How do I get my website to the top of Google?

Every business owner wants to be at the top of Google. That makes sense, because a top position means more visitors, more customers and more revenue. Even so, every honest answer to this question starts with a warning: SEO is not a sprint, it is a strategy. Quick promises sound attractive, but you build lasting positions step by step.

In practice we usually see a clear rise after three to six months, but that is our experience and not a general average: Google deliberately publishes no period for it, because it differs per site and per level of competition. A position is not a possession either: Google runs core updates that reshuffle the local results, and what the May 2026 one did and which four actions hold up afterwards is in the Google May 2026 core update.

There is something good on the other side of that: the work pays back for years. Clients such as Witte Tanden Oisterwijk, a dental practice, and Miraflores Thuiszorg, a home care provider, both near our own base in Oisterwijk in the Netherlands, are still growing on optimisations carried out earlier. So what you set up well now keeps working for you.

We split the work across three pillars. That is our division and not Google's: Google publishes no list of ranking factors and no weights, and warns itself that there is no single lever that guarantees your position. Score on all three and you usually rise. Neglect one and it is exactly that pillar which holds your positions back.

• Technology (on-site SEO): your code, load speed and structure.
• Content (on-page SEO): your text, headings and search terms.
• Authority (off-page SEO): links and mentions from other websites.

Getting to the top of Google is therefore not a trick but an interplay. If you would rather have that interplay guided, look at our service improving SEO.

Good content starts with search intent: what does somebody really want to achieve with their search? Whoever searches for red Nike trainers size 10 wants to buy. Whoever searches for what Nike trainers are made of wants information. Two searches about the same product, with a completely different intent. Every intent asks for its own kind of page.

The main rule alongside it: always write for the person, not for the machine. Text that genuinely takes your visitor further does better in Google in the end as well.

Without keyword research you are firing buckshot. With tools such as Ahrefs, Semrush and SERanking you analyse on the basis of data where your opportunities sit: which search terms do your customers use, and which of them can you realistically win?

An example. On a broad term such as website top of Google the competition is enormous. A more specific term such as SEO consultant Bristol is far easier to rank for. So choose your search terms on data, not on instinct.

Once you have chosen your search terms, you work them into the places where Google and your visitor expect them:

• In your page title and your H1.
• In the first paragraph of your text.
• In your subheadings.

Add short URLs, internal links to relevant pages, alt text on your images and a website that works properly on mobile. They are small things on their own, but together they make the difference between page three and page one.

Your visitors do not see the technology, Google does. These points have to be in order:

• A TLS certificate, so that your site runs on https.
• A load time under 3 seconds.
• A mobile friendly design.
• Structured data through schema.org, so that Google understands your content better.
• Indexable pages, which you check in Search Console.

If something goes wrong here, even the best content can stay invisible. Technical SEO is therefore the foundation under every other step in this article.

Every link to your website is a kind of vote from another site. The more trustworthy websites that point at you, the more authority Google assigns you. One clear rule applies: quality goes above quantity. You build lasting, relevant links through partnerships and PR.

Not everybody is in a position to start on links, and that does not have to stop you. There are four pillars you hold entirely yourself, plus an honest limit where links do decide the outcome, and we mark both out in how do I rank higher in Google without backlinks.

You show trust more broadly than through links alone, by the way. Customer reviews also play a part in how trustworthy you come across. One warning that matters in the United Kingdom: since 6 April 2025 writing, commissioning or hosting fake reviews is a banned practice under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, enforced directly by the Competition and Markets Authority. So earn them. Curious what to aim for? Read how many reviews you need.

SEO and Google Ads do not exclude each other, they strengthen each other. The combination works like this: ads to gather traffic and data fast, SEO to build lasting growth. With adverts you see quickly which search terms bring traffic, and you use that data to sharpen your organic strategy.

What such a targeted approach looks like in practice is set out in the article on how a chiropractor gets more enquiries from Google without wasting advertising budget.

The question in the title contains an assumption worth taking apart, because it quietly sets people to work on the wrong thing. Your website does not have a position. Individual pages have positions, and each one has a different position for each search term. You can sit at the top for one term and nowhere at all for the next, on the same site, on the same day.

That changes the way you plan. Rather than asking how do I get my website higher, ask which page should win which search term. Write that down as a list: the term, the page that ought to answer it, and whether that page actually exists yet. Most sites discover at that moment that they have three search terms all pointed at the same page, which means those terms compete with each other, and two others with no page at all behind them.

The second assumption is the word top. A results page today is not a numbered list of ten links. Depending on the search there may be adverts above everything, a map with three local businesses, a block of questions, a shopping row, and an answer written by Google itself. Being first among the ordinary blue links can still put you well below the fold.

So decide what winning means for the terms you care about, and do it before you start. If your search shows a map block, your work sits largely in your Google Business Profile and your reviews, and no amount of rewriting your homepage will place you there. If the answer block sits at the top, the prize is being quoted in it. If it is a straightforward list of results, the classic three pillars from FIG.01 are the whole game. Search your own main terms on a phone, not on your desktop, and look at what genuinely occupies the first screen. That screenshot is your brief.

