If you want to learn how to rank higher on Google with SE Ranking, you’ve come to the right place.
Search traffic is the most cost-efficient traffic channel – it is no surprise everyone wants to be at the top of the search engine results. Such a desire creates a high level of competitiveness, making it difficult to get there by any means.
To beat the competition, your website and page should be better than others: content, UX, authority, expertness, etc.
Whether you’re starting a blog or have a seasoned website, a search engine optimization (SEO) tool is crucial to help you rank on Google. The best SEO copywriting tips will also help you create content to boost your rankings.
There are no shortcuts in SEO – you cannot rank fast in Google, so prepare for a marathon instead of a sprint. The key to success is having a clear vision of what you need to do and doing it daily because knowledge without action is worthless.
In this article, we’ll review the most important ranking factors and see how the SE Ranking SEO tracking tool can help you implement the best SEO practices.
Contents
What Are The Most Common Practices To Increase Rankings On Google?
There are many rumors out there about how to rank higher on Google. Here are six of the most proven techniques that have an impact on positions.
1. Optimize Your Page Around A Relevant Keyword Cluster And Search Intent
Relevance is the primary ranking factor: when users search for “how to start a blog,” they expect to see a page with instructions and tips on how to start a blog, not a bicycle shop.
It sounds obvious, but it gets trickier when speaking about related keywords. For example, the search results for the query “mountain bikes” contain “for sale,” “how to choose,” and “best” pages – three different search intents for a single keyword.
But if we search for the “best mountain bikes,” the results contain only the “top/best” pages.
So, if you want to rank high by the “best mountain bikes” cluster, you should focus on keywords that have the same user intention (contain “best,” “top,” etc.). Or conversely: avoid targeting too broad or irrelevant keywords (“for sale” in our case).
2. Publish High-Quality Content
This advice is pretty obvious but often overlooked when creating non-focus pages. Those are the pages for clusters with low/no search volume or other pages (e.g., “About us”).
Think of it this way: the domain is a set of web pages – like a book. If some of those pages are torn out, the text is askew, or the grammar is so bad that it is hard to read – would you trust such a book? I bet you wouldn’t, so why should Google trust such domains?
Ensuring every page of your own site has amazing content increases the overall domain authority, leading to improved rankings across domains.
3. Improve Your On-Site SEO
On-page optimization involves tweaking your content so the search engine can “understand” it more easily. Understanding means defining the page’s topic – what the page is about – to show it in the SERP for a relevant search query.
We’ve talked about the importance of relevance. Now, let’s see how to use it.
In general, your page should provide an answer to the search query. The simplest yet most effective approach to accomplish this is to use exact match keywords on a page: if the page contains “best mountain bikes,” sure enough, it’s about bikes.
The best practice is to use main keywords (with the highest search volume) in headings and the title and use other keywords throughout the text to cover all the keywords.
Also, don’t forget to optimize images using “title” and “alt” tags.
Fortunately, there are many on-page SEO tools to help you optimize your blog posts.
4. Clear Website Structure And Information Architecture
A website structure is formed by internal linking and does two things: defines website categories and designates the page’s weight.
Categorization is a convenient way for users to navigate the website, improving the UX (we’ll come back to this in a second) and helping Google evaluate the content.
Page weight (or URL rating) is a simpler concept that has more of an impact on rankings. The home page is the most crucial page of a website, but how to measure it? An easy way is to calculate the inbound links within the website: in most cases, each page has a minimum of one link to the homepage, totaling 100% of pages with links to the homepage.
Using a similar principle, you can increase the page’s URL rating by linking to other URLs.
5. Enhance Page Experience
The primary value of Google Search as a product is to provide the best search results. Users love good results, so Google did its homework in this regard and defined the Core Web Vitals – a set of metrics that helps webmasters to improve the UX.
The main factor is loading speed because not all users have fast Internet or powerful hardware. You may be surprised how impactful loading time is: a third of users won’t wait for the page to load for 3 seconds, compared to a one-second loading time.
Also, building a website with a lightweight and fast theme is crucial for loading speeds.
6. Build Backlinks To Your Site
Like inbound links, outbound links (backlinks) can also improve the page’s weight. Unlike inbound links, backlinks also increase the overall domain authority to rank a website on Google higher. Let’s overview this concept.
The best way to understand how backlinks impact page/domain quality is to remember how PageRank worked. Google has retired this algorithm, but its fundamentals are still a part of the current core algorithm.
The quantity and quality of backlinks determine the importance of a page.
For example, Wikipedia has about 100M+ backlinks from 400k+ referring domains. This provides outstanding domain authority that greatly impacts ranking: you certainly see Wikipedia in the top #1 Google position pretty often when browsing terms you don’t know.
