How to Rank #1 on Google. Here's What we Did to Rank High on Google, Quickly.
Ok here we go…
Disclaimer: NOT an SEO expert. Just a guy wanting to share what I’ve learned.
I want to share with you what we’ve done in order to get ranked #1 or #2 on Google for dozens of key phrases that we’re targeting like:
“validate startup ideas” | “idea validator” | “validate my idea” | “validate ideas” | “ai validator” | “ai validation tool” | validate business ideas | “validate small business ideas”
Here is what worked for us and how you can replicate it 👇
1️⃣ Launching on Product Hunt was the first thing we did, back in September of 2022. 😲
The initial wave of excitement gave us a base of members, and people began to write about us and share us online.
We found out people were creating videos on TikTok and Instagram about us, which just fed the feedback loop. Here's a good example of a Tik Tok video. This woman has 400,000 followers. The feedback loop was:
someone uses our site → they post their results online → others discover our site → they visit the site, like it and start sharing it…
🔑 Product Hunt gave us the first key to our SEO: Amazing links to our site.
I am not referring to the ValidatorAI.com link on Product Hunt directly. Rather, the wave of attention we received on Product Hunt caused hundreds of sites to share us and write about us… and those links we earned became pure gold.
🔑 You really need to have a solid link profile which gives you good Domain Authority. A good domain authority score tells Google to take you seriously.
You can check your domain authority score here: AHREFS Backlink Checker
Our score is pretty solid - and it’s improving. Our main SEO booster is the thousands of backlinks to our site.
Sometimes you get a link from an external site to you, but they put a NOFOLLOW tag in the link… which means Google will give this link absolutely NO relevance when considering your site in its search engine. You want DOFOLLOW links from sites with high domain authority.
While it’s nice to have links from some huge sites like Product Hunt and Reddit, some of those links have a NOFOLLOW tag on them. The way you find out if a link is a NOFOLLOW is to RIGHT CLICK on the link in question, select INSPECT in the drop-down menu and then look at the HTML code of the link.
It’s ok to have these. You want people writing about you. More articles = more attention. It leads to more people writing about you and those links pile up.
They key point is…
🔑 Free customer acquisition via Google is immeasurable gold. Spend some time getting quality backlinks… share your startup everywhere… get people talking and writing. Remember, not all backlinks are created equal.
2️⃣ The second contributing factor is what I like to call: Time in the market.
Since we launched in 2022, there have been other idea validation tools pop up. Some are probably better than ours. But it’s really difficult for them to rank in Google.
Google trusts us. They see we’ve been around longer than anyone else when it comes to validating startup ideas with AI. The newcomers are all competing for attention, social media sharing, backlinks and Google authority. There just isn’t enough link juice to go around to bring everyone to page one. So, a majority of these startups will be stuck on page 4, 5, 6 of Google.
And people really don’t scroll past page 1. It’s been found that almost all clicks are awarded to the first 3 results. If you are on page two, even at the top, you can expect just 0.6% of the clicks. It’s page one or nothing.
3️⃣ Third, ranking #1 for the key phrases I mentioned earlier was 100% intentional.
We specifically sought out these phrases and we intended to rank high for them. We knew the foundation was here (time in the market, solid link profile) so we simply did the following:
🔑 We went to Google’s Keyword Planner and found search phrases that we thought we could rank for. At Google’s Keyword Planner, you can see the monthly search volume that any keyword or phrase receives in Google. It’s must-have information.
This tool also shows you how competitive each phrase is… or to put it bluntly… how many other companies are trying to rank for this phrase as well.
The first thing you want to do is find a few easy LOW search volume + LOW competition keywords that you can target. There’s a strong chance you can rank for those phrases.
The phrase “idea validator” is searched 100 to 1000 times per month in Google. The competition for this is LOW, so it’s possible to rank #1 or #2 here with some effort.
So, we found a phrase that has good search volume, and we grabbed the top spot. If you’re thinking:
Let’s say there’s only 500 searches per month for this phrase… that’s not much, right?
