Do you want to get your blog post on the Google first page guaranteed?
There is something really exciting about to happen…
Peter from YourExpiredDomains.com has taken on a challenge to write a guest post on MostlyBlogging.com in such a way that it ranks on the Google first page guaranteed.
He will explain the entire procedure in detail and show how a blogger can use this strategy to get traffic to a site that is only a few months old.
Not only that, he also demonstrates how to monetize this page.
Is he going to succeed? You will find out in the “Update” section at the end of this article.
Note: This post was updated in March 2018
– to include actual results achieved with this strategy in the past few months on a site that is only 4 months old
– to include UberSuggest as a much better free tool than the Google Keyword Planner
– to include some details about Google’s mobile-first index.
How To Get Your Blog On The First Page Of Google Guaranteed
by Peter Nyiri
Is it really possible to get on the first page of Google for free?
Before we begin, I want to make one thing clear to avoid any misunderstandings: Most probably you are not going to get the home page of your blog on the first page of Google. I will be talking about writing an individual blog post in such a way that it will likely end up on the first page for a specific keyword and thus bring you some extra search traffic.
But I am going to show you how you can double or triple your organic visitors for blog posts with pretty much the same amount of work. Isn’t that cool? It is going to be just a tiny bit technical, but I promise I will explain it nicely so that it is not a problem.
This post was mainly meant to help out new bloggers, but experienced ones will also find usable stuff in it.
New Blogs Have A Hard Time
Most of you probably know the phenomenon where you write a blog post, you get a bunch of traffic to it through social media, Facebook, Twitter, or your e-mail list if you have one, then it all dies. This is a lot of work and wouldn’t it be nice to just have regular traffic to these posts without having to pay a penny and without you lifting a finger?
For new bloggers, they write the post (or 10-15 posts) and nothing happens. Your blog is there nice and shiny like a new building, with great content, but it is just so empty. Your Google Search Console goes 0-1-1-0-0 organic visitors.
Now, if you have a brand new blog, you will probably run into something called the Google sandbox where your blog just will not rank, whatever you do. There are things you can do to shorten the time period it takes to get through it, and the method I describe in this post will help you get some traffic despite that. But the main thing is that you need to earn Google’s trust.
Google is a business itself and its goal is to consistently provide the best content to its users. Otherwise, it would go out of business as people would turn away from it. Therefore your new blog will usually get ignored by Google, as you probably don’t have a lot of content on it that would deserve ranking on the first page.
Therefore, if you have a new blog, just go for cranking out as much high-quality content as possible.
Why New Blogs Have A Hard Time
New bloggers have a hard time because their blog lacks authority.
There is a very simple way to check a blog’s authority. Unfortunately, it is not 100 percent exact, so don’t put your life on it, but it gives you a general ballpark idea and it’s a free resource.
Type in OpenSiteExplorer.com. (This will redirect you to a more complicated URL of MOZ).
Then type in the URL of your site. On the screenshot below you can see the wonderful job Janice has been doing over the past 3 years, her blog has a Domain Authority of 48. As a comparison, a brand new blog starts with zero, and my blog, after 4 months of work got up to a DA of 15.
If you have a high Domain Authority, your content will be easier to rank on Google’s first page, and the method I will show you will have a lot more kick, but it will also help people with lower scores.
How Not To Do It
My blog is just 4 months old and I have a total of 60 posts published, which is basically a post written every other day. I have been really busy… without much result.
I write about two things. The first one is a very specific subject on domain names, and the other one is internet marketing, aimed at helping out people who have a new website or blog, as I realized that these people don’t have a lot of guidance to get started.
When I started, not knowing anything else, I was just doing it the dumb way. I would run into a problem, research it, solve it, then publish a post about it. My blog is basically a record of all the newbie problems I had to solve.
How To Write A Blog Post To Get Maximum Organic Traffic
About a month and a half ago I became smarter and I changed my method. First, I did a lot of research, of course.
I published a post 11 days ago and I targeted it for a certain phrase about domains. I just typed this into Google and it showed up in position 11, on the top of page 2 of the search results. And that is usually just a start. If the readers like it, the post will go higher. I did no link building or promotion other than tweeting it out.