Learn the best strategies for building contextual backlinks.
What Is SE Ranking?
SE Ranking is an all-in-one SEO platform that helps you complete any SEO-related tasks. Regardless of the niche, difficulty, or project size, SE Ranking has the tools required to increase your website rankings in Google, Bing, and other search engines.
As one of the best rank tracking tools, SE Ranking can be your secret weapon to rank higher on Google.
Who Is SE Ranking For?
Today, anyone can do SEO; you don’t necessarily need to be a specialist in the field. SE Ranking is an extremely agile platform that can fit any need:
- Entrepreneurs can research the demand for a product or service before its release.
- SMBs can see the growth points and related niches to get it.
- Online marketers can find content/ads ideas and top-performing competitors.
- SEO agencies and individuals have an amazing toolset for client project management and reporting.
It’s fair to conclude that SE Ranking will be a wonderful fit for you if you’re doing business online.
SE Ranking Features Overview
The SE Ranking platform provides numerous tools and reports – it’s easy to get lost in them without knowing what you’re doing.
Let’s overview the core features you’ll be using the most.
Accurate Keyword Rank Tracking
If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. This is applicable for anything, including organic search positions.
An excellent place to start is to set up a project and keyword tracking to see the current search performance and daily position changes.
Reveal Competitors’ Search Strategies
- Do you know all your competitors?
- Do you know what keywords/pages your competitors are targeting and ranking?
- Do you know what and how many backlinks your competitors are acquiring monthly?
With SE Ranking, you may find the answers to these and many other questions.
Offers Keyword And Link-Building Suggestions That Help With SEO
SE Ranking features algorithms that can detect SEO opportunities for you regarding technical optimization, keyword ideas, and link building.
Competitive Research will highlight missing keywords, and the Backlinks Gap Analyzer will show you domains that refer to your competitors.
This saves you from collecting data manually and allows you to get straight to analyzing – it saves a lot of time and energy, allowing you to focus on more creative tasks.
Generates Automatic Site Audits With Critical Issues That Need Attention
Technical optimization is a cornerstone of SEO. With automated website health monitoring, you can keep an eye on how your website is performing technically on a weekly or monthly basis. If something goes wrong, you can respond quickly.
Also, if you need to focus on a specific page, you can do it via the On-Page SEO Checker.
SE Ranking Tools To Increase Your Google Ranking
If you want to increase your Google rankings or search rankings on major search engines, consider the following SE Ranking tools.
Keyword Rank Tracker
The name speaks for itself – with this tool, you can track the position of each keyword daily. But it’s more than just a rank tracker. Using it, you can:
- Identify the slightest changes in positions in any location you set, some of which cannot be seen in the Google Search Console (GSC). For instance, you can quickly identify traffic drops and the keywords causing them.
- Compare positions with your competitors side-by-side to see the performance of each query.
- Identify cannibalization issues: red signifies that the SERP URL is different from the page you’ve assigned the keyword to or that you have a couple of pages competing for the same keyword – a strong sign to check if everything is right with the target page.
- Spot opportunities to excel. For example, you can improve pages with keywords at the 11th-15th positions and start generating website traffic once they get to the top 10, or by doing the same for pages with ranks 5-10, you can push them to the top 3 and start harvesting the clicks.
Besides importing keywords, you can connect to Google Analytics and Google Search Console. By doing so, you expand their functionality to get more insights.
For example, by connecting Google Analytics, you will have customer data such as sessions, clicks, and conversions directly in your SE Ranking account. In the GSC report, all stats are compared to the previous period, so you can see what pages caused the biggest traffic drop/gain.
SERP Analyzer
To be in the top #1 Google position, you need to surpass every other page in the SERP.
You’ve met the most important ranking factors and best practices, so you know the basics. It’s enough for the top 5-10, but to win the competition, you need more.
An amazing way to learn what your page is missing is to compare it with top SERP competitors. This is the core functionality of the SERP Analyzer.
You can enable and disable metrics to see how they correlate with positions: if the graph consistently grows when closer to top 1, those metrics greatly impact the SERP for that specific search query.
This is a very precise method to find optimization opportunities because you see the difference in metrics, so you don’t need to collect or process data on your own.
When you’ve defined the most impactful metrics for the keyword, you can compare top pages side-by-side to determine the minimum numbers and how much you need to gain to improve your Google rank.
You can simplify this process even more! SE Ranking automatically generates tasks from best practices and compares you with competitors. You just need to finish the tasks.
