7 Proven Techniques to Rank Number One in Google

in this video i'm going to show you how to rank number one in google in fact the seven techniques in this video have helped me get number one rankings for keywords like youtube seo and nofollow links i'm brian dean the founder of backlinko the place where marketers turn for higher rankings and more traffic and if you want actionable strategies that you can use to get higher google rankings you'll love this video stay tuned so my team

and i recently analyzed 5 million google search results to learn more about what people click on in the search results and why and as it turns out ranking on the first page of google ain't what it used to be today it's all about ranking number one or at least in the top three that's because our study found that the top three results get 75.1 percent of all clicks and the number one result alone gets 31 of

the clicks ricky bobby said it best if you're not first you're last and in this video i'm going to show you seven techniques to help you rank number one in google so let's kick things off with our first technique find low competition keywords with explodingtopics.com let's face it most keywords are super competitive that's because everyone and their mom is using the exact same tools ahrefs scm rush moz pro the google keyword planner everyone is typing the

exact same keywords into these tools and getting the same exact results so to find untapped keywords that aren't super competitive you need to use tools that no one else is using and one of my favorite untapped keyword research tools is one that i actually developed called exploding topics this tool surfaces trending topics that aren't competitive yet and because exploding topics focuses on terms that aren't mainstream yet you can find keyword and topic ideas that most other

tools won't show you and now it's time for technique number two rewrite old content to match search intent this technique recently helped me rank number one in google for the keyword seo campaign here's the full story you probably already know that if your site isn't what searchers want google won't rank it even if that page has a million backlinks but if you can align your content up with what someone wants you can find yourself with higher

rankings for that term for example i published this blog post on my blog a few years ago this post was a case study of how one of my readers used a strategy called gestographics to build a bunch of backlinks now i couldn't find a great keyword for that post so i just went with seo campaign it wasn't a perfect fit and it didn't really describe the topic of the page but it was good enough and for

a while it was good enough my page quickly hit the top 10 for that keyword and stuck there for a few months but one day google rankings and organic traffic to that page started to drop so i kind of ignored the problem and hoped it would go away spoiler alert it didn't go away traffic to my page continued to freefall that's when i realized that my content was a horrible fit for user intent i'll explain someone

that searches for seo campaign probably wants you guessed it an seo campaign but my content didn't give them that instead of outlining the steps to setting up an seo campaign my post was about one strategy and using metrics like dwell time bounce rate and pogo sticking google could figure out that my result wasn't a good fit so they downranked it which is why i decided to rewrite this post from scratch this time i made sure to

publish a piece of content that someone searching for seo campaign would love and within a few days organic traffic to that page started to improve and a few weeks after that the new version of this post hit the number one spot let's get right into one of my favorite new seo techniques ghost posts this is a new seo technique that i've been using a lot lately and it's working really well let's break it down so as

you probably know the keyword difficulty scores that you see in most keyword research tools are based on one metric backlinks are backlinks still important for seo definitely but backlinks are only one piece of the puzzle first page rankings are also based on organic click-through rate user intent page speed mobile friendliness on-page seo url length internal links and lots of other factors that's why i tend to ignore or at least take with a grain of salt most

keyword difficulty scores and instead of using those numbers i use ghost posts for example a while back i wanted to optimize a post around the keyword free seo tools and according to ahrefs keyword explorer this keyword is quote super hard to rank for and instead of just blindly accepting that number i decided to see how difficult this keyword actually was specifically i whipped up a quick post and published it on the fourth page of my blog

feed i didn't email the post to my list or share it on social media hence the name ghostpost i was surprised to see that my page started to hit google's first page for long tail versions of my keyword like best free seo tools within about two weeks it even started to crack the top of the second page for my target keyword that's when i decided to promote the post on social media and improve the post itself

as it turns out this super hard keyword actually wasn't that competitive in fact i now rank in the top three for that keyword even though my page has way fewer backlinks than the other results on page one with that let's start on technique number four rank youtube videos in google ranking a page from your site isn't the only way to rank number one in google in fact you've probably noticed that there are more video results in

