How to Rank #1 in Google in 2026: The 3-Step SEO Playbook

0:00In this video, we’re going to give you a step-by-step roadmap to ranking #1 in Google in 2026, starting with the first lesson — don’t ever trust anyone who tells you they can guarantee ranking #1 in Google. Sorry to disappoint, but that’s just way beyond our control as marketers. But, before you click off, what you can do is create as many winning conditions as possible on

0:30your website to give you the highest-possible chance of ranking highly in Google. That’s a less sexy, but more accurate way to say it. My name is Matt and I run a consultancy called Kenyon Digital where I have helped clients hit the #1 spot for their key terms and have come up with a repeatable process that can help just about any

0:46business or brand get there. I’ve partnered with Surfer to give you that playbook in this video. So before we get into the nitty-gritty, we have to take realistic stock of what we’re after. I’m going to give you three reality checks here. First, If you are looking to rank #1 for ultra-competitive terms — terms that have been dominated by enterprise-level businesses for years or decades, that’s probably not a feasible task. These businesses have spent years building their authority and millions of dollars on their content. It’s not impossible,

1:23but it’s probably not worth the resources, especially for smaller to medium-sized businesses. Secondly, you have to understand that it’s one thing to rank #1 and it’s another thing to stay #1. Once you crack that top spot for a particular keyword, especially a competitive one, you’ve got a target on your back, and all your competitors will be trying outdo you in content quality and build more links than you. So, just know that getting the ranking is half the battle, keeping

1:54it is an ongoing effort that requires regular content refreshing, authority-building, and more. And thirdly, you don’t need to rank #1 for every keyword relevant to your business, in fact it may be a waste of resources to try to do so. For any given business, there are likely 1,000s of potential keywords across their service offerings and content, and expecting or trying to rank all of them #1 is just not realistic (nor is it necessary to have a very successful organic search presence). One of the hardest things about SEO is not the

2:30execution, it’s the prioritization, and that’s something I hope to help you with in this video. Okay, so our minds are calibrated, our expectations are set… let’s get ranking. Step #1 - Identifying Your Most Valuable Keywords Now, I know many of you watching this already have a website, likely with some ranking keywords, whether they’re ranking high or low is a different

2:50story — but I just want you to forget about that for a second and start with a clean slate. Ask yourself — what are the business-driving keywords that in a perfect world, my prospects would type into Google and then find me. This is going to be different for different types of businesses. But the first is almost always going to be your brand name. The next most important are likely going to be explicit names of products or services you sell or keywords describing those things. Warby Parker, a direct to consumer eyewear brand, targets keywords like: "buy glasses online" "affordable prescription glasses" "home try-on glasses" DocuSign (B2B SaaS Company), will target keywords like:

3:33“electronic signature software” “sign documents online” or “DocuSign alternatives” (yes, you want to rank for this, too) And for Nicks Plumbing, a local business in Houston, TX, target keywords might include: “plumber near me” “Houston plumber” or names of specific services like: “drain cleaning Houston” “water heater repair Houston” or “sewer line repair Houston” Once you’ve identified your core keywords, Google each of them and really study the results page. The first thing you’ll notice — if you haven’t noticed already — is that in 2026, the search engine results pages (or SERPs for

4:11short) look very different than they did even just a few short years ago. For example, when I Google “electronic signature software,” I see a series of sponsored posts, a Reddit discussion as the top organic result, a listicle of the best electronic signature software platforms, and some homepages of popular software companies, like Docusign. Depending on how Google is feeling that day, you may also see YouTube video results, AI Overviews,

4:39or Accordion-style People Also Ask questions. So yeah, we’ve come a long way from 10 blue links. It’s easy to get overwhelmed here, but our main goal is to figure out one thing: what is the search intent behind this keyword — or put another way, what do you think people are trying to find when they search this? And perhaps more importantly, what does Google think people are trying to find when they search this? I call this Google’s Asssumed Search Intent,

5:10and it’s very important that your content meets that search intent as closely as possible. Now, I’m glad I used this particular query (”electronic signature software”) as an example, because it has mixed-intent, meaning there are multiple possible intents that people can have when searching this. How do we know this? We look at the SERP. Someone searching for this term might want to eavesdrop on some Reddit discussions about the best software for e-signatures. Or, they might want to read a round-up post comparing a list of

5:42the best platforms. Or, maybe they just want to be taken straight to a vendor’s homepage. Google, despite its sophistication, doesn’t quite know, so it gives the user a all-you-can-click buffet of options and lets them decide. But this poses a problem, because I just said the most important thing is matching your page’s content to the keyword’s search intent. So how do you do that when search intent is mixed? There are a few different approaches you can

6:11take. I’ll explain them and then share which one I like the best. The first is simply adopting the majority view. If 6 out of 10 results are homepages. You stick with targeting that keyword on your homepage. The second is more strategic, and it involves asking what the most likely approach would be to get you featured on the SERP based on your brand’s authority and existing search presence. This is the approach that Get Accept has taken with their round-up post. See, DocuSign and PandaDoc have massive brand recognition, which allows them to rank their homepage for this keyword. GetAccept doesn’t yet, so they kind of find a backdoor approach. Rather than attempting to go band-for-band on homepages,