Almost everybody checks their position by searching for their own term and looking. It is the least reliable method available. Your browser knows your history, it knows you visit your own site constantly, and results vary with where you are standing. You will see yourself higher than a stranger does, consistently, and then wonder why the phone is not ringing.

Use Search Console instead, and use it knowing what it does. The average position it reports is exactly that: an average, across every search that showed your page, from everywhere those searches came from. A page that sits third for one term and fortieth for another reports as something in between, and that middle number describes no real search anybody made. So filter down to one search term at a time before you draw a conclusion, and compare like with like.

Three things there are worth more than the position column. Impressions per search term tell you what Google already believes you are about, which is often not what you intended. Search terms where you appear but nobody clicks point at a title and description problem rather than a ranking problem, and that is a far cheaper fix. Search terms sitting just off the first page are your shortest route to visible gain, because moving a page that is already close is easier than starting from nothing.

Then set a baseline and write down the date. Pick your ten most important search terms, note the position and the impressions for each, and put the file somewhere you will find it again. Without that record you cannot tell in three months whether something improved, got worse, or simply moved with the season, and you will end up arguing from memory. If you would rather have that baseline drawn up for you, the starting point is the free scan mentioned at the end of this article.

Keyword research tools give you a volume and a difficulty score, and both are estimates. There is a check that costs nothing and tells you more: open the first page of results for the term and look at who is standing there. That page is Google showing you, in public, what it currently believes a good answer looks like. Arguing with it is expensive.

You are looking for three things. Who occupies it. If the first page is filled with national comparison sites, marketplaces and directories, a single service page from a local business is unlikely to displace them, however well written. That is not defeatism, it is choosing a fight you can win.

What kind of page wins. If every result is a long guide and you have a product page, or every result is a product page and you have written a guide, you have the wrong format for that term and no amount of optimisation repairs a format mismatch. What they are missing. Read the top three properly. Nine times out of ten they answer the question in general terms and leave out the specifics your customers actually ask about: what it costs, how long it takes, what happens if it goes wrong, whether it applies in your area.

That last gap is where a smaller business genuinely wins. You cannot out-publish a national brand, but you can be the only page that answers the awkward practical question honestly, because they will not put a price on a page and you can.

One more rule that saves months. If a term is dominated by results that answer a different intent from the one you assumed, believe the results and not your assumption. Google is showing you what people who type those words actually wanted, and it has far more evidence than you do.

Everything above is a list, and a list invites you to start with whatever is easiest. The order below is the one we use, and it exists because each step makes the next one worth doing.

Weeks one and two: measure and remove obstacles. Confirm your pages can actually be indexed, that your site runs on https, and that nothing important is blocked. Record the baseline described above. Fix anything that stops Google reading a page at all, because until that is right, every other improvement is invisible.

Weeks three and four: match pages to search terms. Build the list from the section on pages and terms. Merge pages that compete with each other, and note where a term has no page behind it. This step usually changes the plan more than any other, and it costs nothing but attention.

Weeks five to eight: rewrite the pages that already almost work. Start with the terms sitting just off the first page, not with a brand new page on a term you have never appeared for. Give each page a title and an opening paragraph that answer the search directly, and add the practical detail your competitors left out.

Weeks nine to twelve: build evidence outside your own site. This is the authority pillar from FIG.01, and it is the slowest of the three, which is exactly why it should already be running while you write. Ask satisfied customers for reviews, get listed where your trade genuinely is listed, and look for partnerships that would exist even if search engines did not.

Two things to hold to throughout. Change one thing at a time on the pages you care most about, so you can tell what did the work. And do not judge before the period is out: in our experience a clear rise takes three to six months, which means a page rewritten in week six has barely started by week twelve. If you would rather have this sequence run for you rather than run it yourself, that is what our improving SEO service is.

With us a one-off technical SEO audit costs 750 euro for up to twenty pages, and keeping it up and improving it structurally costs 250 euro a month. Ad hoc help runs on an hourly basis at 65 euro. What you need exactly depends on your market, your competition and your starting point; every rate is on the pricing page. We invoice in euro. For a business customer in the United Kingdom the general place of supply rule means you account for the VAT yourself, so we do not charge Dutch VAT; see HMRC VAT Notice 741A.

Do not see that spend as a cost item but as an investment. The positions you build keep producing traffic and customers, long after the work is done.

The formula is simple to remember and takes discipline to carry out: strong technology plus relevant content plus trustworthy authority equals growth. Work on all three pillars at once and, in our experience, give the work three to six months to show visible results.

Do you want to know where your website stands now? We run a free SEO check for you. And if you would rather learn more yourself first, our knowledge base holds more articles on being found in Google.

And if the hard part is not the list but knowing which line of it applies to you, put the question to us once. Through contact we will plan half an hour in which we go through the three checks from this article together: which page is meant to win which search term, what the first page of results for those terms actually looks like, and which of your pages sits closest to the point where a rewrite pays.

You will come away knowing what to do first and roughly what it costs, including when the answer is that you can do it yourself. If it is your speed rather than your text that is holding you back, start with why you score low on PageSpeed; if it is the authority pillar, start with ranking higher without backlinks.