How to Rank Higher on Google

Before anything else, some honesty: I am not trying to rank for “how to rank higher on Google”. It is one of the hardest keywords there is, and I have no realistic shot at it.

I am making this because I want a knowledge panel.

Search my name right now. Ryan Gooding comes up. My website comes up. But there is no panel — no box on the right-hand side telling Google, and every AI system trained on Google’s data, who I actually am. Getting one is most of what Branding: is bullshit is about, and it is a bigger part of ranking than most people realise.

So this is three birds, one stone. I want the panel. I am letting Search Console tell me what Google is already latching onto — “rank one” keeps appearing for my site, “rank higher” is showing up on my YouTube stats, one impression, but it is there. And I talk to a lot of business owners who genuinely do not understand how any of this works.

This is the first in an ongoing series where I explain how SEO actually works without overcomplicating it. If you are already an expert, this will bore you. If you are trying to get your head around how the internet works and how to rank higher on Google, start here.

Why people overcomplicate SEO

Most people do not fail at SEO because it is too technical. They fail because they cannot delay gratification.

That is the whole thing. SEO pays out in months. Paid advertising pays out this afternoon. So people go to paid — which is fine, I am not knocking it — and then conclude SEO does not work, when what actually happened is they quit before it started.

The model: the internet, and Google’s circle inside it

Picture the internet as a big grey void. Everything is in there. Your website is in there. So is every competitor.

Now draw a circle inside that void. That circle is Google’s database — what Google knows about, has indexed, and is willing to put in front of someone.

You can be on the internet and not be in the circle. That distinction is the whole game. Being online is not the same as being known.

And Google is not a person. It is an algorithm — a maths equation built by tens of thousands of engineers to decide who gets shown to the person searching.

The blog myth

Here is what everyone gets told.

Someone is looking for a burger. So write a blog about burgers. Someone else wants fries — write a blog about fries. Someone wants a Coke, someone wants burger and fries. Write a blog for each. Make the content genuinely good, and those people will find you.

If that were true it would be fantastic. It is not true.

The reason it is not true is that you are not writing that content for the end user. You are writing it for Google. The person searching never sees your blog unless the algorithm decides to show it to them. You are not persuading a human. You are trying to get past a maths equation.

Why E-E-A-T did not save anybody

Google tells everyone to demonstrate experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. It is deliberately vague, and — more to the point — everybody got told the same thing.

Everyone asks ChatGPT how to get on Google. Everyone gets E-E-A-T. Everyone starts writing blogs.

If following that advice worked, every one of those businesses would be ranking for every burger and fries search there is. They are not. When advice is universal, following it cannot differentiate you.

What Google has actually told us it looks at

The useful thing is that they have told us. It came out in the API leak — a huge document, and I am not going to drag you through the technical detail. Broken down simply, four things matter, and they are all connected:

• Clicks. Google pays a lot of attention to whether people actually click you.
• Identity. Does Google know who you are as a thing, not just a string of words? This is the knowledge panel problem, and it is why I am making these videos.
• Backlinks. Other sites pointing at you. A topic for its own video.
• Information. What exists on your site, and what exists about you elsewhere on the internet.

Get your head around those four and you are ahead of most people arguing about keyword density.

The takeaway: images are the most underused asset you have

This is the part worth remembering.

If you are a brand new business, I would not start by writing a stack of blogs. I would start by getting images onto the internet.

Say you run a burger shop. Everyone fixates on the main search results — the hardest, most contested real estate on the page. If you have done no SEO and do not know what you are doing, do not start there. Start with the image results.

Here is why that works. An image on the internet that links back to your website is, functionally, a backlink — something Google can follow back to you and use to start building a picture of who you are. Images are far easier to get indexed and ranked than a competitive text query, and they do the same underlying job.

So what do you actually do on Monday morning

Post on social media regularly, and make sure the posts get indexed.

Whether social posts directly help you rank is genuinely debated — some people say yes, some say no. That argument misses the point. What is not debated is that an indexed post carrying an image and a link back to your site is an asset Google can find and follow.

The indexing part is not optional. If your posts are not indexed, this is completely pointless. That deserves its own video, and it will get one.

Beyond that, keep it embarrassingly simple:

• Post every day if you can. It does not have to be brilliant.
• Put the obvious keyword in early. Trying to rank for “burger shop”? Put “burger shop” in the post.
• “We’re the best burger shop in [suburb]” or “today we’ve got this burger” is enough.
• Automate it. Set up a bot — I use Claude — to write and post daily so it actually happens.

Do that consistently and the posts get indexed, Google picks them up, you start appearing in image results and eventually in the main results, and each one of those posts is an asset pointing back at your website.

The honest caveat

There is more than one way to skin a cat. This is not a guarantee, and anyone promising you one is lying.

But if I were a small business with no budget trying to rank higher on Google, posting regularly and getting those posts indexed is the first thing I would do. It is cheap, it compounds, and it starts teaching the algorithm that you exist.

That last part — getting Google to know who you are — is the thread running through all of it. It is what Branding: is bullshit is about, and it is what the guide to getting a Google knowledge panel walks through in full.

More in this series soon. If you want help with any of it, get in touch.