One question we are always asked is if I start a subscription with Blog Writing Services UK, how long will it be before my website is on page 1 of Google? The answer? Read on to find out…

Introduction

Let’s go through a scenario, you have just started your new business, you know blogging is something that everyone does so you begin writing some blogs and putting them on your site. A few weeks pass, and your Google Analytics doesn’t seem to show any improvement in your domain authority (DA), traffic or any other metric you would typically have expected to go up. 

Now, we all know that all marketers are liars, and many content marketing businesses will promise the world. Statements such as below are unfortunately commonplace:

“We’ll quadruple your traffic”

“You’ll be on page one in no time”

The Answer

The answer, as you probably would expect is “it depends”. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is extremely multifaceted and there is not a singular thing that will get you to page one on Google. It becomes easy to doubt the value of blogging when you’re not seeing results quickly. In fact, very few have the patience and foresight required to persevere in those early days often associated with launching a blog.

The Variables

Do you have a target audience? 

Are you writing for “the algorithm” or are you writing for your prospective customers? 

A mistake that many content marketers and new bloggers make is that they write to satisfy Google. This is extremely ironic, as the whole point of the way in which Google assesses websites is that it does this to filter out good content from bad content. So, with that being said, when you’re overfilling your blog posts with keywords, not only are you risking keyword cannibalisation but you’re also making yourself to be ranked lower by Google. 

Google is looking for the best, most authentic and most useful content for real humans. So, by attempting to purely satisfy “the algorithm” you are inherently opening your site up to being penalised by Google. 

Domain Age

Let’s bust a myth, it is often considered that the majority of sites at the top of Google are far older than others, therefore because they’ve been around for a long time, Google boosts them up. Now, that certainly does help, but it’s by no means a silver bullet in getting your blog to page 1 on Google. 

Why do you ask? Google has over 200 methods used to determine the DA of a site. So, if you registered a domain in 2015 and one in 2022, and both of them remained totally inactive. Do you really think with the complexity of the Google machine learning algorithms that it will rank the 2015 site higher than 2022 purely on the premise of age? 

On-page & Off-page SEO Content Marketing

As identified earlier, SEO is a bit complicated and not easy to summarise. It can be broken into two areas though, on page and off page seo. On-page SEO typically refers to things you can control on your website such as your blog, off-page refers to backlinks and content creation such as guest posts. More on this later in this article.
One of the absolute basics of on-page SEO is the time which your website takes to load. 

Semrush identified the following:

• If your site loads in 5 seconds, it is faster than approximately 25% of the web
• if your site loads in 2.9 seconds, it is faster than approximately 50% of the web
• if your site loads in 1.7 seconds, it is faster than approximately 75% of the web
• if your site loads in 0.8 seconds, it is faster than approximately 94% of the web

If your website does not load quickly, your bounce rate could increase. Bounce rate is single-page sessions divided by all sessions or the percentage of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only a single page and triggered only a single request to the Analytics server. It was found that the first-second delay resulted in a 4.9% drop in the number of articles a visitor read.

To test the speed of your site pingdom is a great and free tool to do so. You want your load time to be around 1-2 seconds.

User Experience (UX) 

Have you evaluated your site to understand how your prospective customers may interact with it? If you haven’t optimised your site for your customers, you could be losing their interest as soon as they land on your site. This will increase your bounce rate, and as a result, Google will not prioritise your site at the same rate as a site where people spend a decent amount of time on the site.

Keyword planning

Now, keywords are a must for getting your site to page 1 on Google. Depending on your niche, you could and many websites do indeed end up with a massive myriad of keywords. Subsequently, when this is the case, it can lead to a “spray and pray” approach. Having said that, there if you’re leaning on the same keyword(s) too often and in an inorganic way, you could be subject to keyword cannibalisation. Keyword planning will ensure that you’re organically promoting what you want to be considered a thought leader for.  

Blogging strategy

If you’re new to blogging, or you have a new site, Guest posting is a must. An absolute must.  We cannot emphasise this enough, when we started Blog Writing Services UK, we didn’t focus on our own blog, but instead created good content for other sites accepting guest posts which gave us a nice little backlink to our site. Check out our take on why you should focus on guest posting in the early days.

If you have a little bit of budget, you can also use link building tools where you pay for backlinks to be created that are relevant to your niche. This is something you should only worry about later as its not necessary at first. This will take a while to see any results from, but be patient and stick with other methods first. 

Conclusion

Ultimately, as you probably expected, there is no hard and fast rule as to what will get a website to Page 1 on Google. At Blog Writing Services UK, we always go with the approach of let your blog do the talking for you. Many organisations get carried away and try to use their blog as a hard-selling tool. This is not a strategy that we recommend. Your blog is your voice, its where you can be a thought leader, it’s where you can share your brand with your existing and prospective customers.

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