[Full Guide 2026 Update] How do I get my website to the first page of Google Search?

Introduction

If you know anything about SEO rankings, then you know that the title question involves many different aspects. For those that are new to search engine optimization, this is not a flip switch or simple set of configuration or an account that you setup.

In this article I will attempt to structure your approach with actionable tasks to getting your webpage as high on the google ranking as possible, hopefully even the first page. As many people get lost in the details and eventually give up on it or spend money on all the wrong places.

What is organic traffic vs paid traffic?

Organic search traffic consists of visits from unpaid search-engine results. Visits from social media, direct URL entries and referrals are usually classified separately in analytics. The aim is to attract visitors interested in your products, services or content.

Paid traffic is exactly that, it is traffic generated when someone clicks on your paid ad. This can be from any type of platform including but not limited Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Full Article Here: PPC vs SEO

What is SEO ranking?

This is a fundamental question that many overlook in more traditional approaches to business. If you are intending to eventually grow your business regardless of the industry, this is going to be important.
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is adjusting your website to be easily found on a search engine like Google naturally through specific keywords. Think of a car that you plan to modify its overall performance, there are many different things you can do. From tyres, suspension, air intake to more advanced configuration to the onboard computer chip. So, to are there many different things that work together to improve your search ranking.
Similar to a car, you can do one or more of these improvements or just look at those that are within your budget.

Why do I need SEO?

As you may have guessed, it is to be easily found on a search engine. But more than that, it’s core purpose is to direct people who are looking for what you have to offer to your website. That is the bottom line (of SEO).
For example, if you run a hair dressing salon in Gotham City named Harley’s Hair Salon, if someone types Harley’s hair Salon, you will appear high up on the search ranking given your name uniqueness. However, to fully benefit from SEO, if someone types hair salon in Gotham City or hair salon near me, you want to be found as well. The latter search is a more likely typed search option for most people in that region and that is the goal of SEO. To point people looking for what you have to offer.

So, you would want people to find you when they intend to visit a hair salon and not only when they search your name. Buyers’ intent plays a key role in this. This means that you generate traffic from people who are already interested in what you have to offer.

On-page vs Off-page SEO

On-page SEO includes content, headings, internal links and technical elements on your website. Off-page SEO concerns signals beyond your site, such as relevant editorial backlinks and business mentions. Social sharing can help promote content but is not automatically a ranking signal.

10 Ways To Improve Your SEO Ranking: The Summarized Version

Below is a list of the different high-level aspects that influence your SEO ranking. Each will be discussed in detail with actionable steps in the following section. They are not in order of importance.

1. Website content

This is the content you have on your website like media and text. This also includes the structure of the content you have on your website.

2. User Engagement

This is how users behave when they view your website.

3. Backlinks

Backlinks are when your website URL is listed on someone else’s website. For example, listing your website on an online directory.

4. Citations

This is your business details matched against those on other websites. For example, your contact details and location. These should be fairly similar.

5. Mobile Friendliness

How well your website looks and performs on mobile devices.

6. General Performance

How quick and efficient is your website loading speed on any device.

7. Security

This is how well your website conforms to accepted security standards.

8. Consistency (or relevance)

It’s a mixture of some of the above but generally means that your website is being updated and maintained with relevant content within your niche.

9. Competition

Not something you really have control of but is just as important. Your competitors are also looking to optimize their search engine performance.

10. Domain Reputation

How new your domain is and how as it been used thus far. This includes mailing from this domain. This is not just a result of the above as the domain can be used for mailing and redirections which could be misused or through misconfiguration.

These ten areas provide a useful framework, but they are not a formula covering a fixed percentage of Google’s ranking systems. The best priorities depend on your website, competition, search intent and resources.

10 Ways to improve your SEO ranking – Detailed

1. Website Content

Having lots of content on your website is a start but far from enough. The content needs to adhere to certain key rules listed here:

1.1. Content

You must first have content. Having a website with just basic information about you or your business is not enough. You must go beyond contact details, location, and a few pictures. It should contain information about what is it that makes you better than your competitors, some information about how it is you operate or produce goods and more. You can even go on to create articles related to what you offer as I have done so with this article.

Adding content closely related to your service offerings through blogs or mentions are a good way to cover more keywords that may be used to find your website.

1.2. Theme (niche)

Your website must have a common theme and have information related somewhat to each other. An example is if your website is about skincare products, you may have information about hair care products or even pamper spa treatments. You don’t want to have completely unrelated information about stationary or the reason for raising fuel prices. If your passion or business extends to more than one theme, then start another website or try to find an overarching theme that connects them all.

