How to Improve Your Google Rankings: 10 SEO Strategies That Work in 2026

A Colourful 3d Rendered Illustration showing a Ranking Concept Keyboard

Last Updated: August 2026

Quick Answer: How Do You Improve Your Google Rankings?

To improve your Google rankings, focus on creating genuinely useful content that satisfies search intent, strengthening your most important service pages, fixing technical SEO problems, improving internal linking, earning relevant backlinks, building topical authority, and making sure Google clearly understands your business and what you offer.

For local businesses, you should also strengthen your Google Business Profile, reviews, local relevance, and other signals that connect your business with the geographic areas you serve.

There isn’t one trick that makes a website rank.

After more than 20 years working in SEO, I’ve found that the websites that perform best usually get a collection of important things right at the same time.

How Google Rankings Work

Before trying to improve your rankings, it’s important to understand that Google doesn’t rank an entire website in one fixed position.

Individual pages can appear for different searches based on their relevance, usefulness, quality, authority, context, and many other signals.

That’s why asking, “How do I rank my website #1?” isn’t really the best question.

A better question is:

Which pages should rank for which searches, and what would make those pages more useful and competitive?

That’s how I approach SEO.

I don’t start by stuffing more keywords into a website. I look at what Google is currently showing, what the searcher actually wants, what competitors are doing well, and what is preventing the appropriate page from competing.

1. Match Search Intent

One of the most important parts of SEO is giving searchers the type of page they’re actually looking for.

For example, someone searching:

“What is local SEO?”

probably wants information.

Someone searching:

“local SEO company San Diego”

is much more likely to be looking for a service provider.

Those searches shouldn’t necessarily lead to the same type of page.

This is called search intent.

Before optimizing a page, look at the search results for the keyword you’re targeting.

Are the top results:

• Service pages?
• Blog posts?
• Product pages?
• Local businesses?
• Videos?
• Comparison articles?
• Directories?

Google is giving you clues about what people searching that phrase are likely trying to accomplish.

Creating the right type of page is often more important than simply using the keyword more frequently.

2. Strengthen Your Most Important Service Pages

I see businesses make this mistake all the time:

They publish blog post after blog post while their actual service pages are thin, vague, or poorly optimized.

If you’re a plumber, attorney, financial advisor, personal trainer, medical practice, or other service business, your service pages are often some of the most commercially important pages on your website.

They should clearly explain:

• What you offer
• Who the service is for
• What problems you solve
• How the service works
• What makes your business different
• Where you provide the service
• Common questions customers ask
• What someone should do next

Don’t create a service page for Google and a sales page for people.

It should be the same page.

The best SEO landing pages help search engines understand the service while also helping a potential customer decide whether to contact the business.

3. Create Helpful Content Around Your Expertise

Blogging can still be extremely valuable for SEO.

But publishing more articles isn’t automatically better.

I’ve audited websites with hundreds of blog posts that would have been stronger with far fewer pages.

Instead of asking:

“What should we blog about this week?”

I prefer asking:

“What questions does our ideal customer have before, during, and after buying this service?”

Those questions can reveal excellent content opportunities.

If you offer a specific service, supporting content might address:

• Cost
• Benefits
• Risks
• Alternatives
• Timelines
• Comparisons
• Eligibility
• Common problems
• Frequently asked questions

Over time, a strong collection of related content can help establish your website’s depth around an important subject.

That’s much more useful than publishing unrelated articles simply to keep a blog active.

4. Improve Your Internal Linking

Internal linking is one of my favorite SEO strategies because many businesses already have useful pages that simply aren’t connected very well.

An internal link connects one page of your website to another page on your website.

For example, a useful article about local search could naturally link to a business’s main Local SEO service page.

Internal links can help:

• Search engines discover pages
• Clarify relationships between content
• Establish website hierarchy
• Guide visitors toward useful next steps
• Distribute internal authority throughout the site

However, I don’t recommend forcing exact-match anchor text everywhere.

Use descriptive anchors naturally.

If every article on your website uses the exact same keyword to link to the same page, your internal linking starts looking mechanical rather than useful.

Internal linking should primarily make sense to the person reading the page.

5. Fix Technical SEO Problems

Great content can still struggle if Google has difficulty crawling, indexing, rendering, or understanding your website.

