in this video I'm going to show you exactly how to rank on the first page of Google step by step in fact I use this exact formula to rank on the first page of Google for thousands of keywords like backlinks SEO best practices and thousands of others then I sold that site started another site from scratch and grew that site from zero to four hundred thousand visitors per month okay enough bragging let's get into the actual steps and don't worry this isn't going to be the same generic SEO advice you've probably seen a thousand times before like craycrate content use keywords on your page make sure your site loads quickly and all that stuff that you've probably seen a million times before yeah that stuff can help a little bit and this is an SEO video for beginners so it is important to get the basics right but if you want to rank for competitive keywords that stuff might help a little bit but it's not really going to take your site to the first page of Google for really competitive keywords what will the steps that are about to lay out for you right now starting with step number one which is to find five keywords so you probably already know that SEO is really all about keywords it's only all about ranking for keywords that your customers search for and there are a bunch of different strategies tools and tactics for finding them but one of the easiest and most effective is to use Google autocomplete all you need to do for this to work is Type in a keyword that you think a customer might search for and look for the suggestions that Google gives you these are great for two reasons first of all these keywords are usually keywords people are searching for now so they tend to be trending a little bit that way you can get an early and sort of ride the wave as more people search for that term but more importantly they're usually long tail keywords which are much less competitive than most keywords that people go after one of the biggest mistakes people make that are new to SEO is that they go after really really competitive keywords and they're usually keywords that people first think of when they think of their business so for example let's say you run a skincare brand and you want to create a blog post around the keyword skin care routine now on the surface this is a good keyword because it's something that your customers probably search for the problem is it's just way too competitive for most new sites to rank for you have huge Brands trying to rank for this skincare routine keyboard a long tail version of this keyword be something like skin care routine for men or skin care routine for dry skin these two keywords are much less competitive than skincare routine so even if your site is new you still have a chance to rank for them so once you've done with Google autocomplete scroll down to the bottom of Google to the related searches section here's where Google will show you keywords that are directly related to your keyword and sometimes more tangentially related so it's almost like brainstorming within Google and speaking of keywords that are low competition a great way to find them is a tool called exploding topics and this is a Shameless plug because I am the co-founder of that tool but it really is a great way to find keywords that aren't competitive yet which leads us to our second step which is to create amazing content out of each of the five keywords that you found so at this point you should have found at least five keywords that are a good fit for your business and also a relatively low competition and now it's time to create amazing content around those keywords now back in the day amazing content meant just these like huge guides 10 000 words covered everything thing and in some cases that does make sense but in SEO today the big thing is search intent and what that basically means is when someone searches for something there's a search intent behind it sometimes the search intent is looking for information looking to buy something looking to browse and compare different products and each keyword basically has a unique search intent and the better that your content can satisfy search intent the higher your rank in Google for example someone searching for best organic cat food is probably not credit card in hand ready to buy cat food they're more in browsing mode and they're comparing different options so if your page does a good job of comparing the pros cons pricing of different cat foods it's likely to perform well but if you create a page that's like promoting one cat food over the other and it's really salesy it's probably not going to convert well but if someone's searching for something like buy cat food online they're much further down the funnel and they're ready to buy so you could even rank a product or category page for a keyword like that on your eCommerce site even though there's no valuable content besides search intent you also want to create something That's Unique something that brings something new to the table or something better to the table otherwise you're going to have a hard time ranking because for most keywords there are already a decent number of results so for you to stand out and create something that deserves to be on the first page or even number one you need to bring something really different to the table that the results don't already have for example look at this guide from my old site it contains strategies tips case studies and other things that really no other content has which is one of the reasons it ranked on the first page so quickly plus most importantly it's not just unique for the sake of being unique it satisfies search intent which Google can measure and when they say people are generally happy with your page it's gonna rise up the rankings but if they find that your page isn't a good fit for search intent they're going to downrank you so once you have a piece of content ready to go the next step is to optimize it for SEO and this used to be somewhat complicated and evolved back in the day you used to have to put your keyword in your content a bunch of times put your keyword in h2 tag but today that stuff doesn't really move the needle anymore I honestly don't worry that much about on-page SEO today because it's really so simple and instead of just focusing on creating great content that satisfies search intent and in fact we have a whole writing team at my startup and we don't really tell them anything about SEO we don't want to get into their head that they have to worry about keywords or related keywords or all this stuff we just say create the best content possible and for this keyword create something that someone landing on the page would say yes this is like exactly what I'm looking for the whole on-page thing is relatively simple all you really need to do is have your keyword in your title in the first couple hundred words of your page and then a few other times on your page just to let Google know that this page is about that topic for example this post from the exploding topics blog is optimized around the keyword business Trends so we include