Guide · Improve rankings
Improve Your Google Ranking: 5 Measures, Sorted by Impact
Five steps in the right order
You improve your SEO ranking in this order: 1. check indexing, 2. match search intent, 3. set internal links, 4. optimise snippets, 5. reduce load time. The order follows impact per hour of effort. Visible movement usually takes 4 to 12 weeks on existing pages, more like 6 months on new domains.
Why the order decides success
Most ranking guides list 20 measures without weighting. The result: you spend three days optimising image alt texts while half your pages aren’t even in the index.
That’s why I work by a simple principle: blockers first, then levers, then fine-tuning. A non-indexed page ranks at 0 percent – no matter how good the text is. A page that misses search intent might rank at position 40. A good page without internal links gives away positions.
If you don’t know where your website stands: that’s exactly what my SEO audit is for – it delivers the prioritised list for your concrete situation.
Check indexing – the blocker before everything else
Open the Google Search Console and look at the “Indexing > Pages” report. There you’ll see how many of your URLs are in the index – and why the others are missing: noindex tags, redirect chains, duplicates without a canonical URL, crawling errors.
You check individual important pages with the URL inspection. If it says “Crawled – currently not indexed”, Google considers the page too weak or too similar to others. That’s a quality signal, not a coincidence.
Rule of thumb from my audits: websites with more than 500 URLs almost always have indexing problems nobody knew about. This check is among the first steps in every SEO audit.
Match search intent – the biggest single lever
Google ranks the page that best serves the intent behind the search query. Not the longest, not the most keyword-dense – the most fitting one.
The test takes 5 minutes: google your keyword and look at the top 10. Are there guides, but your page is a product page? Then you’re losing not because of quality, but because of format.
Concretely, optimisation here means: adapt the format to the SERP, answer the question in the first paragraph, add real substance that the top 10 lack. Pages between position 5 and 15 respond most strongly to this revision, often within 2 to 8 weeks of the recrawl.
Internal links – underestimated and completely in your hands
Internal links show Google which pages matter to you and pass authority from strong to weak pages. Unlike backlinks, they cost you nothing but care.
Three rules are enough to start. First: every important page gets links from at least 3 thematically fitting other pages. Second: the anchor text describes the target (“keyword research for online shops” instead of “click here”). Third: no orphaned pages – every URL reachable within a maximum of 3 clicks from the homepage.
You’ll find your strongest link givers in the Search Console under “Links”: the pages with the most external references should link to your most important target pages. What that looks like in detail is shown on my on-page optimisation page.
Optimise snippets – more clicks from existing rankings
Title and meta description don’t change your ranking directly – but they decide how many of the people who see your result click. How steep the gradient is across industries is shown by an analysis of over 80 million keywords: position 1 gets an average of 28.5 percent of clicks, position 10 only 2.5 percent (Sistrix, 2020).
Improving the click-through rate from 2 to 4 percent doubles your traffic without a single new position.
This is how you proceed: filter the Search Console for pages with many impressions and a weak click-through rate. Rewrite the title: keyword first, concrete benefit or number after it, maximum 60 characters. The meta description answers in 155 characters why exactly your result is worth the click.
Reduce load time – mandatory, but no miracle cure
Core Web Vitals are a ranking factor, but a small one. A page doesn’t jump from position 30 to 3 because it loads faster. But it can lose positions if it’s significantly slower than the competition.
The target values: LCP under 2.5 seconds, INP under 200 milliseconds, CLS under 0.1. The biggest brakes: uncompressed images, third-party scripts, missing caching. Measure with PageSpeed Insights, fix the three biggest items, measure again.
Realistic timeframes at a glance
| Measure | Typical timeframe until effect |
|---|---|
| Indexing fixes | 2 to 8 weeks |
| Revised content (position 5–15) | 2 to 8 weeks after recrawl |
| Internal linking | 4 to 12 weeks |
| Snippet optimisation | click-through effect often after days |
| New content on established domains | 3 to 6 months |
| New domains | 6 to 12 months |
Anyone promising you faster guarantees is promising something they don’t control. Continuity beats sprint: that’s exactly why I offer ongoing SEO support instead of one-off magic packages.
Position and intent decide the click-through rate
How strongly position and search intent decide the click-through rate is shown by a look into the Search Console of a project I manage.
| Keyword | Position | Click-through rate | Impressions |
|---|---|---|---|
| chiasamen mit apfelessig | 1.5 | 13.6 % | – |
| höhle der löwen abnehmen | 9 | 0.49 % | 29,449 |
Source: Google Search Console, monikagungl.com (public reference), 08/2025–07/2026. Raw search volume without a top position and fitting intent is almost worthless – the long-tail keyword at position 1.5 gets a significantly higher click-through rate than the keyword with almost 30,000 impressions at position 9.
“A Shopify merchant with a mid-four-figure URL inventory wondered about stagnating rankings. The crawl revealed: filter parameters had created thousands of duplicates, and Google was spending its crawl budget on variants instead of products. After the cleanup, the number of indexed relevant pages rose significantly within two months – the rankings followed.”
— Viktor Pásztor, SEO freelancer
Common mistakes when building rankings
Optimising past position 1
Fix blockers first, then content. Starting with fine-tuning on a non-indexed page wastes time.
Too many pages for the same keyword
Three guides on the same topic cannibalise each other instead of strengthening each other.
Checking rankings daily after every change
Evaluate trends over 4 weeks, not daily values. Day-to-day fluctuations say little.
Buying backlinks
The penalty risk doesn’t outweigh the short-term effect.
Changing everything at once
Then you never know what worked. One measure after another, with an eye on the effect.
Frequently asked questions about improving rankings
How quickly do internal links work?
As soon as Google has recrawled the linking pages – depending on crawl frequency, 2 to 6 weeks.
My page is stuck at position 11 to 15 – what to do?
The most rewarding starting position: usually substance is missing compared to the top results, or internal authority. Revise the content and set 3 to 5 internal links from strong pages.
Does a faster website automatically bring better rankings?
No. Below 2.5 seconds LCP, further acceleration brings hardly any measurable ranking effects – but better conversion rates.
How many keywords can one page cover?
One page covers one search intent – often 10 to 50 keyword variants with the same intent.
Viktor Pásztor
Viktor Pásztor is an SEO freelancer in Berlin, has been in digital marketing for over 15 years and manages around 15 client projects in parallel, mostly e-commerce and B2B. He has been working 100 % remotely for more than five years – with WordPress, Shopify, Shopware and TYPO3. More about Viktor Pásztor
Keep reading
Technical SEO
What a crawl finds and what happens next.
On-page optimisation
How content matches search intent.
SEO pricing
What working with me costs.
Want to know which of the 5 steps has the biggest lever on your website?
In a free initial call, we’ll look at your Search Console data together and find the prioritised order for your website. Reply within 24 hours on business days.
→ Request an SEO audit now