1.3. Keywords or Key Phrases

Earlier I mentioned buyers’ intent where a search engine would return results based on what they input. Using the same example, if your website is about your hair salon located in Gotham City named Harley’s Hair Salon, more people would type hair salon and location rather than the name of the salon. Therefore, some of the keywords and key phrases you would want to include are:

a) Hair salon, Hairdresser or Beauty salon.

You do not need to include all of these. The reason for this is that the search engines algorithm tries intuitively to determine the buyer’s intent. So, whichever your website is optimized for, it will rank you for which ever term a user enters into the search engine. Terms will overlap with one another, and some will be given more of a priority. Of course if it is possible to add all keywords in your content ensure this is done organically and not “stuffed” on your website. Keyword stuffing is a practice of using excessive keywords to rank higher. This may have worked in the 90’s but not now with the hundreds of updates Google has had since then.

b) Gotham City

A location is almost mandatory for any business. This is so search engines can deliver people near you to your website listing. Again, there are algorithms in place to identify when people, in your area enter “hair salon near me”. The search engine tries to determine the persons location and serve results based on that.

If you are competing tightly for business within your niche within the online space then finding good keywords or phrases can be a challenge. As more businesses grow, this will be a common challenge and to overcome this, more detailed or long tail keywords should be used. example “hair salon with covered parking” or “unisex beauty salon in Gotham city”. Make sure these other facilities and features are mentioned on your website as well.

1.4. Quality

It must be of good quality. This means that if a person comes to your website, it should provide them with some value. Google has intelligent algorithms to detect if your content has been spammed with certain keywords to try to manipulate SEO to get traffic. Spamming or keyword stuffing will actually hurt your search ranking. Quality goes beyond what a user reads but how it is presented as well. That means including tables, images, and videos when possible.

1.5. Structure

The structure of your data is very important. As humans go through information and visually look at bold headings, bullet points and text boxes, AI tries to do this by identifying heading tags (< h1 > < h2 > < h6 >), lists (< ul > < li >) and a whole list of other html tags. To add to this, there is also a schema markup structure that search engines read to try to understand the content on your website. Here is an example:
If you have a recipe or cooking blog, you will want to include information about a certain recipe like

• Ingredients
• Cooking time
• Step by step instructions
• The number of people it will serve and so on.

You can find the different schema types over at https://schema.org

1.6. Special Category Content Type

Your Money or Your Life or (YMYL) type content are website themes that will have consequences to the viewers money or life. Money means anything that may influences a person’s financial decision like banking, investing or cryptocurrency and life means directly related to a person’s physical or mental well-being. Should your website contain content related to these important categories it will need to adhere to more stricter rules. Three (3) main areas have been defined by Google. Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness (E.A.T). Googles algorithms accesses your website to meet these criteria. If it does not, then you will be ranked very low or not at all on google. Google polices tend to get updated regularly to keep up with an evolving internet, but one thing remains certain, if your website is classified as YMYL type content, extra care must be given to all aspects mentioned here, specifically, E.A.T.

1.7. Media

Include media to supplement your written content. When adding images and videos add alt-text. This helps the search engine understand the purpose and description of the media in relation to your content. Apart from that, it helps viewers know what the image is about if they are not loaded.

1.8. Be Original

And lastly when it comes to content, do not steal, or plagiarize from other websites. It’s easy and tempting but search engines have no trouble detecting plagiarized information. To oversimplify how this works, when content is added to a website, it is crawled and cached on the Google servers. This means that a version of your content is temporarily stored on Google which makes it easier to deliver search results when someone uses the search engine. So, when google sees more than one website with the exact same content, it recognizes the first copy as canonical (original or official) and all others as a copy. Search engines regularly scan for new data and when a website has been updated, it is updated on the search engine cache soon after. Having information that is regarded as a copy hurts your SEO ranking. It’s better to be original with lesser content then unoriginal and lots of copied content. The definition of copied information can have a grey area.

Copying someone else’s content without permission can create copyright and quality problems. Simply rewording existing material does not necessarily make it original or useful. Add first-hand knowledge and examples, and use appropriately licensed media.

2. User Engagement

Consider whether visitors can find answers, navigate easily and complete important tasks. These are useful measures of website quality, but individual clicks, scrolls and time-on-page metrics should not be presented as confirmed direct Google ranking factors.

Analytics bounce rate has different definitions depending on the platform and setup. A quick visit can still be successful when someone finds the answer immediately. Evaluate engagement alongside meaningful actions.

3. Backlinks

A backlink is a link from another website to yours. Relevant editorial links can help discovery and reputation, but links created mainly to manipulate rankings may violate search-engine spam policies.