I published another post 3 days ago on the subject on sales funnels and this morning when I checked, it was on the first page, in the afternoon it was on the second page. It is normal to see such “Google dance” right after a page gets indexed, Google wants to see where to place the page and is experimenting with it. The position usually stabilizes after a while.
These are not high-traffic keywords, but they add up for sure.
Now I am going to show you the secret.
Warning: This is a simple method for non-tech-savvy bloggers and will not work for every single post, but depending on your niche, it will very possibly give you some extra organic visitors with just spending a few extra minutes of your time; therefore, it is definitely worth a try.
The first thing you need to know is that difficulty equals opportunity
Are you researching something in your niche and finding that the search results are absolutely unhelpful or you need to look up 15 different posts/articles to get all the data? Or are you getting straight garbage in a Google first page search result, like text that doesn’t even make sense? Has that ever happened to you?
This might seem extremely annoying, but in reality, this is a sign for you that you should write a comprehensive post on the topic and it that could rank well in Google.
Why? Because if you are having trouble, there will be other searchers that are having the exact same trouble, and if you write really deep, helpful content, Google will need to rank it simply because there is nothing else available.
Make sure you avoid subjects that already have high-quality content in the search results, as you most probably will not be able to outrank these.
Of course, there are a few guidelines you will need to follow besides the quality of your article.
Keyword Research
This may sound scary, but I will greatly simplify it for you.
You will need a free keyword research tool like Google Keyword Planner.
Enter your keyword and just find a few keyword suggestions that fit your subject and are in the 10-100 range. Pick one that you like best – this is going to be your main keyword. You will put this into the title and the URL of your post. Sprinkle the other keywords somewhere in your text wherever they make sense, modify them slightly if needed. You need to go for searcher intent rather than the exact keyword. If a keyword doesn’t fit, just leave it out, and don’t overdo it.
That’s all you need to do. Larger successful sites don’t usually bother to target these keywords as it doesn’t give them enough return and most website owners have no idea how to do this.
From your perspective, if you write 30 blog posts and each gets 20 organic visitors per month, that is 600 visitors per month that you otherwise wouldn’t have. If you are a new blog owner, those visitors can mean the difference between life or death. When your blog gets older and accumulates links, the posts will also start ranking for more competitive terms that you were not targeting and your organic traffic to these posts will increase over time even more.
How To Write Your Blog Post Effectively
Make sure your facts are correct, your post is extremely engaging, actionable, and deep. But there is more.
Your post needs to be over 2,000 words, as statistically, that is the length that shows up on the first page of Google, as explained in this article.
If you can’t make it be 2,000 words, don’t worry, publish it anyway, and upgrade it later on when you find more relevant data. However, the often-suggested 500-word posts are just not going to cut it. Sorry.
Make sure you have a compelling title that will get searchers to click through to your blog. Just look around the internet and see what other sites are using and based on that make up your own title, to include your main keyword.
Sprinkle a few outbound links to authoritative websites that have something to do with the subject you are writing about. This will add relevancy to your post and increase your ranking, despite the fact that many people think the opposite.
Let Your Post Boil In The Google Soup And Rank
Once your post is ready, publish it, then go to your Google Search Console account (earlier it was called Webmaster Tools). Click on “Crawl>Fetch as Google”. Submit the URL of the page, wait until Google crawls it (takes a few seconds) then click “Request Indexing”.
This simple procedure will result in your new post showing up in Google’s index and search results in about 3 days. If you need to majorly update a post, then always resubmit it the same way. If you already have an authority blog, you probably don’t need to bother about this detail as Google already knows to index new content on your site.
Google will index and test your post. Since you have Google Analytics installed on your blog, Google knows about every heartbeat it makes.
The key indicators are time spent on a page and bounce rate. You should also monitor these daily. You can promote your new post on Social Media, but make sure you do it in relevant places. E. g. a like-for-like group clicking on your post and staying there for 5 seconds will destroy all your hard work as it decreases the average time spent on your post. If your server is down, that will be a 0-second visit… If your page is too slow to load, and people can’t wait for it, the results are the same… And Google takes note of all that.
Make sure you add photos, videos, etc. to engage your visitors more. If they watch a video, they spend that much more time on your page, making Google favor you more. Ensure that the file name of the picture also contains a related keyword and that it is not too large and loads fast.
Give your visitors a reason to visit another page, this will reduce your bounce rate and Google will give you better rankings.