Technical SEO can include:

• Crawlability
• Indexing
• Canonical tags
• Redirects
• XML sitemaps
• Robots directives
• HTTPS
• Mobile usability
• Page performance
• Structured data
• Duplicate URLs
• Broken internal links

Site performance also matters for users.

Google’s Core Web Vitals currently focus on metrics including Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).

But don’t become so obsessed with getting perfect performance scores that you ignore the bigger SEO picture.

A technically perfect page that doesn’t satisfy search intent isn’t automatically going to outrank a much more useful competitor.

Technical SEO creates the foundation.

The rest of your strategy still has to deserve the ranking.

6. Build Relevant Backlinks and Authority

Backlinks are links from other websites pointing to yours.

They’re still an important part of SEO, but this is an area where businesses can easily get distracted by quantity.

I would rather earn a relevant link from a legitimate website connected to your industry or community than collect dozens of questionable links simply because a tool reports a certain authority score.

Good link opportunities can come from:

• Industry publications
• Local organizations
• Professional associations
• Business partnerships
• Original research
• Useful resources
• Public relations
• Community involvement
• Expert commentary
• Quality business directories

The best backlinks usually make sense even if you temporarily forget about SEO.

Ask yourself:

“Would it make sense for this website to mention or recommend my business?”

If the answer is yes, that’s usually a much better starting point than chasing links based solely on a third-party metric.

7. Strengthen Your Local SEO

If your business serves customers in a particular geographic area, your organic website strategy should work alongside your local search presence.

That can include:

• Google Business Profile optimization
• Accurate business information
• Customer reviews
• Relevant local citations
• Location signals on your website
• Local backlinks and mentions
• Appropriate business categories
• Useful local content

One mistake I see is businesses creating dozens of nearly identical city pages and changing little more than the city name.

That’s not how I approach Local SEO.

A location page should have a legitimate reason to exist and provide useful information for someone searching in that market.

For a San Diego business, that might mean understanding that customers searching from Santee, Poway, La Jolla, Carlsbad, or downtown San Diego can encounter very different local search environments.

Local SEO should reflect those differences rather than simply swapping city names in templated content.

8. Fix Content Overlap and Keyword Cannibalization

Sometimes improving rankings requires less content, not more.

This surprises business owners.

Suppose you have four pages that are all essentially targeting the same search:

• Your homepage
• A service page
• An old landing page
• A blog post

Instead of strengthening your website, those pages may create unnecessary overlap.

When I audit a website, I want each important page to have a clear job.

If several weak pages cover substantially the same intent, it may make sense to:

• Consolidate them
• Differentiate their purpose
• Improve internal linking
• Redirect obsolete pages where appropriate
• Update the strongest page

This is why I don’t believe the answer to every SEO problem is “publish more content.”

9. Improve Existing Content Before Publishing More

This is one of the most overlooked SEO opportunities.

Before creating 20 new articles, look at what you already have.

Google Search Console can reveal pages receiving:

• Impressions but few clicks
• Clicks but declining visibility
• Rankings near page one
• Impressions for unexpected keywords
• Traffic from valuable long-tail searches

Those pages may already have history, links, relevance, and search visibility.

Improving an existing page can sometimes make more strategic sense than starting from zero with another URL.

I regularly look for opportunities to:

• Update outdated information
• Improve headings
• Answer additional questions
• Strengthen internal links
• Remove unnecessary sections
• Improve calls to action
• Clarify search intent
• Consolidate overlapping content

Your old content isn’t necessarily dead content.

Sometimes it’s one of the easiest places to find your next SEO opportunity.

10. Optimize for Search in the AI Era

Search is changing.

People can now discover information and businesses through traditional Google results, Google Maps, AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini, and other AI-powered search experiences.

That doesn’t mean traditional SEO fundamentals suddenly stopped mattering.

In many ways, the fundamentals have become even more important.

Businesses need to make it clear:

• Who they are
• What they do
• What topics they have expertise in
• Where they operate
• Why they are credible
• How their content relates to other pages on the website

Useful content, clear site structure, authority, brand mentions, backlinks, expertise, and consistent business information can all contribute to a stronger digital presence.

My approach to AI SEO isn’t about abandoning Google SEO and chasing a completely different set of tricks.

