Five steps: How to outrank your competitors on Google

To get high rankings on Google, it is not necessary to have everything that Google expects from a great website. You just have to be better than your competitors.

If you have a website with optimized web pages, it is usually the quality of the links that make the difference. The following tips will help you to get better rankings than your competitors:

Step 1: Find out who your competitors are

Search for five of your main keywords on Google and write down the URLs of the websites that rank best across these keywords. These websites are your main competitors on Google.

Step 2: Check the anchor texts of these websites

The next step is to find out how many of the links to your competitors contain your target keywords.

Required action: Your website should have more inbound links that contain your target keywords than the websites of your competitors.

Step 3: Check the PageRank spread of these websites

Although the official PageRank number that Google displays in its toolbar is a flawed metric, it can still help you to find out why some websites rank higher than others.

Required action: If your competitors have more inbound links from web pages with a high PageRank than your website then you should try to get more high PR links.

Step 4: Check the top level domains of the inbound links

If you want to get high rankings on Google.com.au then it might be important to have many inbound links from .com.au websites.

Required action: If you target local Google versions (Google.com.au, Google.co.uk, etc.) then your website should have more inbound links from websites that use the corresponding top level domain than your competitors.

Step 5: Check the content of the linking pages

Google prefers websites that get links from related websites. If you sell shoes then a link from a fashion blog is much better than a link from a website about puppies.

Required action: Your website should have more inbound links from related websites than the websites of your competitors.

If you follow the five steps above, your website will get better rankings than the websites of your competitors.