The main reason this strategy works is that you provide awesome content to such a degree where most of your competitors are not going to go. Most of them are not going to go through the pain it many times takes to come up with an article that is engaging all the way through its 2,500 words… And this is where your opportunity lies.
Note: I hope you have been enjoying this post. As you may have been told, I wrote this as a public challenge/case study: write it, post it, and have it appear on the first page of Google for a specific keyword without any link building whatsoever. I am going to use the two keywords here:
how to get on Google first page for free
how to get on Google first page guaranteed
We shall see what happens… I am really brave to do this….
In the next section, I will show you how to monetize a post like this with affiliate marketing. Unfortunately, this part of the story is more hit or miss, but we will see what happens…You will see that the monetization is very subtle. No pushing, no big red buttons, simply educating my readers.
Why People Fail With Their Blogs
People fail with their new blogs because of the following:
- They don’t have a system to be successful.
- On top of it, it takes them several months to see that whatever they are doing is not working, thereby wasting their precious time.
If you have a new blog, you can follow the above and write 50 posts with the above strategy, post them in Facebook groups and send them out to Twitter. You can top it up with some basic link building if you have time…
This is a basic system that you can follow. Do it consistently and you will see traffic and you will start making some money with your blog.
I implemented this system not so long ago. In the first month, I got two affiliate sales, each one for $129. These two sales came from 17 total people referred to that site. That’s a conversion rate of over 10 percent.
How To Build A Successful Blog
Please realize that following this simple system is not going to make you into a millionaire. It is enough to get your feet wet and give you some success if you are getting no traffic. Once you are confident, you will need to use additional strategies.
I learned a lot of things from a fellow internet marketer who gets 500,000 visitors per month to his blog. He said that kind of traffic requires a simultaneous use of several marketing channels.
Another important element is that you want to use as many passive, set and forget methods as possible, as you only have so many hours in a day… And you also need time for your family and to enjoy your life…
If you have been blogging for even just a few months then you know that it takes time to develop a system in any area. If you want to figure it out all by yourself for each area, it is just going to take you too long…
After a while, you will know which way you want to expand to your next step. There are many systems you can choose from. Do whatever is close to your heart, as that will work best for you. Find a course in that area, do it, and implement it.
As an example, you may want to expand by starting to use Pinterest. Most people use Pinterest to collect their Star Wars photos (like I do) and for similar things. But did you know that with correct strategy and intimate knowledge of its system, you can turn Pinterest into a serious weapon for your blog and get tens of thousands of visitors and thousands of subscribers, completely on autopilot? There is someone who did that and you can find out more about this by following this link.
I urge you to get started, I can’t wait to see your comments (by the way, those comments also help to rank a blog post…)
Host blogger’s comments:
Readers, please share so other website creators discover Peter’s tips.
He explained how to get on Google’s first page guaranteed for free and without link building.
Peter also gave information about how to monetize using affiliate marketing programs.
The connection between boosting organic traffic and affiliate marketing success definitely exists. Once you start increasing traffic from search engines, you will make more as an affiliate marketer since more people will be visiting your blog.
I look forward to your views. Do you have any additional tips to get on Google’s first page guaranteed for free?
Update
Within nine hours, this post was on Page 1 of Google. Look at the screenshot:
I’d say Peter’s tips are effective! How about you?
Update 3/26/2018
On my first blog, YourExpiredDomains.com, I am getting 370 organic clicks with about 5 posts that I wrote with this strategy. The other posts where I didn’t use it are getting zero… Here’s the graph:
Since the original blog post was published, I started a new blog called FunnelXpert, simply because the subject of expired domains is a bit too “esoteric” to promote. My new blog is about how you can turn your blog into a 5-figure business using a correctly built sales funnel.
Needless to say, I have been using the above strategy from the very beginning.
However, I switched over to UberSuggest.io, which has been taken over by Neil Patel. You get very helpful results like this:
For example, “How to Get Out of Google Sandbox” has 30 searches per month and difficulty of 0.12.
You may ask why should you spend your precious time writing 2,000-word blog posts for keywords with 30 monthly searches…
The answer has a few angles to it.
93 percent of all searches on Google have less than 20 monthly search volume and no one targets them because everyone is thinking like that… This is a huge untapped resource.
