for keywords you are targeting.

Build New User Channels

Creating content is great, but does it matter if nobody is reading it? There are many options for moving forward when you are getting 0 visitors to your website. You will need to create user channels.

If you know about SEO, then you are probably optimizing your content for it. But organic SEO shouldn’t be your only user channel, and here are some of the best user channels to start getting traffic to your website: