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It’s funny - we always seem to have the same conversations with potential clients who know a little bit about online marketing:

I hear that possible to get my website to the top of the search engine pretty easily.  Can you make that happen?

As much as I’d like to say "Yes, we can definitely do that for you!", I also can’t lie and set false expectations.  First off, if someone can guarantee top rankings in Google, they’re selling you snake oil.  It might work for a day or two, but it won’t last.  That is one guarantee I can make you.

While there is no guaranteed way to always be #1 in Google, it is very possible to be among the top results.  It might take a bit of work to get there but it is possible.  Even better than that, there is a way to get a pretty good idea of what you need to do to get to the top of the Google rankings.

Google Rankings were Built on Math

The founders of Google created the search engine to prove out their doctoral thesis at Stanford.  While I won’t go into the excruciating detail of it, the important thing to note is that rankings are based on a mathematical formula of the number of sites that link to yours (or your competitors’ sites). 

A lot of changes have been baked into their search rankings since the search engine first came to be but the same math still sets the foundation for all search results.  That means that most of the rankings you see are based on some characteristics of a website that can be quantified

What Do I Care About Quantifying Search Rankings?

If your website shares the same quantifiable characteristics of similar websites ranked at the top of Google, your website should rank towards the top as well.  Or to put it another way, you should be able to rank above your competitors for a particular search term if you have the same or better quantifiable characteristics as them.

1. You can rank higher
2. You can get more visitors
3. You can generate more new clients

What Are These "Quantifiable" Characteristics"?

There are 2 numbers that I look at when doing a competitive analysis for some search terms:

• PageRank
• Inbound Links

These are the best indicators of where a site is going to rank for a particular term.  If you do a search for a term and look at the top 3, top 10, and top 20 results, you will see that most of the time, the average PageLink and number of inbound links decreases the further you go down in the rankings.

If I Get More Links, Will I Be Ranked Higher?

Not necessarily.  Like I said above, there are a lot of factors that determine the rankings of websites.  That takes a much more in-depth analysis of your competitors.  But if you’re interested in getting one of the top results, and you can get a similar or higher value for the characteristics I listed above, you’re in the game.  You will probably show up somewhere in the rankings and you can start making small changes to see what gets you even higher.

What’s Next?

Before you start diving into this competitive analysis, you need to determine what the goals of your website are for you.  There may be some easier and less expensive ways to get more traffic to your website and you should look through those options as well.  But if you know that you want to get top search rankings in Google, this is a pretty good way to get an idea of what you need to do to get ranked higher.

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