Consider this:
We’re #1 on Google for this phrase, so we’re getting nearly all 500 of those people.
This search phrase is pretty high intent and a perfect match for us: Someone has an idea and isn’t sure what to do next. That’s who we are looking for. And, if you pick 10-20 low volume low competition phrases, and you rank #1 or #2 for them, that’s THOUSANDS of new leads every month coming through your front door - FOR FREE!
If you scroll up to the keyword search volume picture we showed earlier, advertisers are paying $3+ for a click on Google for these same phrases we rank for. Sometimes paying $10+ to be atop the page in the sponsored ads section.
So, this top ranking, for this single key phrase, to the right company, is worth $5000 per month. Just from this one search phrase (500 visitors x $10 per click) — and we capture all of them. It’s real value, and it’s entirely free.
So, how did we rank well for those key phrases?
4️⃣ Let’s talk about on-site content.
We still have a lot of work to do here, but the copy on our site is carefully selected.
Google first crawls your domain name, your site title (in the top navigation bar) the site description, your opening paragraph and main heading. So, what you do in those places matters more than anything if you’re just starting off.
Our site description says:
Generate and validate product, small business and startup ideas with our AI advisor tool.
Just that sentence, written like a normal human would read it, is packed with phrases for Google. We could rank for any combination of those words.
And here is our main site heading and opening paragraph:
Main heading:
Validate and Score Your Startup Ideas
Main paragraph:
Is my new product idea worth launching? Val is an AI tool that helps you write a value proposition, analyze the competition, find your customers and validate your business idea. Our AI tool does competitive analysis, customer analysis, idea scoring and it gives you helpful next steps. Curious if you have product market fit? Let our AI analyze it for you. Get quick startup idea feedback (for free) via the form. This is the best way to test a startup idea! Join the world’s largest community of idea explorers!
🔑 DO NOT stuff your paragraph with keywords… Google hates keyword stuffing. Rather, write it as a person would want to read it, but lace it with key phrases of how you can help customers and what you actually do.
The next thing we will do is to find MEDIUM search volume keywords with LOW competition and try to rank for those phrases. And then we’ll graduate up to searches with MEDIUM competition and so on. SEO is never ending but it’s the best return on investment out there.
The on-site copy is a constant experimentation.
Targeting new things:
We recently added an AI Powered Startup Idea Generator to our site, and we moved it up on the page, so Google knows to notice it. We’re starting to rank well for these phrases we are targeting like: “ai startup idea generator” and “generate startup ideas with ai”.
🔑 It is all a matter of determining: who your target customer is that you want to reach → what exactly do they need help with → therefore what are they searching on Google to get this help → build your site content with these keywords so Google knows you are what these customers need → repeat.
A few other quick mentions:
5️⃣ We changed the FAQs on our site.
Instead of basic FAQs about our site and how it all works… now we are trying to match for exact questions that customers might be asking Google like: how do I validate a startup idea with no money?
So, we created an FAQ with that exact question and answer… and Google already has this FAQ question on page one!
However, the goal here is to have our FAQ appear on Google as one of the trusted FAQ in their search results drop down section (not the regular search links). So, we added something to let Google know they need to pay more attention to our FAQ section. And we just added it today…
🔑 It’s called an FAQ schema. Basically, you copy your FAQs and embed them right into the of your site’s HTML code, so Google knows to crawl it. After you add it, you can verify that Google is crawling it here: Rich Test Results Page. This page will show you if your site is eligible to show results in Google (like FAQs or images) which go beyond just the standard links
For the purposes of time, FAQ schemas are amazing, and you really should read about them here: FAQ SCHEMA INFO
6️⃣ Also important, you need to get setup in Google Search Console.
There you can see what errors Google is having when they crawl your site, you can tell Google about updates you’ve done, you can submit site maps, check the performance of pages etc. It’s a MUST HAVE.
We found out that 100 of our pages were no longer active but were still being crawled by Google. So, we removed those pages, told Google to check again and they verified the fix — all helping our search engine rankings.