I personally think it makes more sense to target such keywords and get a trickle of traffic each than target a phrase with 500 searches and get nothing.
On top of it, there are phrases that are very similar and have the same search intent. After a few months, your post will rank for all these different search terms and that adds up pretty fast.
Additionally, these numbers are estimates and they can be way off. Sometimes you can get huge traffic from keywords listed with zero searches.
I recommend that you type in this phrase and check the search results yourself, look up each of the top 10. Please note that search results are different based on your location, your own search history, and even because of the browser you use. If I search on Firefox and Chrome, I get different results even on the same computer!
Observe the DA of the sites, the number of the backlinks and the length of the articles. The good news is that with this strategy it’s possible to beat even high DA websites, as you will see later on.
As an example, this is one of the search results:
Google Sandbox 2.0: What You Should Know – Ahrefs
Jul 24, 2014 – There’s a fairly new topic that has been the talk of the SEO town since the last few weeks — Google Sandbox 2.0. If you don’t already know what Google Sandbox is, it’s essentially a form of Google penalty, which filters out backlinks to a penalized site which would otherwise have a positive impact on the …
FunnelXpert is beating this listing per my Chrome browser, but in Firefox it is beating me… But in both cases, FunnelXpert is listed on the first page. Ahrefs has a DA of 78 and MOZ shows the article has 11 links. If you open the article, you see that it is only 800 words long.
If you pick keywords that have articles on the first page that are short and not very useful, you can easily rank on the first page with your 2,000+ word article.
Here’s another example:
| Keyword | Search Volume | CPC | Competition | |||
| wordpress sales funnel theme | 20 | 0.52 |
The top result is SKThemes, Sales Page WordPress themes for landing sales funnel websites
Apparently, it has 7 backlinks. The length of the article is just over 1,000 words.
My post, The Best WordPress Sales Funnel Themes & Plugins, is 2,400 words.
My site is only 4 months old, DA: 11, and the post has no backlinks, and I am successfully competing with all these high DA sites.
And I am beating ElegantThemes, DA: 95, 6 backlinks.
Since this post has already gotten me 3 sales and $163 in commissions, I am planning to update it with even more details.
Is Your Blog Optimized For Mobile?
Google recently switched over to the mobile-first index.
Previously there were two different index databases, one for mobile, one for desktop.
When you searched from desktop, you would get the desktop results. When you searched from a phone, you would get the mobile results.
However the number of mobile searches now surpasses desktop, therefore even if you search from desktop, you get the results from the mobile index.
What does that mean? If your site is not mobile optimized, your rankings suffer.
If you have a large featured image and your site loads slow, same thing.
I recommend that you check how your post looks like on a phone.
Your pop-ups may work on desktop but may be horrible on mobile.
I recently saw that the slide-in opt-in form I created was covering the entire screen on a phone, which is a big no-no and destroys rankings.
One Final Trick
Once you have written your post, link back to it from a site like Quora or Inbound.org and point to it from some blog comments, and by creating a couple of Pinterest pins.
Many of you may say, “But some of those links are no-follow”.
You know what? This is where you fail with your blog. Believing all the garbage that is taught to you as eternal truths.
Someone posted on Inbound.org on the subject of the Google sandbox. I entered the discussion and I linked back to my post on the subject. It was a few days later that it started to rank on the first page.
And I have a similar experience with Quora.
What does this all mean for my blog? FunnelXpert is getting 170 monthly organic clicks from Google and this number is increasing every single day.
If you want steady traffic to your blog, be sure to incorporate this strategy when you write your blog posts.
Monetizing Your Blog
In the original challenge that I did, I tried to monetize the traffic, however, this wasn’t successful.
I have since learned a lot about monetization, too. There’s a lot more to it than just throwing some affiliate links or ads on your blog.
If you want to learn more, sign up for my Turn Your Blog Into A 5-Figure Business free e-course.
I also created a Blog Earnings Troubleshooter so that you can identify the points that prevent your blog from earning money for you.
Author Bio:
I will introduce my new website to you.
It is called FunnelXpert, and it is about funnels: sales funnels, webinar funnels and everything that goes into it to make your site or blog profitable.
If you liked what I did above, hop over. It actually demonstrates what a sales funnel is like, what it does. I’d like to invite you to come over, sign up, experience it yourself, and use what you learned to build a 5-figure blog or website.