There are two things that have been famously known to make you rank on Google Search: good content and backlinks. Both of these two things complement each other because if you have good content, it is likely that you will also have a lot of backlinks, and vice versa.
Your goal when trying to rank high on Google search is to try to get as many backlinks as possible. How you do that is up to you, but this is literally a numbers game.
Getting a lot of backlinks to your site builds up your Website Authority, a metric that measures the likelihood of your domain ranking high in search results. A high number of backlinks is a good metric that shows the credibility of your domain. If you have a lot of sites linking to your domain, it probably means that your site is trustworthy.
Methods for Ranking
Thankfully, there are many known methods to help you rank in search results. We are going to discuss the most popular ones here.
Blogging
Almost every company you can think of has a blog page. This is an effective way of building backlinks because of the nature of blog articles: it is easy to refer to them as a reference for some sort of information. Also, it is easy to see why blogging is a good investment as a lot of search queries are informational, making blog posts more likely to rank for such queries.
A common method for building backlinks on your domain is to do targeted outreach. For example, you can write an article on a certain topic, and email website owners asking them to link to your article in a few relevant places on their site.
Virality
Ranking on Google is like a game, and there are many ways to play that game. One of the ways to help you rank in search results and build up backlinks is to think about how to make your domain go viral. How can you build up the most amount of backlinks in a short amount of time? Here, we note a few of the ways we've seen to accomplish this:
Having a revolutionary product/service
Having a viral blog post
Having a really unique & great website design. For example, Diagram and Linear's Website Authority ranking shot up after revealing a new redesign of their site.
Your Competition Matters
Ranking on Google can take very little effort and less than a day, really. It all depends on your competition. For Blogkit, it took us less than a week to rank #1 for the search term "Blogkit" on Google search because it was a keyword with very little competition. To see the difficulty of certain keywords, you can use tools such as Ahrefs Keyword Difficulty Checker. The higher the keyword difficulty, the harder it will be to rank for that keyword. It all depends on your competition.
A few other factors that play a role in ranking on Google (according to Google) are webpage performance, usage of HTTPS, search query relevance, and mobile-friendliness. Note that most modern websites should have no problems with the technical aspects that take part in ranking on Google.
We wanted to keep this article short because ranking in search results is simple, but not easy. This topic has been researched heavily over the past few decades, and the insights from the research have been vastly similar. Ultimately, it is a game of building backlinks, writing good content, and analyzing your competition.