We also found out (mistake here!) that we had some duplicate content. Our articles were appearing on another site in addition to ours. We fixed the problem, told Google Search Console and our SEO should be positively impacted soon.
Important…
🔑 I should have made sure every article directly targeted a keyword or phrase we wanted to rank for. I haven’t been doing that. The article titles and content should have matched key phrases on Google we are targeting.
So, if you’re writing a blog or articles for your site, 100% make sure that you’re intentional about the topic, title and article copy.
7️⃣ Something we have completely missed that we need to work on is internal site linking. On our homepage, we should have a few internal links to our own articles. Likewise, our articles should have links referencing our AI tools and links to other articles of ours. It needs to be a mini-internal link network. We’ve missed doing this - and it’s what we’ll tackle next.
Final note:
It’s pretty cool that a few top searches that brings us traffic are:
Validator AI
and
Validation AI
and
ValidatorAI
This shows that people have heard about us and are seeking us (specifically) out. This goes back to ‘time in the market’. We’re targeting idea-curious people, and now, they’ve started looking for us. Pretty interesting.
We’ve made some mistakes with our SEO efforts, but it’s exciting to now see these #1 rankings. Google is bringing us a steady flow of the exact people we are looking for. We have the foundation set… now it’s time to grow!
🔑 To do list for you:
Get on Google Keyword Planner, find the low hanging fruit: low search volume, low competition.
Make sure everything written on your site targets those key phrases. Once you rank well for those, move up the chain to the medium difficulty keywords.
Be intentional about your site titles, descriptions, meta tags, opening paragraphs, FAQ section and articles.
Start sharing your site everywhere - and get people writing about it and talking about it.
Get on Google Search Console once you are up and running and tell Google to index your site (and check for errors).
8️⃣ Most of all. Be authentic.
Authenticity gets people talking, it truly helps your customer and apparently Google appreciates it as well. Don’t stuff keywords into your site copy (that’s not being authentic, or honest) and please write as if you are talking directly to your customer.
👉 If you are an SEO expert - reach out and let me know how our strategy looks. What am I missing?
Disclaimer: NOT an SEO expert. Just a guy wanting to share what I’ve learned.
I want to share with you what we’ve done in order to get ranked #1 or #2 on Google for dozens of key phrases that we’re targeting like:
“validate startup ideas” | “idea validator” | “validate my idea” | “validate ideas” | “ai validator” | “ai validation tool” | validate business ideas | “validate small business ideas”
Here is what worked for us and how you can replicate it 👇
1️⃣ Launching on Product Hunt was the first thing we did, back in September of 2022. 😲
The initial wave of excitement gave us a base of members, and people began to write about us and share us online.
We found out people were creating videos on TikTok and Instagram about us, which just fed the feedback loop. Here's a good example of a Tik Tok video. This woman has 400,000 followers. The feedback loop was:
someone uses our site → they post their results online → others discover our site → they visit the site, like it and start sharing it…
🔑 Product Hunt gave us the first key to our SEO: Amazing links to our site.
I am not referring to the ValidatorAI.com link on Product Hunt directly. Rather, the wave of attention we received on Product Hunt caused hundreds of sites to share us and write about us… and those links we earned became pure gold.
🔑 You really need to have a solid link profile which gives you good Domain Authority. A good domain authority score tells Google to take you seriously.
You can check your domain authority score here: AHREFS Backlink Checker
Our score is pretty solid - and it’s improving. Our main SEO booster is the thousands of backlinks to our site.
Sometimes you get a link from an external site to you, but they put a NOFOLLOW tag in the link… which means Google will give this link absolutely NO relevance when considering your site in its search engine. You want DOFOLLOW links from sites with high domain authority.
While it’s nice to have links from some huge sites like Product Hunt and Reddit, some of those links have a NOFOLLOW tag on them. The way you find out if a link is a NOFOLLOW is to RIGHT CLICK on the link in question, select INSPECT in the drop-down menu and then look at the HTML code of the link.
It’s ok to have these. You want people writing about you. More articles = more attention. It leads to more people writing about you and those links pile up.
