How to completely dominate Google’s first page

Google is trying to make the experience as beneficial to the user as possible, so plastering the SERP with links to your site isn’t going to provide this. Also, if you’re looking to dominate using a specific term it’s just never going to happen, there are just too many variables at play.

1) Paid Search results

To guarantee your presence at the top of the SERP you can pay for your website to appear in the Ad sections. These normally appear at the top of a SERP, to the right-hand side, or within a separate ‘Shopping’ section.You’ll need to set up an AdWords account in order to appear in the paid for listings at the top of the page, and you’ll only appear in the shopping section if you have a product to sell and are using Google Shopping Campaigns.

2) Google News

News results often occur in the top half of the SERP and have two or three links to stories related to your search term. Here we have News results for ‘search engine watch’.You have to submit your site specifically to Google News in order for it to be crawled and recognized as containing genuine news items. You can check whether your site is eligible here. Bear in mind that you will have to verify your ownership of your site and make sure you’re using meta-tags correctly.

3) Sitelinks

These are the extra links that appear under the main URL when searching for a brand or a publisher.These can help make branded search results appear more impressive, and helps push tangential results about you (a Wikipedia page, a news item about some terrible controversy) further down the SERP as well as any possible competitor results.

4) Search box

The search box appears in the results when you search for certain brands or publishers. If the search box appears, you can then search within that site.Much like the sitelinks above, this helps beef up the size of your branded search results with an extra little tool.To get your own search box, the only things you need are a website with a search tool of its own and a simple piece of Schema mark-up.

5) Answer box

Google scrapes third party websites to answer searchers’ straightforward questions in their own answer boxes. This technically means a searcher barely even needs to leave Google. However this is even more of a reason to be the one answering a particular question, as Google will place what it perceives to be the best answer at the top. This isn’t necessarily taken from Wikipedia either.Again there’s no guarantee that your site will be scraped for this information, but there are things you can do to increase the chances.

6) Google My Business and Map results

For businesses and retailers in particular, it’s vital to have accurate and up-to-date information, as Google will increasingly serve local results based on a user’s location.Google Maps search results are based on a combination of relevance, distance, and prominence. It’s entirely possible that Google give prominence to a business that’s farther away from a user’s location because it is more likely to have what their looking for.Therefore it’s important that your business information is complete and that the stock listed on your website is up-to-date and as detailed as possible.

7) Reviews

Reviews are absolutely essential for online retailers. They’re also vital for local businesses, whether or not they sell online, thanks to their sheer prominence in local search results. If you look at this mobile search for restaurants in Chicago, the best organic listings are taken by the restaurants with good reviews. After this the next organic listings are mainly from review sites such as Yelp, TripAdvisor, Time Out and Zagat. Therefore if you want a prominent position in local SERPs, you need user reviews.

8) Social Profile

A lot of branded searches the bottom few results tend to be that of the brand’s social channels.Although these may not lead directly to your website, they are still officially ‘your results’ and therefore another good way for your brand to dominate the page. Make sure you have regularly updated Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, YouTube Google+ and Pinterest accounts.

9) Videos

Google gives a great deal of prominence to videos, especially ones on its YouTube platform. Therefore if you have video content it’s important that you have a regularly updated YouTube channel with great quality videos and loads of happy subscribers. Another thing that many people forget is that it’s vital to tag your videos accurately in order for Google to discover and crawl your content properly.