How to Make Your Content Rank High on Google: Top 10 Results Аnalysis

If you want your potential clients to find your content, it has to be on page one on Google. Undoubtedly, you can’t afford to be ranked on the next pages. Your SEO efforts just won’t pay off. According to statistics, 75% of people never scroll past the first page of search engines.

But what actually makes you rank high in 2022? In addition to creating new content with SEO in mind, always make sure it brings real value to the reader and gives answers to their questions.

To find out what content might perform well for a particular keyword or discover a user's search intent, sometimes it’s enough to to check your rankings in Google and take a look at the top 10 results in the organic search.

Going through each of the articles on the first page might help you to get an idea what pages receive loads of traffic, what is the target audience’s search intent when looking for a certain keyword, how to optimize the title, h2 and h3 tags, and what kind of information to include when elaborating your own content.

Here’s what we found when analyzing the top 10 Google search results for this article’s primary keyword “how to get your content to show up on Google first page.”

1. Your Website Doesn’t Necessarily Have to Be a Well-Established Source of Information

Sites with stellar content that have been around for years tend to rank higher. If an article has been published on such resources as Hubspot, Neil Patel, Content Marketing Institute it has more chances to appear on top of Google but it doesn’t mean that being a starter you have no chances to conquer a slot in top. Look what we discovered.

Although most of the articles that appeared in the top 10 organic search results were from well-established brands such as WordStream, Neil Patel, Ahrefs, there were other websites with lower DR and traffic. One of the websites that appeared on the first page didn’t actually get to even 1,000 monthly visits.

Conclusion: even if you are starting to market your business or brand with content, you shouldn’t give up because of such severe competition. You have all of the chances to appear on the first page in search results. There are some methods that can help you to do so. Keep reading.

2. Detailed Guides and Step-by-Step Instructions Tend to Show Up Higher

If you’re wondering what type and form of content to start with, keep in mind the following findings:

• The average number of words in the articles that appeared in the top 10 was 2873;
• The shortest article had around 1,000 words;
• The longest article had more than 7,000 words.

In our case, this tells us that the more complete the information in the article is, the higher chances it has to appear on the first page.

If you analyze the top 10 results for your target keywords, you’ll get an idea of what kind of content users are searching for and what their intent is when looking for a certain phrase.

For our keyword, we can see that our potential audience might be looking for a detailed guide or a list article. See the image below.

Conclusion: produce quality content to increase search engine rankings. If you want to appear higher, you need to understand how your content can be better than the one that currently ranks for your keyword.

When writing your next article, keep in mind the user’s search intent and make your content satisfy it. As a result, the reader won’t have to leave your website looking for complete information. Evergreen content such as lists and how-to articles tend to perform better for informational search intent, while commercial and navigational search intents might require other content formats.

3. Titles Optimized for Long-Tail Keywords Are Easier to Rank

Try to target long-tail keywords. For example, keywords like “content” or “rank high on Google” are short-tail, and they’re very competitive. And the phrase “how to get your content to show up on Google first page” has a lower search volume. Since these keywords are more specific than the generic ones, they allow you to attract more qualified traffic.

Also, users are often looking for specific answers. And if you address specific long-tail keywords in your titles, that can make the searchers think, “here, I will certainly find an answer to my question.”

Conclusion: get to know what your potential clients might be looking for and make the title interesting enough to catch their attention.

4. Top-Performing Content Is Structured With H1, H2, and H3 Tags and Lists

Well-structured content ranks better. Most of the articles that appeared in the top 10 results for our keyword contained headings and subheadings and used the strong tag to highlight the most important information. See the image below.

Conclusion: to help content rank higher in SERPs, make it easy to read. Consider adding high-quality, unique images that illustrate and complement the points mentioned in the article. Use tag to make it easier for search engines to know what the images are about. Surprisingly enough, not every piece of content that appeared in the top 10 was pleasing to the eye. But if you look at the industry’s key players such as Ahrefs or Backlinko, or go through the articles on the Content Marketing Institute blog you’ll notice that their content is a visual masterpiece. So, if you want your blog article to rank high in the long run, don’t ignore the visual aspect.

5. Not All of the Articles Received Lots of Engagement When Published

If you were looking for ideas on how to rank higher on Google in 2022, you probably met some tips to improve user engagement. This includes social signals, such as comments or content reshares to social media.

Exactly how Google uses and weights engagement signals (i.e. clicks and interaction data) is subject to endless debate in the SEO circles. And although we can’t deny that page engagement and page rankings are linked, we noticed the following thing. Only some of the articles on the first page received lots of engagement in the form of social media shares and comments when published.

Conclusion: although it’s good to have a loyal audience that will share your newly published content with their followers or provide meaningful feedback under your blog post, the virality after publishing doesn’t guarantee the top spot in the long run. As we mentioned earlier, during our experiment, we found articles that appeared in top search results but didn’t have any social shares or comments at all.

6. Content With Meaningful Linking Structure Ranks Better

Having relevant internal and external links on your site can improve search visibility and Google website ranking.

During our analysis, we noticed that many of the top-ranked content contained links to industry studies and articles from well-established brands in the field of marketing such as MOZ, Hubspot, Backlinko, etc.

The majority of blogs had a meaningful internal linking strategy.

Conclusion: have a digital content strategy in place or analyze the existing articles to see how you can improve the readers’ experience by linking to relevant articles on the blog that will enhance their knowledge on the topic.

Consider creating so-called “pillar” pages with several supporting blog posts (or clusters). These cluster posts should explain sub-topics based on the pillar topic and generate internal links to the pillar page.

Ensure that your valuable internal links are ‘dofollow’ links so that the value of the link–or link equity– is passed to each relevant page. This not only guides users along their journey once they are on your site, but it creates topic density and relevance. It’s important not to neglect these technical SEO aspects as they can make a big difference in your site performance. 

7. Users’ Search Intent Should Be Aligned With Your Business Objectives

The user’s search intent is extremely important and should be a number one priority when optimizing content for search engines. But on the other hand, you shouldn’t forget about your commercial intent.

Indeed, a top position on Google guarantees good traffic flow to your website. However, it’s useless if it doesn’t result in new leads, increased sales, and brand awareness.

We made this mistake with our blog. Although we created content that generated traffic, it actually didn’t bring us new customers or leads. So now, we are trying to produce content that will genuinely help users achieve their goals. At the same time, we try to explain to readers (without being promotional) how our tool can facilitate this job.

For example, in this guide, we incorporated step-by-step instruction on how to create an email signature with the help of our tool.

Also, we designed the page, which you can see below, the way that when a user clicks on any of the email signature examples, they are directed to our editor. From there, they can create and edit a professional signature in minutes. So now, the article actually converts to leads and not just drives traffic. Furthermore, the more time users spend on this page, the bigger are the chances that it will rank high on Google.

Conclusion: it’s crucial to remember why you create content in the first place. So, the next time you start writing, try to align your business goals with the user’s search intent.

While Google provides recommendations for SEO, you might find them frustrating. Especially those that suggest just to “make your site interesting and useful.” Indeed, this is precisely what you need to do if you want your content to appear in top positions. However, history indicates that Google is continuously developing the algorithm so that it can keep improving the quality of its SERP.

In this article, we revealed our findings that exceed the recommendation to create better content. But pay attention that these findings are based just on one particular case. Keep these tips in mind but do your own research when creating a content strategy, test hypotheses, and remember that the best results come from an investment of both effort and time.