How to Be the #1 Google Search Result in 2021?

Nobody visits the second page of Google except desperate students and the morbidly curious.

Page 2 is where good websites with bad SEO go to wither away to nothingness. According to Backlinko.com, only 0.78% of Google searchers clicked on something from the second page – which is bad, bad news for your page if that’s where it’s landed.

But there’s good news: despite Google’s ever-refreshing algorithms, there are some strategies that will help you get to the first page of Google in 2021. You don’t have to do all of them, but executing a few of these tips well will improve your chances.

But first… some encouragement

Getting to the first page of Google is a great goal. First result is even better – but don’t forget, your priority should always be your audience and your potential customers.

According to Backlinko.com’s research, the #1 result in Google’s organic search results only has an average CTR of 31.7%. That means that even if you never achieve the top position, you’ve still got a more likely chance of being clicked than the first result.

That being said, the #1 organic result is 10x more likely to receive a click compared to the tenth one, so aim for the sweet spot around the middle.

Changing position in the rankings will also affect your clickthrough rate. Moving up 1 spot in the search results will generally increase CTR by 30.8%, with moving from position #3 to position #2 resulting in the most meaningful boost. However, moving from #10 #9 doesn’t make a statistically significant difference, so if you can’t get any further than that don’t worry.

Tips to get your site on page 1 of Google:

Ask a question.

Title tags that contain a question get 14.1% more clicks compared to pages that just pose a statement. This might be because people searching Google are usually looking for an answer – and if the title of the page more accurately resembles their query, they’re going to think it contains the solution.

Shorten (or lengthen) your titles.

Here’s the golden formula for a page title: between 15 to 40 characters. Titles of this length usually get around 8.6% higher clicks compared to longer or shorter ones. Does it just look good to our eyes? Does it play well with Google’s font size? We don’t know – it just works. Sorcery.

Keywords, keywords, keywords!

URLs that contain a relevant keyword have a 45% higher click through rate compared to URLs that don’t contain a keyword. Don’t know your keywords? You really should. Use Google’s keyword checker tool to see the most relevant search terms for a page like yours, and include them organically wherever you can.

“Power Words” are over.

Like… they’re so 2015. Power words such as “secret”, “ultimate”, “powerful”, “best”, “new” and “insane” led to big results for infopreneurs and others during the digital marketing boom after the last recession. However, recent data suggests they’re played out and that searchers may even regard them as spammy. Titles with power words get a 13.9% lower CTR compared to titles that didn’t – so if you can tone it down, that’s probably going to work in your favour.

Put some emotion into it.

Emotional titles may improve your CTR. Research has found that titles with positive or negative sentiment improved CTR by approximately 7%, which could make all the difference to your conversion rate. Decide what emotion you want your audience to feel, and insert emotional words accordingly.

For example, as COVID-19 overturned life as we know it, many businesses were concerned with losing their customers to lower-cost options if they were struggling financially, and wanted to give audiences the impression they were on their side. As a consequence, we saw a huge boom in the use of loyalty-based emotional headlines containing the words “always”, “forever”, “maintain”, and “now more than ever”.

Get meta.

Don’t forget your meta description. Pages with a meta description get 5.8% more clicks than those without a description. When it comes to Google, the more data the better, and there’s nothing the search giant loves more than context it can use to show its text-to-speech assistant devices in the best light.

Long tail searches are king.

People don’t search “women’s shoes”. They search for “women’s Nike shoes size 6 free delivery”. That’s called a long tail keyword, and they make up the majority of searches on Google. One or two won’t do much for you, but when you add them together you’ll really see the traffic flow in. For example, Neil Patel was able to increase his organic traffic to 173,336 visitors monthly using a long-tail strategy. But…

Write more content.

…There is a downside to a long-tail keyword strategy – and that’s that you can’t stuff a bunch of random keywords onto the same page. (Well, you can, but Google and the people who visit your page will absolutely hate it.) So what’s the solution? More blog posts, baby! Focus on one or two long-tail keywords per post, and publish on a regular prolific blogging schedule.

Focus on E.A.T

Yes, that’s your permission to go get a snack. Now come back, and read this: E.AT stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These are the search quality raters guidelines which help Google determine if their algorithms are delivering good results. Boost your page in these three areas, and that will help it climb in the results.

Are you on the front page of Google yet? Why not – and what are you doing to get there? We’d love to know if you have any tips or strategies we haven’t heard of – so drop us a line in the comments!