On-Page SEO Audit
SE Ranking examines your page on all well-known issues in every category: meta description, text, media files, UX, structured data, and more.
As a result, the tool calculates your Page Quality Score. But the main benefit of this audit is that it compares your page with your main organic competitors based on your focus keyword.
Not only does it check the page itself, but it also shows internal linking and backlinks – we’ve seen how impactful those are, so auditing the page without considering them is a mistake.
Similar to the SERP Analyzer, you have auto-generated tasks and comparisons with competitors.
Website Audit
The Website Audit does the same checks we’ve seen earlier in the On-page SEO Audit, but it does them for the whole site.
SE Ranking regularly scans all URLs to check if everything is fine and calculates your website health score. If there are any issues, you can easily access them along with recommendations for fixing them in the Issues Report.
Issues are categorized by type, plus you can see the affected pages – a highly convenient way of detecting and fixing problems (note that you can also access instructions from it).
Keyword Research
Keyword research is essential for web marketing since all tasks rely on keywords in one way or another.
The first thing you need to do SEO-wise is to find the right keywords for your website, group them into clusters, and prioritize them.
The main metrics for prioritization are Difficulty and Search Volume – supply and demand. In theory, the best keywords have a large search volume and low difficulty, but it’s rarely the case, so you need to determine your own demand/supply ratio.
CPC (cost-per-click) can help you with it: the high cost per click number tells that keyword has more commercial value.
The research process is simple: combine seed phrases with filters to find target keywords. If you have doubts about whether a keyword is relevant to your website – check the search results and see if there are pages/sites similar to yours.
To save keywords, select them and add them to a project or Keyword Manager list – it’s as simple as that.
Link Building
Off-page SEO is perhaps the most laborious and time-intensive process, but it is a powerful way to improve your rankings on Google.
Any link building starts with donor research – searching for domains to obtain backlinks from. A great way to find them is to look through your competitors’ backlinks.
The dashboard provides you with a summary backlink profile of the target domain. From it, you will be able to know the overall strategy: dofollow/nofollow, destination URLs, and anchors.
You can quickly assess the quality of each potential domain by using SE Ranking’s DT (Domain Trust) metric.
By using filters and toggling columns, you can adjust the report as needed to get new backlinks ideas, types, and donors. And combined with the strategy you’ve learned from the summary, you will be ready to build links.
Another way you can narrow down your search is using the Backlinks Gap Analyzer. You have a much higher chance of acquiring a backlink from a domain that refers to several competitors.
To keep track of built links, it’s recommended to add them to the Backlinks Monitor. It stores your backlinks and checks if they are on air, along with the response code and indexation of a referring page. The latter is vital for link building because if the referring page is not in Google’s index, it’s the same as having no link at all.
Competitive Research
The Competitive Research module tells you all about the domain’s traffic. Not only does it estimate your main traffic metrics, but it also shows top countries, pages, and keywords.
If you don’t know your competitors yet, simply enter your domain to see who you are up against in the SERP.
The Overlap report will help you find new keyword opportunities. For example, those keywords that your competitors have ranks for but you don’t – it’s a fast and easy way to find relevant keywords you are missing.
What Metrics To Track With SE Ranking For High Rankings
Now it’s time to examine more closely which project metrics you should keep an eye on regularly.
Organic Traffic Forecast And Visibility
The organic Traffic Forecast is the estimated traffic based on the keywords you’ve added to your project, their volume, and your rankings for those keywords.
The real traffic numbers can differ, but this report is focused on displaying the most significant changes in target keywords. For big projects, GSC can generate a lot of noise – clicks for non-relevant keywords – so it makes sense to manually track 1-3 keywords per page to get a clearer picture.
Alternatively, you can monitor the Search Visibility. While the Traffic Forecast evaluates traffic, the search visibility can be associated with GSC Impressions – how often your page gets to the user’s viewport.
For example, most pages from the first SERP page receive impressions, but the first three results get 70% of all the clicks.
Keyword Rankings
You can gain many insights from rankings if you know how to read them.
- See the overall trend of change – if rankings decrease throughout the site, you have a buffer to fix issues before they affect traffic.
- Monitor rankings in different locations separately and compare them.
- Track cannibalization issues to identify and fix pages affected by this problem.
- Monitor the appearance of Rich Snippets to see if your structured data is displayed in the SERP.
- Organize keywords by categories or tags to see the data by clusters or keyword types (e.g., primary/secondary).
Those are common ways to use the Rankings report, but you’ll find other applications once you get used to it.
GSC Metrics
This report is similar to what you see in the Search Console (Clicks, Impressions, CTR) but better. First, all metrics are compared to the previous period, so you instantly see the dynamics.
