How Can I Get to the Top of Google

The holy grail of websites isn’t always getting to the top of Google. It depends on why you have a website. People have websites for two main reasons: to be found, or to add an element of legitimacy to an already popular business. If you fit in the second category, then it’s probably not worth your time and effort (and money) to worry about. If you fit in the first category, read on. Google are in the business of providing accurate and relevant results and work hard to make sure when someone types a search in they see what the want – not necessarily what the website owners want them to see. Google use a multitude of factors to determine what they consider accurate and relevant and they don’t disclose what these factors are (so that people can’t trick the system). Ignore sites that promise to get you to the top, and instead go straight to the source. You can find some official information here. At The Website Shop we ensure that your site is well set up to be searched (such as being mobile friendly and well structured), but the most important thing is making sure the content is relevant and popular.

“Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors.” Google, 2017

Relevance is determined by the genuineness of your content (Google won’t tell you more about it) and popularity is determined by how many people visit your site or business (or talk about it online). It’s a little but of a catch-22. You need to be up the rankings to get visitors, but you’ll need visitors to get rankings. Think about ways to send people to your site (such as business cards) or look at paid advertising as a boost.

Boost Yourself With Paid Advertising

One way you can shortcut your way to the top is with paid advertising. In the image above the four entries at the top of the page that begin with [Ad] are paid advertisements. That’s what we did at The Website Shop when we started out and it worked well for us to get us off the ground. Now you can see we’re high up in the organic (non-paid) results as well. If you’re keen to do this go to Google AdWord Express.  

Being Realistic

Once this is done, all it takes is time. Realistically you can’t expect to be top of the rankings on day one but it all depends on how niche and how popular your site is. If you want to be top of the rankings for ‘accountants’ in all of New Zealand, you’re going to have a lot of competition. If you want to be top of the rankings for ‘vegan restaurants in Upper Hutt’ you’re going to have a lot less competition. In the above screen shot I’m searching for ‘website design’ when I’m in Upper Hutt. If I searched it when in Auckland I’d get entirely different results.