SEO Google 2021: Why Your Site Doesn't Appear on The First Pages and How To Turn This Around

Is doing SEO for Google in 2021 still relevant?

Think of a blog with 17 million visitors.

Do you believe that 70.7% of all this traffic is a large number?

Yes, there are more than 10 million visitors only from organic searches, that is, using a blog / website optimized for SEO we are able to guarantee all this traffic for our business.

This is equivalent to 8% –10% of the active population on the internet throughout Brazil. Imagine that many people visiting your blog / website.

And more:

• Knowing its contents.
• Recognizing your work.
• Buying your products and services.
• That is the power of SEO for Google well done.

SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization. In a very direct way, it is the optimization of websites, blogs and content for better performance in search engines.

That is, it is the best strategy to win the top positions not only on Google, but also on other search engines like Yahoo and Bing.

As well as on social networks that function as search engines, such as YouTube and Pinterest.

Despite the popularization of social networks, especially Instagram, blogs and websites are still extremely relevant to digital or physical businesses for a few reasons:

1. Attract a qualified audience that already has a higher level of awareness about your product, service or content, as they are actively searching the mechanisms.

2. Organic traffic is free, requiring only investment of time, not money.

3. Ensure the protection of your business, since you have no control over your social networks and are subject to changes in external policies and rules.

4. Attract free qualified leads to your email list, if you invest in a topic with an email capture box and digital bait production.

So, having a blog is still extremely relevant in 2021. If it weren't, you wouldn't have found this article and wouldn't have consumed that information at that time.

But, why is it so important to be on the first page and even among the first search results on Google?

Why you should invest in SEO for Google

If you have produced content that is what the searcher needs, the person will click, read, listen or watch your content.

And if you like what you find, you can subscribe to your email list and even save your site as a favorite, being part of the audience that now knows who you are.

If too many people do this, you get an avalanche of free, quality traffic. These people are much more engaged, after all, they went after you, and not the other way around.

And you need to worry about getting the top placements for a logical and simple reason: people are too lazy to scroll through all the results pages to find what they need and so they tend to stay on the first, if at all, on the second page.

Experts on the subject consider the first 3 results shown by Google to be the “Holy Grail” of organic searches, receiving more than 35% of all search results.

The first place tends to receive 18.2% of clicks alone.

Adding these 10 results on the first page, we have 52.32% of all clicks. More than half of the search intentions are there, on the first page.

How to rank on the first page of Google

We know that content is KING.

That is, producing quality content is an obligation of any website or blog.

But quality content is not solely responsible for ensuring the success of an SEO strategy for Google.

There are 3 pillars that are equally important, as well as ignored. And no website or blog thrives without them .

Pillar # 1: Design

94% of a website's first impressions are related to its design and this judgment takes just 8 seconds.

You don't have much time to impress a visitor and at any time they can choose to go back to where they were, connect to Netflix or YouTube and disappear from your blog or website.

For obvious reasons, the only judgment possible in 8 seconds is the visual.

It is how we learn to identify whether a person is happy or sad, whether a fruit is healthy or is rotten to eat or whether the person in front of us is with open hands to receive us or with clenched fists about to hit our nose.

In fact, studies show that 73% of people want to consume content with a pleasant design. In other words, just memorable content is not enough. It needs to have a nice design.

Otherwise, there are endless other possibilities for your visitor to look for.

And unless you've spent the last 10 years in a cave, you know that people are stuck on their cell phones.

Therefore, the design of your blog or website, besides being beautiful, needs to be responsive.

That is, when opening your blog / website on your cell phone, tablet or computer, it needs to be impeccable. After all:

• 80% of internet users have a smartphone.
• 86% of emails are read on mobile devices.
• 63% of young people (15-25) make purchases on their smartphones.

Design is our first pillar and he is responsible for the confidence, proximity and enchantment of the audience.

Pillar # 2: Speed

Did you know that 40% of people leave a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.

Google penalizes you and throws you down in the content ranking. And you miss great opportunities to grow a loyal audience, communicate with them via email and sell your products and services.

Remember that nowadays 90% of people use several work windows at the same time, indicating that the vast majority perform multitasking.

Therefore, any delay in loading your blog / website means loss of visitors.

And this problem goes further.

The bounce rate on a website can double if it takes more than 4 seconds to load.

That is, if you lost 10 out of 100 visitors due to the slowness of your site, taking 4 seconds to load you would lose 20 people.

If it takes more than 8 seconds, that number rises to 50 people (more than doubles).

So, in the age of anxiety when people want everything faster, easier and for yesterday, you don't stand a chance if you don't have a blog / website loading SUPER fast.

Pillar # 3: SEO on page

Google uses a super secret algorithm (with more than 200 ranking factors) to decide which sites are at the top of this busy list.

Some of these important factors for SEO for Google within your blog or website are:

• Use the keyword in the content, without exaggeration, that is, keeping the reading pleasant.
• Page loading speed.
• Number of updates made to the blog or website (hence the importance of posting frequently).
• Use of keywords in titles and subtitles.
• External links to renowned sites.
• Number of internal links.
• Updating old content.

In addition to good content, you need to have a website optimized for SEO.

My passion is to write, sharing my ideas with people who believe in values ​​similar to me.