Another great feature is its integration with the rank tracker: see the crawled position alongside the GSC position and compare them since the average position is not always representative.
Also, you can add keywords to track right from the report: simply select what you want to add.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics 4 is out but is not the most user-friendly tool. Therefore, SE Ranking solves this problem by providing a ready-to-use SEO dashboard to analyze your traffic.
In addition to that, you can access the GA Conversion right there to measure the efficiency of the SEO campaign – SE Ranking will use GA events that you’ve marked as conversions for this report.
Referring Domains
In the Backlink Monitor, you can see the dynamics of new and lost links. The fundamental rule of successful off-page SEO is to sustain new link dynamics bigger than lost links.
Another thing to consider in your monthly plan is lost links: if you’ve determined that you need 50 links per month from competitor research, don’t forget to add the average lost links to that – keep the dynamic you planned.
Why Choose SE Ranking As Your All-In-One SEO tool?
SEO is a very broad process, so you need a complex solution to solve all tasks.
SE Ranking covers all specters of SEO activities:
- With keyword research, you see the market size and each keyword that forms it.
- Competitive research gives you insights into how others achieved their results – no need to reinvent the wheel, just borrow some best practices.
- After you have a semantic core and strategy, SE Ranking will help you create content with the SERP Analyzer to define important metrics to aim for.
- Then you can easily analyze your URLs using the On-Page SEO Checker and Website Audit.
- SE Ranking’s Backlink Checker will help you find donors to build links from to improve your pages’ authority, while Backlinks Monitor keeps them organized.
- Last but not least, SE Ranking provides excellent analytic tools so you can see the smallest changes to tweak your strategy.
This is truly an all-in-one SEO software that helps you get higher search engine rankings day to day.
What I Like About SE Ranking
- Competitive Comparison – Search results are all about competition – Google constantly compares one page to another, defining what’s better. SE Ranking provides tools to compare your page side-by-side with top-performing competitors. This is the most convenient way to see the differences and recognize your weaknesses and strengths.
- Simple Summary And Detailed Reports – Many SE Ranking reports have the following structure: a summary dashboard to see the overall stats and a detailed report for each category. This intuitive user flow stays consistent throughout the platform, making seamless navigation.
- Easy To Use – The overall user experience is great: I could find what I needed without any problems, everything worked the way you would expect it to, and all tools and categories were super intuitive. I spent no time thinking, “what is this button for” or “how do I do it” – amazing UI.
- User Experience – Every (!) metric you see has a tooltip describing what it is – amazing hints for newcomers. Another nice touch is that tables have configurable columns, so you can set up the view as you wish. Also, many links to guides on how to use tools make work much easier.
What I Don’t Like About SE Ranking
- It can be slow to update keyword rankings and big amounts of data – Crawling SERPs takes time, so if you have thousands of tracked keywords, SE Ranking can struggle with tracking them daily. But it’s rarely the case since most of the projects have 1-5 tracked keywords per page, and the total number of priority pages is under 100 – you don’t need to track everything (remember the 80/20 rule).
- For some paid plans, you still need to pay extra for some services – You need to pay for some tools even though you have an active subscription. For example, each run of Search Engine Autocomplete, Search Volume Checker, Index Status Checker, and Keyword Grouper tool will cost you a fixed amount of money regardless of your plan. It is pretty cheap, but paying for subscriptions and services is still confusing.
Also, if you want to add more team members to manage projects, each user seat will cost you $20. Therefore you can still add guests for free if you need to share projects without sharing access to edit them.
What Pricing Plan To Choose At SE Ranking?
It strongly depends on the number of projects and their size.
- Essential – For entrepreneurs and SEO individuals, an Essential plan should be enough.
- Pro – For agencies, I recommend choosing the Pro plan since you can create an unlimited number of projects.
- Business – The Business plan is most suitable for enterprises and large-scale agencies due to the increased limits and ten user seats.
To get access to a custom plan, you can contact the SE Ranking team.
Speaking of rankings check frequency, I recommend choosing weekly because you don’t need to see the daily changes too often. But it may not be the case for highly volatile and competitive niches – those who choose daily checks need to react to changes swiftly.
Conclusion
Ranking high on search engines requires a lot of time, labor, and money, which you need to use cleverly to reach your goal. Define what’s important and focus on it.
SE Ranking does precisely that for all SEO tasks. Whether it’s competitive analysis, on-page optimization, link building, or technical optimization, SE Ranking has the right tools to complete those tasks.
And with a fantastic UI and instructions, you won’t waste any time figuring out how to do things.
SE Ranking is the only SEO software you need to increase rankings.