They key point is…
🔑 Free customer acquisition via Google is immeasurable gold. Spend some time getting quality backlinks… share your startup everywhere… get people talking and writing. Remember, not all backlinks are created equal.
2️⃣ The second contributing factor is what I like to call: Time in the market.
Since we launched in 2022, there have been other idea validation tools pop up. Some are probably better than ours. But it’s really difficult for them to rank in Google.
Google trusts us. They see we’ve been around longer than anyone else when it comes to validating startup ideas with AI. The newcomers are all competing for attention, social media sharing, backlinks and Google authority. There just isn’t enough link juice to go around to bring everyone to page one. So, a majority of these startups will be stuck on page 4, 5, 6 of Google.
And people really don’t scroll past page 1. It’s been found that almost all clicks are awarded to the first 3 results. If you are on page two, even at the top, you can expect just 0.6% of the clicks. It’s page one or nothing.
3️⃣ Third, ranking #1 for the key phrases I mentioned earlier was 100% intentional.
We specifically sought out these phrases and we intended to rank high for them. We knew the foundation was here (time in the market, solid link profile) so we simply did the following:
🔑 We went to Google’s Keyword Planner and found search phrases that we thought we could rank for. At Google’s Keyword Planner, you can see the monthly search volume that any keyword or phrase receives in Google. It’s must-have information.
This tool also shows you how competitive each phrase is… or to put it bluntly… how many other companies are trying to rank for this phrase as well.
The first thing you want to do is find a few easy LOW search volume + LOW competition keywords that you can target. There’s a strong chance you can rank for those phrases.
The phrase “idea validator” is searched 100 to 1000 times per month in Google. The competition for this is LOW, so it’s possible to rank #1 or #2 here with some effort.
So, we found a phrase that has good search volume, and we grabbed the top spot. If you’re thinking:
Let’s say there’s only 500 searches per month for this phrase… that’s not much, right?
Consider this:
We’re #1 on Google for this phrase, so we’re getting nearly all 500 of those people.
This search phrase is pretty high intent and a perfect match for us: Someone has an idea and isn’t sure what to do next. That’s who we are looking for. And, if you pick 10-20 low volume low competition phrases, and you rank #1 or #2 for them, that’s THOUSANDS of new leads every month coming through your front door - FOR FREE!
If you scroll up to the keyword search volume picture we showed earlier, advertisers are paying $3+ for a click on Google for these same phrases we rank for. Sometimes paying $10+ to be atop the page in the sponsored ads section.
So, this top ranking, for this single key phrase, to the right company, is worth $5000 per month. Just from this one search phrase (500 visitors x $10 per click) — and we capture all of them. It’s real value, and it’s entirely free.
So, how did we rank well for those key phrases?
4️⃣ Let’s talk about on-site content.
We still have a lot of work to do here, but the copy on our site is carefully selected.
Google first crawls your domain name, your site title (in the top navigation bar) the site description, your opening paragraph and main heading. So, what you do in those places matters more than anything if you’re just starting off.
Our site description says:
Generate and validate product, small business and startup ideas with our AI advisor tool.
Just that sentence, written like a normal human would read it, is packed with phrases for Google. We could rank for any combination of those words.
And here is our main site heading and opening paragraph:
Main heading:
Validate and Score Your Startup Ideas
Main paragraph:
Is my new product idea worth launching? Val is an AI tool that helps you write a value proposition, analyze the competition, find your customers and validate your business idea. Our AI tool does competitive analysis, customer analysis, idea scoring and it gives you helpful next steps. Curious if you have product market fit? Let our AI analyze it for you. Get quick startup idea feedback (for free) via the form. This is the best way to test a startup idea! Join the world’s largest community of idea explorers!
🔑 DO NOT stuff your paragraph with keywords… Google hates keyword stuffing. Rather, write it as a person would want to read it, but lace it with key phrases of how you can help customers and what you actually do.