7:06they say, “We’ll just publish a round-up page giving our users a ton of free value, even to the point of mentioning our competitors, and let them decide.” And even though they don’t have the site authority of PandaDoc or DocuSign, they still manage to outrank them with their round-up post. (Just another reason why round-up posts are awesome.) Step #2 - Build the Best Possible Page for That Keyword Okay, so you've identified your target keyword and studied the SERP. You know what Google thinks users want. Step #2 is to build the best possible page for that keyword. Let's break this down into

7:38the components that actually matter. Firstly, matching the format to the intent. Webpages come in all different shapes and sizes. A product page looks and feels quite different from a long-form informational blog post, which likewise looks different than an eCommerce category page. Your job is to match that format of the top-ranking results for your target keyword, while differentiating the substance of that content. (And yes, if the format is a video, which is very common in how-to Google searches, you need to be making video!) And real quick, I don’t know how many more times we need to keep saying this, but Google does not prefer or reward a particular word count. The

8:22question to ask isn't "how long should this be?" It's "what does someone searching this term need to know, and have I covered it completely?" For every piece of content I create, I start by adding my target keyword into Surfer’s Content Editor. For this piece, I’m targeting “how to start a hydroponic garden.” I love Surfer’s new step-by-step process here in

8:43the right-hand panel, which takes the guesswork out of each step of the writing workflow. I’ll usually start by looking through the competitors’ outlines to get my creative juices flowing and make sure I’m covering this topic at least as thoroughly as my competitors. You can also create an AI-generated outline, which you don’t need to use in its entirety, but can be great for giving you some ideas – and it’s all based on real data from the top-ranking pages in the SERP. As part of my research,

9:12I also click the Questions tab to make sure I’m answering all of these in the content. After I’ve finished a draft in my own words, I’ll retroactively go back and make sure I’m including all the entities I need to optimize for both traditional search engines and AI assistants. By the way, I think we’re long overdue for a full content workflow from start to finish using Surfer. I don’t have enough time to deep dive into that right now, but leave a comment if that’s something you’d like to see soon. Now, just having a well-optimized, thorough piece of content isn’t enough. The second phase of creating great content that ranks highly

9:49is demonstrating real expertise and experience. You may have heard the acronym EEAT thrown around, that’s a Google term that stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness, and it’s how Google claims to evaluate content. Google has gotten very good at identifying whether content comes from first-hand experience or was just assembled from other sources. According to some reputable SEO sources, the extra "E" — Experience — is now the

10:19most heavily weighted factor. What signals real experience? Original photos. Screenshots. Step-by-step documentation from actually doing the thing. Case studies with specific numbers. Personal anecdotes about what worked and what didn't. It just so happens that the GetAccept round-up post we referenced earlier does this very well. First, they explicitly establish authority with this sub-header "Yes, we really have tested each platform." Second, they include original screenshots of every single platform. These are presumably not stock images or marketing graphics pulled from company websites, but actual UI screenshots from inside the products. You can see document editors, signature flows, dashboards. These are the kind of

10:56images you can only get by actually logging in and using the software. Third, they structure each review consistently: a "Best for" badge, a description, a screenshot, pros, cons, and an ideal use case. That consistency shows methodology. It shows they ran each platform through the same evaluation framework. And finally, there's a real author with a byline and photo. Natasha Ellis-Knight. You can see when it was published and when it was last updated. These are small details,

11:28but they signal accountability. Someone's name is attached to this. In addition to all these experience signals, they have a nice table of contents, and a tl;dr section making the piece highly convenient for skimming. So — If you're writing about a product, have you actually used it? If you're explaining a process, have you actually done it? If you're reviewing a service, have you actually hired them? If the answer is no, either get that

11:54experience or find someone who has it and involve them in the content. I mean heck this even be someone you find in the reviews of the products that you interview for their experience. You don’t need to be an expert in everything, you just need to demonstrate expertise and experience, even if it’s from someone else. Okay, so you’ve matched format to intent, you’ve built a great page that satisfies EEAT signals and… you’re good to go! Be sure to like and subscribe for more tips and have fun making all that money! No, of course not, if SEO were that easy, brand new websites could outrank behemoth brands in a matter of days. No, unfortunately, building an amazing page

12:36isn’t nearly enough, especially if you’re a newer site or one that’s typically gotten lower search traffic. You have to power up your pages, and that’s step #3 in ranking #1 in Google. Step #3 - Power Up Your Pages Okay, so how do we power up our money pages such that Google and users trust us with their clicks? The main ways are: By building topical authority around your target keyword through helpful, interrelated content pieces all connected by internal links (I’ll break that down in a second) By acquiring healthy, natural backlinks from other websites to your website Let’s keep it real simple — pretend you’re Google and you are tasked with evaluating

