In order to climb the search rankings and make your website appear on Google’s search engine results page (SERP), a variety of factors have to work together.
First, you must have a good website. It needs to load quickly, have a user-friendly layout, be optimized for mobile, and feature content that is keyword-focused and well-organized with subheadings and lists. A strong content marketing strategy is based on valuable information that either informs, entertains, or solves a problem for its audience.
All of this put together is referred to as search engine optimization or SEO. The overall optimization of your website, both for human visitors and Google’s bots, send signals to search engines about the quality and trustworthiness of your site – which is important since consumer trust is at an all-time low.
Great SEO website with valuable content that’s engaging readers? Good for Google.
Clickbait articles, spammy pop-ups, poor layout, and obnoxious keyword stuffing? Google will take a hard pass, as will your readers.
Once you have a great website ready for viewers, you need to make sure Google is aware that your site exists.