If you rank on page two of Google or beyond, you’re practically invisible.

In fact, almost all of the traffic to our blog comes from first-page Google rankings:

Unfortunately, nobody can guarantee first-page Google rankings. But you can improve your chances of getting them by following a logical process.

Here it is:

Let’s go through it step by step.

Google wants to rank the type of pages that searchers are looking for. Unless your page aligns with the searcher’s intent, it’ll be near impossible to rank on the first page.

Unfortunately, it’s impossible to say for sure what searchers want. But as the point of Google is to rank the most relevant results, you can get a good idea by looking for the most common type, format, and angle of the pages ranking on page one.

Content type

The results you see ranking on the first page will usually be one of these: 

• Blog posts
• Interactive tools
• Videos
• Product pages
• Category pages

For example, all first-page results for “days between dates” are interactive calculators:

For “sweaters,” they’re all e-commerce category pages:

Content format

This applies mainly to blog posts. If you’re mainly seeing this content type on the first page, check to see which of these formats appears the most: 

• Step-by-step tutorials (i.e., how to do x)
• Listicles
• Opinion…