How To Get A New Blog To Rank In Google

If you’re reading this right now, I can guarantee you’re feeling overwhelmed by how daunting the task of getting your website to reach those top spots is. Well guess what, every single website on the internet starts at nothing. Sure, it’s no easy task, but following these tips will boost your rankings significantly, even for the youngest of sites.

Why Isn’t My Site Ranking?

Firstly though, we must understand why your site isn’t ranking. Sure, you may not have as flashy looking site, or as much content as your competitors, but why is it that Google doesn’t like new sites?

This all comes back to Google’s core belief that new sites won’t provide as high quality user experience as a site that’s young. Why though? Well, put simply, if your site is rubbish with terrible content, people won’t stick around long enough for you to earn ad revenue, or click affiliate links, so there’s no point in you continuing a project making you no money.

Apply that thought to a well established site and you can start to see why Google historically prefers them. In fact, according to an Ahrefs study, the average age of the top ranked result from 2 million different keywords, is a whopping 2 and a half years!

Sorry to make you feel even more overwhelmed. Now might be a good time to discuss the tips and tricks top blogs use to get the top ranks way faster.

On Page Optimization

First and foremost, you’re going to need a site that doesn’t just look great, but performs great too. Without prior knowledge or training in SEO, you’ve likely got next to no idea how to do any sort of on page optimization. These days though, you don’t need to worry, people have kind of already done your job for you. Just install these plugin’s

Yoast (Free)

This plugin is the king of content. Yoast will help you write your posts in a way that reader’s will love and format in a way search engine’s will love. All from the comfort of your add a new post page, you’ll be able to alter things like your page title, meta description and URL slug while also giving you a checklist of things you need to do for the most optimized page possible.

WP Rocket ($50 a year)

I completely understand not wanting to drop $50 on a site that’s making you precisely $0, I was there too, but hear me out. Google cares a lot about how long it takes your site to load. In fact, quite a few of the different metrics they use to rank posts will either directly or indirectly come back to load time, so making your site quick is essential.

WP Rocket handles absolutely all of your speed requirements; without getting too technical, it compresses files and bundles them together where needed and deletes them where they’re not needed.

Smush (Free)

I know I just said WP Rocket handles all of your speed requirements, but there’s one aspect that is better left to Smush. Smush is an image optimization plugin that will convert and compress all your images and videos on your site, so users don’t need to take 5 years loading your high quality images. The best part is, quality isn’t compromised at all.

Backlinks

If you know anything at all about SEO, you’ll already know that backlinks are king. Studies have shown time and time again that Google’s number 1 ranking factor is the amount of backlinks you have and how high quality they are. But how do you get backlinks with a new site? Unfortunately, it’s actually not very easy at all, but there are a few tricks.

Guest Posts

Blogs all over the internet will be happy to accept high quality posts from anyone at all. Finding them isn’t hard either, all you need to do is search Google with terms such as “write for us” + your niche, so for example: “write for us” business.

You can find both free and paid guest posts, it’s all about shopping around to find the best and cheapest options.

HARO

Help A Reporter Out (HARO) is one of the best free ways to secure high quality links for your site. How it works, is you sign up for emails 3 times a day (weekdays) and HARO will link you up with reporters in your niche who need quotes and opinions for upcoming articles. If they choose your feedback, you’ll get a link back to your site.

What makes this so powerful though, to become a ‘reporter’ (as in the one asking for queries), you need to be a part of a site with an Alexa rank of less than 1 million, meaning that not just anyone can be asking for peoples opinions.

Socials

Not only can you gain direct traffic from sharing your content around social media, but it’s also one of the easiest obtained ranking factors.

Whether or not socials directly effect your rankings has been debated for years now, however the general consensus is, the more likes, shares, comments, retweets etc. your article is getting, the more Google likes it.

A quick pro tip for you, if you’re only just starting out and creating new social accounts, outreaching pages and accounts in your niche that have a much larger following will get you far more traction than just sharing it yourself and hoping a few people will see it.

Ads

Just to be clear, I’m not classifying having your ad at the top of the search as ranking well. But as the spend money to make money saying goes, ads can actually kickstart your traffic.

User engagement plays a big part in how Google views your site. They want a user to spend plenty of time on your page and visit as many pages as possible on your site, regardless of how they were obtained.

So if you write some killer, irresistible content and drive views to it through ads, you could be sending Google a whole bunch of really positive metrics without really doing anything. Google and Bing both give you a voucher when you first start advertising with them too, so you won’t need to pay anything until you’re already seeing results.

Different keywords also cost different amounts to advertise for, for example if someone clicked on my ad under “top paid survey sites”, it’d cost up to $1 per click, whereas “top paid survey sites for teens USA” would be far less because not as many people are searching for it.

Final Thoughts

Whether or not a site succeeds or not is largely decided in the first year. This is when developers like yourself will make the decision of if your site is worth the effort. While you probably won’t see huge results in your first year, knowing the techniques to start pushing your site up the rankings will see you profiting sooner.