5-Step Formula to Ranking Premium Content in Google

If you want to rank at the top of the search results, you need to know everything about your competition and the content you are writing about. The same holds true even if you are trying to rank your site with long tail keywords or in less competitive markets. No matter what your site is or the market you are currently in, Google is only going to list so many websites in their first page organic listings… and we all know that the first page is the only place that matters.

What most site owners and bloggers don’t realize is that ‘content creation’ is a long term game and it’s one that takes a lot of patience to see results with. However, there are methods to speed up this process. With all of this in mind, today I wanted to share with you a simple 5-step formula for maximizing your content creation and search ranking efforts, while also speeding the process up as much as possible.

1 – Decide on Your Topic and Niche Audience

Before starting a new website or blog, you need to first know why you are creating a site in the first place, who it’s targeting and how you are going to make money with it. While most bloggers will just go live with their site and plan on monetizing it later on, this is a long and tedious process — especially if you are waiting around for your content to start indexing within Google. However, there are some tips and tricks to speed up this process. For a more detailed approach, Neil Patel wrote up a great resource guide on how to rank your site in the search results faster.

Blogging is completely changing the way content is created on the internet and how businesses rank in the search results. Businesses with a blog not only tend to create more valuable content for their audiences, but they also rank more often and have increased traffic.

In short, the more you know about your site, audience, and content before getting started, the more likely you are to find success.

2 – Create Your Content and Monetization Strategy

Once you’ve decided on your content focus and niche market, it’s time to scope out your competition. Search Google to see what other sites are ranking for keywords you would like your site to rank for, while also seeing what type of content they are creating. Tools like SEMRush and Long Tail Pro are great for digging deep into the search rankings and analytics of your competition, while also seeing how likely it might be for your site to outrank them.

3 – Make Your Content Better than the Competition

While checking out your competition in the search results, it’s important that you spend a decent amount of time on your content creation. Google loves ranking content that is over 1,000+ words long and goes above and beyond. A perfect example of this would be a detailed resource guide that includes original images, data charts to backup information, videos and even infographics if you can find the time to create one.

The combination of creating killer content and including an engaging infographic to go along with it is something some of the best blogs in the world do to consistently stay ahead of the competition. The concept of this model is to have written content that walks the user through the process of how to create a blog, while also showing them visuals in infographic form — for those who don’t want to read through the 1,500+ words of text.

4 – Reach Out to Relevant Industry Sites for Backlinks

Content creation is just one component to the success of your site. While it’s a major component to ranking and user experience, the real factor to getting your site to rank in Google is the backlinks and references you will receive from other sites. Not only does your content need backlinks, they also need to be from relevant and authority sites.

To accomplish this, you have a few different options. The first is to start doing your own outreach and guest blogging on other sites while referencing back to your own site and content when applicable. The other is to manually contact all sites within your niche to see if they would like to reference your resource guide or feature your infographic on their site. They key here is to provide value and to make it as easy as possible for them to complete this task while also benefiting from it.

5 – Monitor Your Results and Repeat the Process

The last part of the process is to monitor your results and to then repeat the process. I mentioned that content creation is important, but once your content is finished and live, you won’t really need to mess with it again. The rest of your time and focus should be spent on your content outreach and getting more awareness for your site.

Continue to monitor your search rankings and see what new keywords you might be ranking for. As you continue to see new search phrases and keywords creep up on Google, be sure to link other content on your site using back to your new article using a similar set of keywords, as this will also help with your search rankings.

Content outreach and link building is something that you should also continually focus on. Go after higher quality links than smaller sites, as they will push a lot more SEO juice and value to your site.

How to Rank Any Content in Google

Even with over a billion active sites on the internet today, it’s still possible to rank new websites and content at the top of Google. All you need to do is produce high-quality content and make sure you follow each of the methods outlined about.

Remember, it’s easy to go live with a website and content — it’s not so easy to get an audience and find success. You need to work for it!