If you search “how to rank in google” you’ll get hit with 684,000,000 results, in 0.71 seconds.That’s right, there are 684 million pages that potentially answer your question.(Any page that ranks below 428,000,000 clearly doesn’t know what they’re talking about, but I’ll give the first 428 million the benefit of the doubt).But what if the secret to ranking in Google isn’t a secret at all? Or how about this: There is no secret, because Google shows you exactly what’s needed in order to rank.Every. Single. Time.
What I mean is this:
Having good content isn’t enough to rank a page.
You could have the best content on a subject and still rank poorly IF you fail to hit the key signals Google looks for. Because Google doesn’t read. But it does count.Google looks at a page for topically relevant keywords and counts them – how many, how often, and where they are on the page.Looking at the top-ranking pages for any search query, you’ll notice recurring patterns in the page structure, word count, the number of headings, image usage, etc. – these are the key signals Google is looking for.Various page types are rewarded with top spots for different queries – you’ll notice e-commerce pages rank high for some queries, academic articles for others, and at times a mixture of video and image results, along with typical websites.
The Roadmap to Ranking
So when Google gives you the results, it’s showing you the roadmap of how to build a top-ranking page – for that specific query.
Which means you can use that information to structure your page in a similar fashion. However: don’t plagiarize and don’t copy.
But DO steal – only steal like an artist – take the essence of the pages, the patterns common to all of them, and make them your own.Your page doesn’t need to be unique in order to rank.
Google isn’t looking for uniqueness, it’s looking for something it can understand.If you notice the top results are all similar, there’s a reason!
Even more so if the results come from large companies – nothing they’ve done is by accident.
Companies like Nike have the money for massive amounts of A/B testing, focus groups, etc.
Everything on their page, down to the color and font choices, has been intentionally done. See my article on Masterclass.com SEO where I go into this.You may not know the exact “why” behind it, but you do know that it’s working.
And that’s something you can use to your advantage.So…
Now you know the secret to ranking in Google, and it was right in front of you all along.Do what others do, but make it your own.Easy, right?Well, not exactly.
The Scientific SEO Method
With so much variation among different pages, trying to parse out the patterns in a meaningful way is near impossible to do.That’s where tools like Page Optimizer Pro (POP) come in.
POP scrapes all the data for you, processes it and spits out the patterns the top ranking pages have between them. Essentially it takes out the guesswork and the impossible task of calculating all this data manually to help you build the perfect page.Tools like POP actually break down key SEO signals, factor by factor, giving you mathematically derived target ranges for each. Hitting these numbers allows you to create a page that has all the common aspects of the top ranking pages for your chosen query. For the rest of your SEO, you can use tools like Ahrefs, Semrush & Google Lighthouse to find technical issues that may be impacting your site such as spite speed and indexing issues. Ahrefs & Semrush also work to locate common off page signals such as backlinks which top ranking pages have in common, essentially giving you recommendations of the links you should be also trying to acquire to your page.Combine these things together, and you’ll be able to build high ranking pages easily. Give it a shot and let me know how it goes.