Moz and Ahrefs provide their own domain metrics, including Domain Authority and Domain Rating. These third-party estimates are not Google’s ranking scores. Assess backlinks by relevance, quality and context, not just a single metric.

Manipulative backlinks can be a concern, but Google often handles many low-quality links automatically. Disavowing links is a specialised measure, not a routine response to a low third-party score.

This must be used with extreme caution of risk lowering your ranking.

Read here on the steps by for Google: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487

To get backlinks you would need to engage with other websites in one way or another to contribute meaningful content either by asking them to link to content you have or by giving you a shout-out which is often sometimes a paid service. Other than that, contacting directory services to have you listed is another way to get backlinks.
As your website grows and gains traffic, there may be others who would choose to link back to your content as it provides them with value in some way.

4. Citation

On the topic of directories, citations help search engines better understand you. If your business is listed on many directories with matching details, this reinforces your website details. Of course, you would want to beware which directories you choose. You do not want to list your hardware business on a food network directory as an example. There are many free options available.

For relevant directory examples, see our South African business directories guide. Prioritise useful listings over backlink volume.

Google Business Profile lets eligible businesses manage information on Google Search and Maps. It can help local customers find a business, subject to verification and eligibility requirements.

Google Business Profiles can represent eligible storefront and service-area businesses that interact with customers in person. Online-only businesses generally do not qualify. Service-area businesses can hide their home address when appropriate.

5. Mobile Friendliness

People access websites on phones, tablets and computers. Rather than relying on dated device-share percentages, test your site across screen sizes and keep it readable, usable and fast. Google primarily indexes the mobile version of website content.

6. General Website Performance

This is a technical requirement that requires significant attention before your website is even built and after. There are a few questions you should ask yourself to determine what you should get.

6.1. Who is my intended audience for the website?

Of course, if you are a small business serving a small region, a simple solution should do. If you serve a country or many countries, then you would need to pay more attention to your initial website solution. There are other factors to consider apart from region, like are you a school or university. This could generate lots of traffic on its own though it’s a small region. Lastly, keep the end goal in mind. You want to get a solution that can scale up as you do. If it is a personal blog and has a fairly low audience reach, then it would not matter as much.

The goal here is to understand the anticipated traffic and accommodate for that when choosing a hosting solution.

6.2. What type of content and features will I have on my website?

The more content and features you have on a website the more resources required. When a webpage loads, it must load the media, HTML, styling files that tells the website how it should look and JavaScript which tells the website how it should behave. This loads for every basic modern website so the more content and features the longer it takes to load. Some websites have other non-standard content that loads for specialized content features.

Therefore, it is important to understand your requirements when building a website so that the right hardware and software infrastructure is put in place.

6.3. Who will be building my website?

Based on your skill level, different tools will be required to archive the same results which means it will impact your budget. As this is a highly technical task (with various levels of complexity and different learning curbs), learning how to archive higher performance at the lowest cost requires weeks, months or even years if you do not have the technical backend knowledge. Large companies like Wix or Square Space makes it easy for anyone to manage and grow their website however this comes at a very high cost.

You could also acquire online services like CloudFront or Cloudflare to boost your website performance. Cloudflare is a free service with paid options which you can reap the benefits of and does not expire. They make their money from even higher performance options or their other add-on services.

If you would rather have a web agency like Web Force manage this, it is often much cheaper. The trade-off is that you have to rely on an external party to manage this function of your website. If you are comfortable with that and don’t want to get your hands dirty this is a good option for you. Some companies may offer hybrid option however this should be reserved if you or your team have technical knowledge.

6.4. So why do search engine consider performance?

At first glance it may seem more favourable to those who can afford it. This is only partially true, yes you can throw money for better resources but there are ways to improve performance by other means through optimizing existing resources. Optimizing HTML, CSS, JS scripts, reducing image sizes and removing unnecessary files can all improve performance.

A fast, usable website benefits visitors. Performance is part of the overall page experience, but paying more for hosting or achieving a particular speed score does not guarantee higher Google rankings.

Good performance on a website ultimately adds value with a pleasing user experience which is the goal of this exercise.

7. Security

It goes without saying that this is an important factor for ranking high on a search engine. Also, a technical requirement but slightly more straightforward (for basic security) than performance. Apart from having an SSL certificate that allows your website to load using https, security is closely linked to the platform you have chosen to build your website on. This is because each platform has their own security vulnerabilities, and the webmaster needs to be knowledgeable enough to apply necessary hardening configurations. The threats that exist are constantly evolving and so to must the websites software which needs constant updating.
In some cases, the mail server is separate from the web server. You need to ensure that both servers are secure. As an example, should your mail server get hijacked and used to send out spam, this impacts your overall domain reputation.
There are many free tools you can use to scan a website here are some we use.

https://pentest-tools.com/website-vulnerability-scanning/website-scanner
https://www.immuniweb.com/websec

If your website has intrusive pop-ups and redirecting users to grey market websites, your SEO ranking will hurt.

