How to rank website on Google first page

In this article, I'm going to show you exactly how to rank on the first page of Google step by step.

In fact, I use this exact formula to rank on the first page of Google for thousands of keywords like backlinks, SEO best practices, and thousands of others. Then I sold that site, started another site from scratch, and grew that site from zero to 400,000 visitors per month.

Okay, enough bragging. Let's get into the actual steps. And don't worry, this isn't going to be the same generic SEO advice you've probably seen a thousand times before. Like create great content, use keywords on your page, make sure your site loads quickly, and all that stuff that you've probably seen a million times before.

Yeah, that stuff can help a little bit. And this is an SEO article for beginners, so it is important to get the basics right. But if you want to rank for competitive keywords, that stuff might help a little bit. But it's not really going to take your site to the first page of Google for really competitive keywords.

So follow this article to the end to know what will the steps that are about to lay out for you to rank website on Google first page.

SEO for Beginners: Rank #1 In Google (2025)

Find 5 keywords

So you probably already know that SEO is really all about keywords. It's all about ranking for keywords that your customers search for.

And there are a bunch of different strategies, tools and tactics for finding them. But one of the easiest and most effective is to Use Google autocomplete.

All you need to do for this to work is type in a keyword that you think a customer might search for and look for the suggestions that Google gives you. These are great for two reasons. First of all, these keywords are usually keywords people are searching for now. So they tend to be trending a little bit.

That way you can get an early and sort of ride the wave as more people search for that term. But more importantly, they're usually long tail keywords, which are much less competitive than most keywords that people go after.

One of the biggest mistakes people make that are new to SEO is that they go after really, really competitive keywords. And they're usually keywords that people first think of when they think of their business.

So for example, let's say you run a skincare brand and you want to create a blog post around the keyword skincare routine. Now, on the surface, this is a good keyword because it's something that your customers probably search for.

The problem is it's just way too competitive for most new sites to rank for. You have huge brands Trying to rank for this skincare routine keyword.

A long tail version of this keyword be something like skincare routine for men or Skincare routine dry skin. These two keywords are much less competitive than skincare routines.

So even if your site is new, you still have a chance to rank for them. So once you're done with Google Autocomplete, scroll down to the bottom of Google to the related searches section. Here's where Google will show you keywords that are directly related to your keyword and sometimes more tangentially related.

So it's almost like brainstorming within Google. And speaking of keywords that are low competition, a great way to find them is a tool called Exploding Topics. And this is a shameless plug because I am the co founder of that tool. But it really is a great way to find keywords that aren't competitive yet.

Create amazing content for your 5 keywords

Which leads us to our second step, which is to create amazing content out of each of the five keywords that you found. So at this point, you should have found at least five keywords that are a good fit for your business and also a relatively low competition. And now it's time to create amazing content around those keywords.

Now, back in the day, amazing content meant just these like huge guides, 10,000 words, covered everything. And in some cases, that does make sense. But in SEO today, the big thing is search intent. And what that basically means is when someone searches for something, there's a search intent behind it.

Sometimes a search intent is looking for information, looking to buy something, looking to browse and compare different products. And each keyword basically has a unique search intent. And the better that your content can satisfy search intent, the higher you'll rank in Google.

For example, someone searching for best organic cat food is probably not credit card in hand ready to buy cat food. They're more in browsing mode and they're comparing different options. So if your page does a good job of comparing the pros cons pricing of different cat foods, it's likely to perform well.

But if you create a page that's like promoting one cat food over the other and it's really salesy, it's probably not going to convert well. But if someone's searching for something like buy cat food online, they're much further down the funnel and they're ready to buy.

So you could even rank a product or category page for a keyword like that on your e commerce site even though there's no valuable content. Besides search intent, you also want to create something that's unique, something that brings something new to the table or something better to the table. Otherwise you're going to have a hard time ranking because for most keywords there are already a decent number of results.

So for you to stand out and create something that deserves to be on the first page, or even number one, you need to bring something really different to the table that the results don't already have.

For example, look at this guide from my old site "Backlinko". It contains strategies, tips, case studies, and other things that really no other content has, which is one of the reasons it ranked on the first page so quickly.

Plus, most importantly, it's not just unique for the sake of being unique. It satisfies search intent, which Google can measure. And when they see people are generally happy with your page, it's going to rise up the rankings. But if they find that your page isn't a good fit for search intent, they're going to downrank you.

Optimize it for SEO

So once you have a piece of content ready to go, the next step is to optimize it for SEO. And this used to be somewhat complicated and evolved back in the day. You used to have to put your keyword in your content a bunch of times put your keyword in H2 tag.

But today that stuff doesn't really move the needle anymore. I honestly don't worry that much about on page SEO today because it's really so simple and instead of just focus on creating great content that satisfies search intent.

And in fact we have a whole writing team at my startup and we don't really tell them anything about SEO. We don't want to get into their head that they have to worry about keywords or related keywords or all this stuff. We just say create the best content possible and for this keyword create something that someone landing on the page would say, yes, this is like exactly what I'm looking for.

The whole on page thing is relatively simple. All you really need to do is have your keyword in your title, in the first couple hundred words of your page, and then a few other times on your page just to let Google know that this page is about that topic.

