Copy Our Step-by-Step Approach to Rank #1 On Google (Advanced Local SEO Concept)
A few simple activities can help your good content rank very well on Google
As part of our Marketing 3-4-5™ framework, we're creating a series of industry-specific marketing plans. This is something we're doing as part of our own content marketing strategy but also to provide valuable resources for small businesses.
We noticed that our first marketing plan for Hardware, Home Improvement, and Building Supply Stores started ranking on Google after just a few weeks. This was a good opportunity to enhance our new piece of content to help it rank even more prominently on Google.
NOTE: we observed it's ranking in the Search Console of Google Search Central (formerly, Google Webmaster Tools). The console showed us phrases our content was ranking for, in this case, "hardware store marketing plan" and a few other variations.
Once we knew the queries, we could see the content ranking ahead of us
We looked at those who ranked higher than us and asked ourselves “What are they doing differently?”.
We specifically look at their titles, description, and the structure of their pages.
The title of the page is incredibly important to ranking higher on Google as well as getting more clicks on social media
Titles should be clear and concise but don't need to be too short. Below the title in the search result is the preview text which is generated by either the Meta Description or OG Description. This doesn't help you rank directly but it entices clicks which is (obviously) important and clicks help elevate your rank.We adjusted our title to be more straightforward and show more compelling words in the space provided. We also added a few subheads to our page for easier reading and scanability.
Making these small but crucial changes helped our content start to climb the search results and after a few more weeks reached #1 on Google for our search queries.
Note: search results change daily, fluctuate based on who is searching, their devices, and other intent signals. Search results are always changing.
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Video Transcript
We created the Marketing 3-4-5™ Framework and approach to make it faster, easier, and simpler for every local business to do marketing. Then we decided that we would start creating a series of marketing and content plans targeted at common local industries.
The first that we created was for hardware stores and building supply home improvement stores. There are a lot of iconic, independently-owned businesses of this sort and we wanted to break this down.
Now we created this page and looked a bit different at the time we of course shared it to social media, promoted it to our email newsletter, but we noticed we started climbing up Google to appear in the first 10 to 20 results.
And we thought why don't we go ahead and try to optimize for this a bit more.
We looked at the common search terms that we were ranking for like “hardware store marketing plan” and we looked at those who were ranked ahead of us and really wanted to look at what they are doing that's different. So we started with the titles literally the page names.
Then we looked at the descriptions this is the preview text it's called a meta description or an OG description which is what shows on Facebook. It doesn't help you rank but it helps get clicks because what people see and that helps you rank. So we started tweaking and adjusting now we did also come back and we made some changes here we; we updated our title we added some heads and subheads we did some different things to tighten up but the main content didn't really change it was just a few subtle things to kind of encapsulate what we observed others were doing. Over the course of a few weeks we saw our rankings continue to climb.
Fast forward to today we have the first organic result for our content and marketing plan.
Now you might say well this is the first result actually that's called the snippet featured snippets do not appear on every search but now it is something that we are working to optimize towards and we'll see how that progresses.
You can see “Simple Marketing and Content Plan for Local Hardware Stores” appears visually so people can quickly see what that is and they can read our concise description.
So as you have content that you want to rank for this might be an exercise you want to do for your business.
This is an advanced concept but once you get this you can replicate it and with us we have more marketing and content plans coming and we have a framework that we'll continue to implement to help those rank well also.