8. Consistency

Consistency is useful when maintaining a website, but posting or editing on a schedule alone does not improve search rankings. Prioritise relevant information, security, usability and meaningful updates when your content needs them.

Review important pages periodically, but there is no universal requirement to change content monthly. Prioritise accuracy, broken links and useful improvements.

9. Competition

Chances are your competitors are also doing what they can to get ahead. Don’t let this deter you as competition drives innovation and creativity in all areas. But before you even get there, ensure you are doing the basics in this article.

Here are two actionable tasks for this item:

9.1. Market Research

View your competitor’s websites and get ideas on what to do and what not to do with your own website. Look at it from a customer perspective and make notes. You would be surprised on what you learn. Of course, you don’t want to blatantly copy content as this will end up costing you in more ways than one.

9.2. Backlink scan

There are online tools that allow you to enter your competitor’s website and peak into who is backlinking to them. You now have potential options for backlinks to your own website. Sometimes if a webmaster links your competitor’s website, they may link yours as well.
Here is a free backlink checker: https://ahrefs.com/backlink-checker

10. Domain Reputation

Domain Authority and Domain Rating are independent scores created by SEO software providers, not Google ranking metrics. A domain’s age alone does not determine how a particular page ranks.

Use third-party metrics as supporting indicators, not predictions of search positions. Content relevance, quality, search intent and competition matter more than any single proprietary domain score.

A website with 10 points lower could still rank higher if that website has been optimized for the specific keywords entered, in the right location or if that specific webpage content has been optimized to be more engaging to uses. Therefore the domain score should be seen as a probability score vs your competitors.

What else impacts my website ranking?

This question is to point out other factors that affect your SEO ranking that you have no control over.

User personal history and data

TLDR; An individuals search preference is taken into account.

Most online activity now has some sort of ability to track an individual’s behaviour patterns, events and general activities. This is not to say that every one of these are being tracked. For example, social media interactions are tracked. If you engage with certain brands, you may see ads for those brands later on. Depending on the social platform, you can turn off these personalised ads. Your smartphone has apps that can track you as well and of course what you enter into a search engine is remembered.

This may sound malicious, however many services you use which are free to use must make money somehow and your data is generally used serve personalised ads and content. You should still beware of suspicious websites and apps especially when entering sensitive data. All the types of data companies have on an individual may in some cases influence what that individual see on search engine results.

To remove your data from Google, follow this link. Note that it is not a straightforward process, and you would need to provide relevant data to prove you are the person whom data needs to be removed. There are also some instances where you will need to contact the website owners themselves. https://support.google.com/websearch/troubleshooter/3111061

Current Trends

Unusually hard to predict, online trends play a significant role in how your website is ranked on a search engine. This can be in cases were a news story breaks triggering many people to search for particular content.

Similarly there are also predictable trends such as during black Friday, more people are searching for deals. Or during cultural or traditional events certain items or services may be more in demand.

Government and Company policies

This doesn’t happen very often but should be on your radar. An example is of search engines algorithms which get updated to include or exclude certain criteria. In the last ten years Google algorithms has been strongly leaning towards websites that are mobile friendly.

Government policy is even more rare as companies tend to be more dominant with how their applications should be used but there have been cases in the past where legal battles have been fought prompting search engines to enforce certain restrictions.

Sanctions can also play a part in your SEO ranking. Most major search engines originate in the USA and if your country has been sanctioned for whatever reason, depending on the sanctions, your website ranking may drop of the search engine completely.

The unknown or conspiracy factor

Search engines regularly update their ranking systems, and their full algorithms are not public. Rather than speculating about hidden motives, use published search documentation, performance data and useful content improvements to guide your SEO work.

In Conclusion

You may be asking yourself why all this effort to rank higher on a search engine when I could spend the same money for ads. It is not about which is better between organic and paid traffic. A good strategy will employ both. However, the steps I mention that would improve your SEO ranking is actually improving the value of your website as a whole. These steps make your website more secure, perform well and give the viewer a good experience with relevant with up to date content. This is what search engine ultimately want to provide to users. So if done right and diligently for long enough, you will start to get significant amount of traffic without paying too much on ads.

I tried to be as comprehensive as possible and to the point as it covers quite a bit of content. Even so there are many other items that could have been added here so use this guide as a strong base of understanding instead. If you would like to contribute to this article in any way or need assistance with SEO’s, please contact me at online@webforce.co.za or click here for more info on how we can help you.