For example, this post from the Exploding Topics blog is optimized around the keyword business trends. So we include that exact keyword in the title, in the first hundred words and a few other times on the page.

Honestly, that alone is like 90% of on page SEO right now. And yes, that page does rank number one for my target keyword business trends.

But it's not something that ranks because of any on page SEO magic. It ranks because it's the best result for the keyword business trends. It has the best content, the most original content, and it satisfies search intent.

Optimize your content for user experience

So now that your content is written optimized for on page SEO, the next step is to optimize it for user experience.

Google used to rank sites based largely on how many backlinks they had, or based on how many times a keyword appeared on a page. And it's not really like that anymore.

Backlinks are still super important. I'm going to cover that later in the article. But Google largely ranks content based on how happy it makes a searcher, which is that search intent thing that we talked about earlier.

But you can't just create a piece of content that satisfies search intent and expect it to rank because you also need to make sure that the user can find their information quickly, basically User experience.

In fact, Google can carefully measure how people interact with your site and whether they bounce back to the search results. And if people bounce quickly from your site after landing on it from Google, they'll downrank you.

But if people are generally staying on your site for long periods of time after searching for a keyword, that's a positive sign to Google and they're likely to raise your rankings.

With that, here's exactly how to optimize your content for user experience. The first thing is you want to front load the value as much as possible, which is basically giving people the thing they're looking for as high on the page as you can.

Basically, you don't want to hide insights and hide really valuable tidbits in your content. You want to make it stand out so people can skim and get what they're looking for quickly.

For example, look at this post about ETFs from Investopedia. The page doesn't even have an intro, never mind a long winded intro. It just jumps right into what ETFs are, which is what people searching for ETFs want to know.

Now at Exploding Topics, we do use intros, but we try to keep them really short. And the idea behind them is really just to let people know that they're in the right place. That way, people can get value within seconds of landing on the page.

Another thing to look at is your content layout and design. Specifically, you want to make your content easier to read. Or as I like to say, when it comes to online content, hard to read means won't read.

So if your font is small, or sections are all squished together, or you have long paragraphs, people are not going to read it, no matter how good the content is.

Now, if you want to see a great example of how this looks, go to healthline.com, they're probably the gold standard when it comes to content layout and design. They have super big, easy to read font, a simple layout, and lots of subheadings that make the content easy to read and skim.

Build backlinks

And now it's time for our last step, which is to build backlinks. Make no mistake, backlinks are still super important when it comes to SEO. That's because Google largely uses backlinks to figure out which sites are trustworthy and authoritative. In other words, the exact types of sites that they want to show at the top of the search results.

Now, there are a million ways to build backlinks, from broken link building to guest posting. But considering this is a article about SEO for beginners, I wanted to give you a sort of approachable strategy that anyone can use, a strategy that works especially well for new sites with zero authority. And that strategy is called "Be the Source".

Now, I have an entire article on this strategy, so if you want to go super deep on it, you should read that article. But let me give you some steps here that you can get started on right away.

The first step is to find a statistic in your industry that you can write about and expand on.

For example, at Exploding Topics, we realized that a lot of people are searching for how much data is generated per day. But it was lost inside these long statistics posts, among a bunch of other stats about how much data is generated per day, where the data comes from. And it was really just hard to find that one stat that people are searching for.

So we created a dedicated page to how much data is created every day, along with a couple of different, you know, insights and examples. But most importantly, at the top of the page was the statistic people were looking for.

So that way someone searching for how much data is created per day we were the source. We were the easy source to find and the easy source to cite. And that made us quickly the source for bloggers and journalists that were writing about how much data was generated per day. In fact, we started to get backlinks literally like a week or so after publishing the post.

Now, you might be wondering if my site's new, it doesn't have any authority. Why would Google rank that content and why would someone link to me? It's a good question and a legitimate concern. That's exactly why you want to target really specific stats that people are going to have a hard time finding anywhere else.

These specific stat keywords are super low competition, so you can usually rank for them without any authority whatsoever. For example, when ChatGPT was first blowing up, we realized that there was an opportunity to create one or maybe even several stat pages around ChatGPT.

The problem was there are already quite a few pages about ChatGPT statistics, like how much money they raised, who's the founder, and stuff like that.

So we went with a very specific topic instead. How many users does ChatGPT have, which ranked super quickly and brought in dozens of backlinks in that page? Because we're targeting a new trending, low competition keyword ranked very quickly. And when bloggers and journalists are writing about ChatGPT and they wanted to know how many users they had, they found us first.

Conclusion:

So let me give you the key takeaways from this article so you can get started and actually start to rank your site in Google today.

First, you want to target low competition, long tail keywords that are still trending and they haven't become mainstream yet.

Next, you want to create a piece of content that's not just great and high quality, which is vague. It's something that satisfies search intent and give searchers exactly what they want.

Third, you want to optimize your content for on page SEO, which is basically adding your keyword on your page a couple of times.

Next, optimize your content for user experience and make sure people can get value as soon as possible after landing on your site.

Finally, you want to build backlinks. And like I said, there are a thousand different ways to do this, but the best way to get started is to be the source for a specific statistic in your niche.

So, that's all for my SEO guide for beginners. Now I'd like to hear from you, which step from this article are you going to try first? Let me know in the comment section below and I'll see you in the next article.