Fortunately, I have always counted on the best practices to grow this site up to 17 million visits. And it was these 3 pillars that sustained this growth.

But I am not an expert in design or IT. As I said, my business is writing. And, it was not worth investing my time to acquire these skills that would take good years to be polished.

I chose the fastest and most efficient path for me and, for many other digital entrepreneurs and content producers, who want to focus on what they master to grow their internet business.

So, since July 2017, we have been using Athena as a WordPress template on the blog of our sites.

It was developed by our technology team to ensure the best of the 3 pillars we've seen so far:

• Flawless design.
• Optimized for SEO.
• Fast loading speed.

All this so that you can focus on the only part of SEO for Google that needs your creativity and writing skills: content.

How to improve content SEO

The first big question, which comes before SEO optimizations for content, is the quality of the content and its relationship with the quantity of published texts.

What is best for SEO for Google: quantity or quality?

Imagine that you have to choose between publishing 5 articles a week or just one article a week.

When you publish an article a week, you get more time to keep it state of the art, improving every aspect of it. However, you only publish once.

As for the option of publishing 5 articles a week, you don't have much time to perfect these articles, as well as dwell on them.

You need to make the content machine spin. The loss of quality is compensated by the quantity of articles in this case.

Okay, you must be thinking, but what should I choose? Quality or quantity?

A few years of experience have shown me that an article that is not even produced in a single week is much more valuable than 5 articles published in a week.

Better positioning of yourself in relation to your competitors, you do differently and you do better. And the greatest chance of ranking at the top of Google searches, by density, the quality of the information you put in that article.

But exactly what to do to have quality content?

You can use, infographics, ebooks, videos. The important thing is not the format of the content itself, but the richness of the material, both visual and transmitted content.

So, when you already have this format in mind, be it an article with more than 2 thousand words, be it an infographic, be it an ebook, be it a video you are recording, remember also to make your material with these benefits:

1. Clarity

Do not go around, put your focus on that subject only, that is, talk about a certain subject and do not expand too much on subjects that are not so related to that content.

2. Simplicity

Translate complex concepts with simple analogies and make your content easier to understand.

3. Density

Try to dig deep even in the topic of your content. Cite references, sources, studies.

4. Curiosities

Try to break the pattern, address a curiosity about the respective subject you are dealing with.

5. Organization

Break up your content so that the reader can maintain the flow of reading without falling asleep.

6. Intent

Try to understand what your visitor intends to do after consuming your content.

It may be that he needs additional information or even a product to move on to the next stage of his journey, and you can not only, but should, find the best way to meet your future needs.

In addition to these characteristics of quality content, you should focus your attention on optimizing the following items in your content:

Title and its meta description

You need to combine the useful with the pleasant: your title needs to be optimized for search engines.

And here are 3 practical tips for that:

• Up to 55 characters (more than that can be cut in search results);
• Mention the main keyword;
• Use the H1 tag.

Content size

Most pages that are ranked on the first page of Google are over 2000 words.

This is not a rule, as it may vary according to the market, but if your content is more than 2000 words and - obviously - memorable, it will certainly be much more likely to rank on the first page of Google.

Visual elements

This is another important point, as it improves the user experience. Especially because, as you already know, Google always wants to show the best results to people who search there.

Related Keywords

Google has a technology called LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing), which analyzes the meaning of different keywords on the page to determine the relevance of the page.

In other words, this technology checks for words related to the main keyword in your text.

The more words related to the main keyword are present in your text, the more relevant your text becomes.

Links to renowned sites

This is another very effective practice for improving the quality of your content. By placing external links to authoritative pages, your visitor realizes that you used grounded information to create that content, and not just something that came from your head or statistics from that blog that no one knows about.

From Google’s point of view, it realizes that you’ve placed external links to pages with great authority, allowing Google to more easily find out what topic you’re covering.

Other ways to rank on the first page

SEO for YouTube

Also, search YouTube for search intentions for the same keywords you want to use in your article, even if you don't have video content.

You can either add a video to your text, or create your article based on a video transcript, if you want to increase your chance of ranking

Google shows videos on the SERPs - above the normal pages of the site - you can get additional exposure, as we can see in this search for the term “apple cake recipe”.

Voice search and featured content

By 2022, 1.6 billion voice assistants are expected to be in use, whether via smartphones or devices like Alexa and Google Home, which will certainly boost voice search.

A study by Backlinko found that 41% of Google's voice search results came from excerpts highlighted in the search, also known by the English term “feature snippet”.

The "features snippets", always occupy the top of the Google page and have the function of responding to searches directly so that the user does not need to go to another page. That's why they work so well not just as texts, but for voice search results.

To achieve this prominent place, look for ways to answer your audience's questions in the most direct and complete way possible, using not only texts, but graphics and tables as well.

Old posts

A quick, easy and efficient way for you to publish your new article is to point links to it within some specific posts that you have already published.

That way, you guarantee faster indexing on Google, an improvement in your website's internal SEO, in addition to bringing more traffic to the new article from the old ones.

Choose articles related to the new article and place a call for your reader to access this new content.

The work of SEO for Google never ends as the algorithm will continue to change and require adaptations.

But more important than worrying about what the “machine” likes, try to understand what your audience wants. This is the real key to a successful SEO, content and digital marketing strategy.