6 Different Ways Your Business Site Can Rank in Google

There are many ways to get ranked at the top of Google, even if your site isn’t first in the standard results. However, without optimizing your business website for them, you’ll likely never be included.

The key is to learn about the alternatives Google offers, besides the search results page you already know and love. By taking some steps to optimize your site accordingly, you can be included in some lesser known search results—which could increase your overall traffic figures.

In this post, we’ll give you a rundown of Google’s other search results options, and how to optimize for them. By the time we’re finished, you’ll have all the necessary tools to pull in more organic traffic.

Key Takeaways

• There are a number of ways to rank in Google Search.
• Regular search is still the foundation of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
• Schema is a basic requirement for most advanced options.

1. Regular Search Traffic

Regular search engine traffic is still the foundation of SEO. Even if much of your traffic comes from the alternatives we’ll discuss next, your pages must rank well to begin with.

Before moving forward, you need to take a hard look at your bottom line and ask: Is investing in SEO right for my business? We’re confident in telling you, the answer is (almost always) a resounding yes!

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How to Get Started

1. Learn to measure the success of an SEO campaign.
2. Don’t get caught up in keyword stuffing, or misunderstand where keywords belong on the page.
3. Create a long-term content strategy by focusing on a wide range of long-tail keywords.
4. Use Yoast SEO or All In One SEO to take granular control over the optimization your WordPress site.

2. The Knowledge Graph

The Knowledge Graph is a project by Google that enhances its search results with semantic search information gathered from all over the web:

Semantic search has a lot to do with Google’s shift towards entity-based search—essentially places, people, and things. Google keeps a knowledge base of identifiable data logged away in order to present a box of information about your search topic next to or above regular links. These results are easier for searchers to glean the information they need, and could also bring a huge amount of traffic to the lucky source sites.

Optimizing for the Knowledge Graph is an extension of your existing organic search strategy.

How to Get Started

Google largely relies on structured data to source its information for the Knowledge Graph. With that in mind:

1. Add Schema to your site, which is the most common form of structured data.
2. Use plugins such as Yoast SEO, All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets, and Schema to help.

3. Featured Snippets

You may have noticed a box above the results page when Googling a question. It includes a summary of the answer, extracted from its source webpage, along with the page title and URL. This is called a featured snippet:

Simply put, featured snippets are chosen from short, concise answers within your blog post content—and they can bring in crazy amounts of traffic.

How to Get Started

We’ve covered how to do this in a previous blog post, but to sum up the process:

1. Install Schema if you haven’t already done so.
2. Identify common questions asked by your audience.
3. Provide a clear answer to the question in a targeted landing page.
4. Format the page with proper HTML tags.

4. The AMP Carousel

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), enables sites to offer self-hosted, rapidly loading pages for mobile. The AMP Carousel is a feature only available on tablets and smartphones, where AMP-enabled articles show up in a carousel above the rest of search results:

Sites can load up to four times faster with AMP, which greatly improves the user’s experience. In turn, you can benefit from a 27% bump in conversion rates for every second you shave off your site’s loading time.

How to Get Started

1. Install Schema if you haven’t already done so.
2. Mark any content you want to be eligible as an article in Schema, as well as have its AMP counterpart ready to go.
3. Install AMP using the official AMP WordPress plugin.
4. Configure Yoast SEO to work with AMP, if applicable on your site.

5. Google Images

There’s no doubt that images increase on-page reader engagement. However, they get indexed and returned in Google Images too:

When optimized correctly, Google Images can be a strong supplemental source of traffic. Google offers a few tips for successful image publishing:

1. Provide fast-loading images.
2. Use good quality photos.
3. Place images high up on the page.

How to Get Started

1. Prepare your images so they load quickly.
2. Name each image with 2–4 descriptive words.
3. Set the title and alt tag of each image on the page.
4. Use images relevant to the text around it.

6. Google Videos

Video can be powerful for normal SEO thanks to Google’s Rich Snippets—you could even get a video thumbnail to the left of your page in normal search results:

Videos are a powerful way to engage and attract quality leads, and marketers agree it is highly effective for conversions. Although videos show up in 70% of normal results, Google have also provided an an entire section dedicated to video search, similar to images.

How to Get Started

1. Begin by reading through the Video Search Course documentation.
2. Don’t block necessary resources in your robots.txt.
3. Use an appropriately-sized thumbnail.
4. Make sure each embedded video on your site has a unique thumbnail, title, and description.
5. Add schema to your video pages using the All in One Schema.org plugin, which increases the chances of your video thumbnail appearing in search results.

Bonus: Google News

Finally, news is often prioritized above other search results, while also having its own dedicated section within Google:

In order to get your site considered as a news source, Google looks for the following attributes:

• Timely information on relevant news stories, rather than content such as how-to articles, advice columns, weather forecasts, or stock data.
• Original reporting and proper attribution for any work or data collected by an outside source.
• Clear authority and expertise on your subject.
• Accountability through author bios and easily accessible contact information.
• Well-written articles with impeccable grammar and spelling.

The bar for inclusion is high, but the traffic benefits can be worth the effort.

How to Get Started

Once your site reaches the minimum requirements, follow these steps to be considered for Google News:

1. Set unique, permanent article URLs. WordPress should already be handling this for you.
2. Make sure that article links contains at least a few words, for the sake of Google’s crawlers.
3. Publish articles in HTML, as Google cannot crawl files such as PDFs.
4. Submit it to Google for consideration.

Conclusion

There are many ways to increase your search traffic, and the steps for leveraging those channels is learning what they are, then optimizing for them. Firstly, rank your site well for regular search. Next, make sure your site is running a schema as it’s recommended for most advanced SEO situations.

There are many channels to choose from, so it’s best to pick those that align well with your business strategy. Let’s recap:

1. Regular search traffic (start here if you’re new!).
2. The Knowledge Graph.
3. Featured snippets.
4. The AMP Carousel.
5. Google Images.
6. Google Videos.
7. Google News.

Are there any other channels worth optimizing for? Let us know the direction you’re taking in the comments section below!