It’s about making a business easier for both traditional search engines and emerging AI discovery systems to understand, trust, and potentially recommend.

How to Measure SEO Progress

Rankings matter, but they shouldn’t be the only thing you measure.

I look at SEO from several angles.

Useful metrics can include:

• Organic clicks
• Search impressions
• Keyword visibility
• Qualified organic traffic
• Leads
• Phone calls
• Form submissions
• Conversions
• Google Maps visibility
• Backlink growth
• Visibility of priority service pages

Google Search Console is particularly useful because it shows you how Google Search is actually exposing your website.

Sometimes a page can be improving before traffic increases dramatically because impressions and average positions are moving in the right direction.

SEO should ultimately support business growth, though.

A thousand additional visitors who never become customers aren’t necessarily more valuable than 50 highly qualified visitors searching for exactly what you sell.

Common SEO Mistakes That Can Hold Back Rankings

After auditing websites for many years, I see many of the same problems repeatedly.

• Creating multiple pages for the same keyword
• Publishing content without a clear purpose
• Ignoring service pages while constantly blogging
• Buying large quantities of low-quality backlinks
• Using the same internal-link anchor everywhere
• Creating thin city pages
• Ignoring Google Search Console data
• Leaving outdated content untouched for years
• Expecting SEO to produce instant results
• Focusing on rankings without tracking leads

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that more SEO activity doesn’t necessarily mean better SEO.

Strategy matters.

How I Approach Improving Google Rankings

I don’t believe there’s a secret SEO button, magic backlink, or one-page checklist that suddenly puts a business at #1.

Good SEO is cumulative.

You improve the right pages.

You fix technical problems.

You strengthen internal linking.

You create genuinely useful supporting content.

You build authority.

You monitor what Google is actually doing.

And then you adjust.

That’s how sustainable search visibility is built.

If you’re trying to improve your rankings but aren’t sure what’s actually holding your website back, I can help identify the highest-priority opportunities.

I’ve worked in SEO for more than 20 years, and I work directly with businesses rather than handing strategy off through layers of account managers.

If you’re looking for an experienced SEO expert in San Diego, you can start by having me look at your current website and search visibility.

GET YOUR FREE SEO ANALYSIS

Call or text: (619) 719-1315

Thanks for reading,
Jen Ruhman
SEO Expert & Founder of Jen Ruhman SEO

Frequently Asked Questions About Improving Google Rankings

How can I improve my Google ranking?

Start by making sure the correct page matches the search intent you’re targeting. Then improve the page’s usefulness, internal links, technical accessibility, authority, and overall relevance. Local businesses should also pay attention to their Google Business Profile, reviews, citations, and geographic relevance.

How long does it take to improve Google rankings?

There is no universal timeline. Some SEO improvements may produce changes relatively quickly, while competitive keywords can require months or longer. The timeline depends on competition, your website’s history, existing authority, technical condition, content, and the strength of competing pages.

Do backlinks still help Google rankings?

Backlinks can still be valuable, particularly when they come from legitimate and relevant websites. However, link quality and relevance matter more than simply collecting the largest possible number of backlinks.

Does publishing more content improve rankings?

Not automatically. Publishing useful content that fills genuine topic or search-intent gaps can strengthen a website, but publishing large quantities of overlapping or low-value content can create unnecessary clutter and competition between your own pages.

Can internal links improve SEO?

Yes. Internal links help users and search engines discover related pages and understand how content is organized. Strategic internal linking can also help reinforce which pages are most important for particular topics.

Do Core Web Vitals affect SEO?

Page experience and Core Web Vitals are worth improving, especially because website performance affects visitors. However, excellent performance scores alone do not guarantee high rankings. Content relevance, usefulness, authority, search intent, and other signals also matter.

Can AI-written content rank on Google?

The method used to produce content is less important than whether the final page is useful, accurate, original, relevant, and created for people rather than primarily to manipulate search rankings. Businesses should review AI-assisted content carefully and add genuine expertise, experience, and value.

Should I hire an SEO expert to improve my rankings?

It depends on your website, competition, resources, and experience. Business owners can handle some SEO tasks themselves, but competitive campaigns often involve technical SEO, content strategy, internal linking, local optimization, authority building, and ongoing analysis that can benefit from experienced professional guidance.