You’ve spent a lot of effort on an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy, yet when you do a search on Google, you cannot find your website on the first page of the search results. Ranking on the first page of Google used to be simple. Stuffing a few keywords onto a page was enough, but with an increase in competition and several updates to Google’s search engine algorithm, it’s no longer as simple. That doesn’t mean you can’t rank on the first page, so let’s take a closer look at what you should do.
Check Your Robots.txt
If your efforts to rank on the first page of Google don’t seem to pay off, then it’s a good practice to start by assessing the robots.txt file on your server. This particular file serves as an instructor for search engines. It basically tells the search engine which files it may access and which ones are forbidden.
If, for example, your blog posts can be accessed by navigating to your website’s URL, followed by /blog - and you have a “Disallow” instruction for “/blog/” in your robots.txt file, then it tells search engines not to go to that URL.
You also have to ensure your robots.txt file is not blocking user agents, such as Googlebot. This would stop Google and other search engines from crawling your website - which means your pages won’t even show up in search results.
You Fail to Focus on Search Intent
When choosing keywords, you must be careful - and you also need to consider how well they correlate to the content on a specific page. Google has gotten smarter over the years and can better tell what the search intent of a user is, then show the pages that are most likely to meet the needs and answer the questions.
When someone searches for “best mattresses for back pain”, they don’t want to click on the first organic result and land on a sales page. They want valuable and resourceful information about what type of mattress would be right for them and perhaps a few considerations they should keep in mind.
Make sure your pages properly align with the search intent of the keywords you target.
Focusing On Quantity Over Quality When Building Backlinks
Backlinks still remain an important part of building an SEO strategy, but when you are too focused on quantity over quality, it can cost you.
Instead of trying to build thousands of backlinks as fast as possible, rather spend your time looking for higher-quality backlinks from websites with authority. This can help to add more authority to your own website and, in turn, push your pages to the first page.
Conclusion
Understanding how Google works and keeping up with the latest updates is an effective way to help your page rank on the first page of search results. You also have to focus on things like content quality, visitor duration, and more. If you are struggling to get your page on the front page of Google, then reach out to IDMI.Net. We have the expertise you need to rank for your primary keywords.