google than ever before especially above the fold for example this video carousel ranks above the traditional first result so for this set of results these youtube videos are actually the real number one result as another example i've been trying to get this post to rank number one for a target keyword of mine for a few months now unfortunately i'm still alternating between number three and number four so to get some real estate in that number one

spot i decided to create a high quality youtube video on that same topic and because i optimized my video the right way it's made its way to the top spot within a few months which leads us to technique number five target low competition high cpc terms when i used to do keyword research back in the day i'd focus a hundred on search volume so if i saw a keyword with 100k searches a month i'd automatically think

that it was a great keyword today i put a lot more focus on a keywords cpc or cost per click in other words how much advertisers spend on those clicks this is important for two main reasons first traffic that comes to your site from high cpc terms tend to convert a lot better after all people are bidding to pay for clicks on that exact term which means that people that search for that keyword aren't broke tire

kickers they're buyers second a lot of high cpc keywords aren't as competitive as you might think for example i recently created a post optimized around the low competition high cost per click keyword link building services now this keyboard doesn't get that many searches only about 350 searches per month with a cpc of 20 bucks a pop i know that the traffic is made up of legit buyers moving right along to technique number six embed videos in

your content you probably already know that dwell time is an important google ranking factor dwell time is the amount of time that someone spends on your page before going back to the search results and the higher your dwell time in general the higher your page will rank in google the question is how do you improve your dwell time embed videos on your page for example i recently compared my bounce rate on a sample of pages with

and without a video and pages with a video had an 11.2 percent better bounce rate than pages without a video and that's why i embed videos in pretty much every post that i publish sometimes i make the video an entire step strategy or tip or as a way for people to learn more about something that i'm talking about either way i found that embedding videos can significantly increase your dwell time and now it's time for our

last technique technique number seven rank in the featured snippet spot in many ways ranking the featured snippet is actually better than racking number one that's because the feature snippet is above the normal search results which is why a lot of people call it position number zero well over the last few months i've been running lots of featured snippet experiments and i've developed a process that's helped me rank for dozens of different featured snippets here's how it

works first identify the type of feature snippet that google's already showing for that keyword now there are three main types of featured snippets to keep an eye out for the definition snippet the list snippet and the table snippet then add something to your page that would fit perfectly inside of that featured snippet for example i wanted to rank in the featured snippet for the keyword nofollow links so i wrote a little section that would fit perfectly

inside of a definition featured snippet which helped me rank in the featured snippet within about a month now there's one thing i should point out about this approach according to an ahrefs study literally 99 of all featured snippets are pulled from results on the first page of google so if you're not already on the first page for a keyword you pretty much have a zero percent chance of getting in the featured snippet but if you're already

on page one and want to quickly get to the top of the results this strategy can definitely help now before we end this video i have a quick bonus technique for you create branded strategies now to be clear this is an advanced strategy that's not easy to pull off but when it does work it pretty much guarantees that you'll rank number one here's the full breakdown you may not have thought about it before but your brand

is actually a keyword a keyword that you automatically rank number one for for example if you google backlinko you can see that iraq number one with a bunch of site links from my site underneath it but why stop there you can start to rank number one for lots of different keywords when you brand your techniques and strategies for example you might have heard about the skyscraper technique my three-step formula for building backlinks and because i branded

my strategy lots of different people search for that keyword every month a keyword that i totally made up in fact according to google search console the keyword skyscraper technique gets almost a thousand searches per month and because i rank number one for that keyword i get most of those a thousand clicks so whenever you develop a unique strategy technique or tactic give it a branded name this doesn't guarantee that people will start searching for it but

it increases the odds that what you created will become a thing there you have it eight proven techniques to help you rank number one in google if you like this video make sure to subscribe to my youtube channel right now just click on the subscribe button below this video also if you want exclusive seo and traffic techniques that i only share with email subscribers head over to backlinko.com and hop on the newsletter it's free now i

want to turn it over to you what tip tactic or strategy are you gonna use from this video are you gonna try to rank in the featured snippets or start embedding videos in your blog content either way let me know by leaving a comment below right now okay to learn more about what excuse me you guys never saw the 40 year old virgin that movie and because i branded my strategy the skyscraper protect me so this

is nothing one hair getting pulled out