that exact keyword in the title in the first hundred words and a few other times on the page honestly that alone is like 90 of on-page SEO right now and yes that page does rank number one for my target keyword business Trends but it's not something that ranks because of Any on-page SEO magic it wrecks because it's the best result for the keyword business Trends it has the best content at the most original content and it satisfies search intent so now that your content is written optimized for on-page SEO the next step is to optimize it for user experience Google used to rank sites based largely on how many backlinks they had or based on how many times a keyword appeared on a page and it's not really like that anymore backlinks are still super important I'm going to cover that later in the video but Google largely ranks content based on how happy it makes a Searcher which is that search intent thing that we talked about earlier but you can't just create a piece of content that satisfies search intent and expect it to rank because you also need to make sure that the user can find their information quickly basically user experience in fact Google can carefully measure how people interact with your site and whether they bounce back to the search results and if people bounce quickly from your site after landing on it from Google they'll downrank you but if people are generally staying on your site for long periods of time after searching for a keyword that's a positive sign to Google and they're likely to raise your rankings with that here's exactly how to optimize your content for user experience the first thing is you want want to front load the value as much as possible which is basically giving people the thing they're looking for as high on the page as you can basically you don't want to hide insights and hide really valuable tidbits in your content you want to make it stand out so people can skim and get what they're looking for quickly for example look at this post about ETFs from Investopedia the page doesn't even have an intro never mind a long-winded intro it just jumps right into what ETFs are which is what people searching for ETFs want to know now at exploding topics we do use intros but we try to keep them really short and the idea behind them is really just to let people know that they're in the right place that way people can get value within seconds of landing on the page another thing to look at is your content layout and design specifically you want to make your content easier to read or as I like to say when it comes to online content hard to read means won't read so if your font is small or sections are all squished together or you have long paragraphs people are not going to read it no matter how good the content is now if you want to see a great example of how this looks go go to healthline.com they're probably the gold standard when it comes to content layout and design they have super big easy to read font a simple layout and lots of subheadings that make the content easy to read and skim and now it's time for our last step which is to build backlinks make no mistake backlinks are still super important when it comes to SEO that's because Google largely uses backlinks to figure out which sites are trustworthy and authoritative in other words the exact types of sites that they want to show at the top of the search results now there are a million ways to build backlinks from broken link building to guest posting but considering this is a video about SEO for beginners I wanted to give you a sort of approachable strategy that anyone can use a strategy that works especially well for new sites with zero Authority and that strategy is called be the source now I have an entire video on this strategy so if you want to go super deep on it you should watch that video but let me give you some steps here that you can get started on right away the first step is to find a statistic in your industry that you can write about and expand on for example at exploding topics we realize that a lot of people are searching for how much data is generated per day but it was lost inside these long statistics posts among a bunch of other stats about how much data is generated per day where the data comes from and it was really just hard to find that one stat that people are searching for so we created a dedicated page to how much data is created every day along with a couple different you know insights and examples but most importantly at the top of the page was the statistic people looking for so that way someone searching for how much data is created per day we were the source we were the easy source to find and the easy source to cite and that made us quickly the source for bloggers and journalists that were writing about how much data was generated per day in fact we started to get backlinks literally like a week or so after publishing the post now you might be wondering if my site's new it doesn't have any Authority why would Google rank that content and why would someone link to me it's a good question and a legitimate concern that's exactly why you want to Target really specific stats that people are going to have a hard time finding anywhere else these specific stat keywords are super low competition so you can usually rank for them without any Authority whatsoever for example Chachi petite was first blowing up we realized that there was an opportunity to create one or maybe even several stat pages around chat GPT the problem was there are already quite a few pages about chat GPC statistics like how much money they raised choose the founder and stuff like that so we went with a very specific topic instead how many users is Chachi Piti have which ranks super quickly and brought in dozens of backlinks in that page because we're targeting a new trending low competition keyword ranked very quickly and when bloggers and journalists are writing about chatgpt and they wanted to know how many users they had they found us first so let me give you the key takeaways from this video so you can get started and actually start to rank your site in Google today first you want to Target low competition long tail keywords that are still trending and they haven't become mainstream yet next you want to create a piece of content that's not just great and high quality which is vague it's something that satisfies search intent and gives Searchers exactly what they third you want to optimize your content for on-page SEO which is basically adding your keyword on your page a couple of times next optimize your content for user experience and make sure people can get value as soon as possible after landing on your site finally you want to build backlinks and like I said there are a thousand different ways to do this but the best way to get started is to be the source for a specific statistic in your Niche so yeah that's about it that's all for my SEO guide for beginners and now I would like to hear from you which Step from this video are you going to try first let me know in the comment section below and I'll see you in the next video