Almost all search engine users ignore paid ads on the bottom of the page and never scroll past page one. This means that if you get your website ranking organically on search engines, you’ll leverage all potential customers. Unfortunately, you’re not the only one trying to do rank with SEO, everyone is trying to do the same thing. This means that you’re going to have to compete with a lot of other websites to get to the top.

Even though you are competing with others to climb to the top of the page, it doesn’t mean that you should give up. It just means you should spend more time, money, and energy than everyone else. To do so, you need to know the SEO formulas that will get your website to the top of the search results. Here are five tricks that will work:

Tip #1: Competitive Analysis

One great way to optimize your SEO is to analyze the successful competition. Questions to ask yourself is what are your competitors doing right, what they’re doing wrong, and how you can copy their successful tactics. It’s best to have an understanding of what other people are doing to win rather than trying to build an entire new strategy from scratch. After all, why use a strategy that you’re not sure works when you could use one that is tried and tested by a competitor? Don’t ignore the power of copying other successful strategies.

Tip#2: Get Active on Social Media

How does social media and SEO correlate? Search engines try to take into account as much information as possible about your site. They use it to determine the quality of your website and where they should place you when someone searches regarding a topic within your vertical. One factor that search engines consider is social media. In particular, they consider the following questions:

• How active are your social media pages?
• How up-to-date are your social media pages?
• How much engagement does your website content get on social media?

It’s not just worth it for the sake of just reaching a larger audience on the social media platform itself, but also because all of that attention will benefit your SEO strategy. It’s ultimately up to you to decide on which social media platforms to focus your efforts on. In the end, the social media platform you choose will depend on exactly what you want to do. Whatever you choose, use social media to build your SEO.

Tip #3: Optimize On-Page Elements

One of the best ways to get a head start on your website’s SEO is by optimizing the on-page elements. If you don’t make sure that you have optimized all of the on-page elements, it’s going to be very difficult to get far with all of your other efforts. This should be one of your top priorities.

Keyword placement is one of the most important on page elements. You’ll want to make sure that you include your primary keywords in the title tag of your page.You’ll want to add a meta description as well. This will help Google quickly and easily recognize what your page is about and place it in the right category.

Another way to optimize your on-page SEO is to increase the word count of your blog posts. Generally, longer posts perform better. Finally, to optimize your on-page SEO, include some internal links in each blog post. Two or three links on each post that lead to other pages of your site works well. All of those elements will prep your site for ranking like you want it to.

Tip #4: Generate backlinks

Backlinks are a great way to generate traffic and increase your rankings at the same time. Backlinks are links that point from someone else’s website to your website. They tell Google that the referring website trusts you. If that website has a high domain authority, it is good for your rankings.

One tactic to generate backlinks is to create an infographic and ask other blogs to share that infographic. Another way to generate backlinks is by writing testimonials for other websites. When you do, just be sure to include a link back to your website.Finally, you can repost your content on sites such as Medium and LinkedIn with a link to your website.You can use this strategy as you guest blog for other websites, too.

All of these strategies are effective in their own way. You just need to decide which ones you have time for and which ones you don’t.

Tip #5: Target Google Snippets

The best part about Google Snippets is that they push you to the number one result even if you’re not winning in the rankings otherwise. It’s an easy way to push your result to the top of the page.

Here’s the best way to target Google Snippets.

Think of a question related to your industry that people are regularly typing into Google.In your content, have that exact phrase as a subtitle and answer the question as obviously as you can in the paragraphs directly after. Make sure to organize it logically. The other thing you can do is create a checklist-type content. Numbered lists are best known at snagging Google snippets because they are easy for the robots to read and understand. The more that search engines can understand your content, the better chance that you’ll rank  on top.

If you want to start ranking on Google, start with these fives tips: competitive analysis, active on social media, leverage on-page elements, create backlinks, and target Google snippets. SEO is a matter of knowing the right strategies, putting in the work, and being patient. If you do those things, you’ll climb to the top faster than most other websites.