The next thing we will do is to find MEDIUM search volume keywords with LOW competition and try to rank for those phrases. And then we’ll graduate up to searches with MEDIUM competition and so on. SEO is never ending but it’s the best return on investment out there.
The on-site copy is a constant experimentation.
Targeting new things:
We recently added an AI Powered Startup Idea Generator to our site, and we moved it up on the page, so Google knows to notice it. We’re starting to rank well for these phrases we are targeting like: “ai startup idea generator” and “generate startup ideas with ai”.
🔑 It is all a matter of determining: who your target customer is that you want to reach → what exactly do they need help with → therefore what are they searching on Google to get this help → build your site content with these keywords so Google knows you are what these customers need → repeat.
A few other quick mentions:
5️⃣ We changed the FAQs on our site.
Instead of basic FAQs about our site and how it all works… now we are trying to match for exact questions that customers might be asking Google like: how do I validate a startup idea with no money?
So, we created an FAQ with that exact question and answer… and Google already has this FAQ question on page one!
However, the goal here is to have our FAQ appear on Google as one of the trusted FAQ in their search results drop down section (not the regular search links). So, we added something to let Google know they need to pay more attention to our FAQ section. And we just added it today…
🔑 It’s called an FAQ schema. Basically, you copy your FAQs and embed them right into the of your site’s HTML code, so Google knows to crawl it. After you add it, you can verify that Google is crawling it here: Rich Test Results Page. This page will show you if your site is eligible to show results in Google (like FAQs or images) which go beyond just the standard links
For the purposes of time, FAQ schemas are amazing, and you really should read about them here: FAQ SCHEMA INFO
6️⃣ Also important, you need to get setup in Google Search Console.
There you can see what errors Google is having when they crawl your site, you can tell Google about updates you’ve done, you can submit site maps, check the performance of pages etc. It’s a MUST HAVE.
We found out that 100 of our pages were no longer active but were still being crawled by Google. So, we removed those pages, told Google to check again and they verified the fix — all helping our search engine rankings.
We also found out (mistake here!) that we had some duplicate content. Our articles were appearing on another site in addition to ours. We fixed the problem, told Google Search Console and our SEO should be positively impacted soon.
Important…
🔑 I should have made sure every article directly targeted a keyword or phrase we wanted to rank for. I haven’t been doing that. The article titles and content should have matched key phrases on Google we are targeting.
So, if you’re writing a blog or articles for your site, 100% make sure that you’re intentional about the topic, title and article copy.
7️⃣ Something we have completely missed that we need to work on is internal site linking. On our homepage, we should have a few internal links to our own articles. Likewise, our articles should have links referencing our AI tools and links to other articles of ours. It needs to be a mini-internal link network. We’ve missed doing this - and it’s what we’ll tackle next.
Final note:
It’s pretty cool that a few top searches that brings us traffic are:
Validator AI
and
Validation AI
and
ValidatorAI
This shows that people have heard about us and are seeking us (specifically) out. This goes back to ‘time in the market’. We’re targeting idea-curious people, and now, they’ve started looking for us. Pretty interesting.
We’ve made some mistakes with our SEO efforts, but it’s exciting to now see these #1 rankings. Google is bringing us a steady flow of the exact people we are looking for. We have the foundation set… now it’s time to grow!
🔑 To do list for you:
Get on Google Keyword Planner, find the low hanging fruit: low search volume, low competition.
Make sure everything written on your site targets those key phrases. Once you rank well for those, move up the chain to the medium difficulty keywords.
Be intentional about your site titles, descriptions, meta tags, opening paragraphs, FAQ section and articles.
Start sharing your site everywhere - and get people writing about it and talking about it.
Get on Google Search Console once you are up and running and tell Google to index your site (and check for errors).
8️⃣ Most of all. Be authentic.
Authenticity gets people talking, it truly helps your customer and apparently Google appreciates it as well. Don’t stuff keywords into your site copy (that’s not being authentic, or honest) and please write as if you are talking directly to your customer.
👉 If you are an SEO expert - reach out and let me know how our strategy looks. What am I missing?