13:20whether or not two different websites should rank for the keyword, “best hydroponic garden system.” Both websites have a great page on the topic with expert advice, engaging on-page elements like infographics, and plenty of firsthand experience. But website A only has one page on the overarching topic of hydroponic gardening, freshly published a couple weeks ago. Website B on the other hand, has an entire ecosystem of related content pieces covering hydroponic gardening from every conceivable angle. Best hydroponic gardens for vegetables, for outdoor growing, for apartments,

13:57for limited space, best gardens on a budget — you name it, they have it. Not only that but since they’ve developed so much great content, they’ve earned powerful backlinks from sites like Better Homes and Gardens and a bunch of niche gardening websites. Which would you choose to rank for “best hydroponic garden system”? — keep in mind, no difference in quality on the page itself, but the answer is obvious. We’d choose the

14:23one with proven trust from other websites and clear topical authority on the subject. This is exactly why Surfer exists and why I personally use it and have used even before making videos on this channel. Surfer's Sites dashboard takes the guesswork out of building topical authority. You plug in your domain, connect it to Google Search Console, and Surfer analyzes your existing content coverage — showing you exactly where you stand and where the gaps are. It clusters related keywords together and visualizes your topical coverage, so you can see at a glance: "Okay, I've covered hydroponic gardens for beginners pretty well, but I'm completely missing

14:52content around hydroponic lighting, nutrient solutions, and troubleshooting common problems." Those gaps? Those are your next content priorities. Each piece you publish fills in more of that topical map, signals to Google that you actually know what you're talking about, and creates more opportunities for internal linking back to your money pages. And once you've identified what to write, Surfer's Content Editor helps you build each piece with the right semantic keywords, proper structure, and comprehensive factual coverage from both traditional and AI Search platforms — so every supporting article actually moves the needle on your authority. The result is a content ecosystem where every piece supports every other piece, and your money pages sit at the center of

15:31a web of trust signals pointing right at them. Now, let’s talk about the second portion of that “powering up” equation: getting backlinks from other websites to your website. Backlinking is a massive topic that deserves its own video or even series of videos, so as much as I’m tempted, I can’t go down the rabbit hole today. That said, I do have a video on my own channel, Matt Kenyon Marketing, of my favorite backlink acquisition techniques,

15:59which you can check out via the info card or link in the description if you’re interested. I will say this though — and I will die on this hill — I believe it’s far more important to build your topical authority with interrelated pieces of content first before you go hunting for backlinks, and here’s why. Let’s stick with the hydroponics thing — say you’re trying to build a hydroponics supply brand and you start doing some outreach to other websites for backlinks. Of course, my preference would just be to create content that’s so good

16:30that other sites link to you naturally, but everyone gets very upset when you say that. Anyway — which would be an easier sell to try to get a backlink from a site owner? Would it be: “Hey, can you please link to my sales page because I want money” OR “Hey, I noticed that you linked to a page on an old site that hasn’t been updated in 6 years on the best hydroponic gardening nutrient solutions. I just wrote a brand new post where I tested a bunch and I think it could really help your audience, plus, transparently, I would honestly love a backlink from your site.” It’s a no-brainer — they’d almost be silly

17:04not to link to you given the value you’re providing to their audience. So great, you get the backlink to your blog post, how does that power up your money pages though, how does that help make moneyyyyyy my dude. Two words. Some of the sweetest words in all of SEO. “Internal linking.” More specifically “Internal linking passing link authority to other pages on your site.” That’s 11 words and doesn’t quite roll off the tongue, but here’s the point: When you build content clusters around your money pages, and then internally link everything together, all the backlink authority that each of those supporting pages get (like our hypothetical blog post on nutrient solutions), gets passed up to the money page through those internal links,

17:56boosting the authority of the money page in search results. Then, you rinse and repeat, applying this process to each and every one of your revenue-driving pages, and the rising tides of organic growth lifts the entire ship of your website. Are you seeing the power of this? Isn’t SEO insane?! (I didn’t think as a little child who wanted to make Pixar movies that I’d be saying that about a digital marketing strategy but here we are.) Now this is a lot of hard work — I just described doing this for one particular money page. If you have multiple products or services, you’ll be rinsing and repeating for each of them. I’m condensing this process for the sake of this

18:37video, but creating just one of these topical clusters around your money page and building links to those pages can take several months of full-time work, and even then there’s no guarantee that you’ll see results for another few more months. And also I’m assuming that you already have good product-market fit and a technically sound website. But SEO rewards the patient. Because traffic gained from SEO is high-intent and high-quality, and you can often reap the rewards of it for years to come. When you study the patterns of the #1 ranking websites, no matter what industry, they follow this playbook. They build killer money pages with compelling copy and engaging visuals, they create whole ecosystems of content around those pages,

19:24and build authority and trust from the rest of the internet, sometimes over the course of decades. So that’s the move — it’s not easy, but it’s very doable, even for small to medium-sized businesses. And the best part is that you don't have to do it alone and you don't have to do it manually. Software tools like Surfer exist to handle the heavy lifting — identifying keyword gaps, optimizing your content, and tracking your progress so you can focus on actually building

19:54the business. If you want to try it out, there's a link in the description below. And if you want to learn more about growing your AI Visibility, be sure to watch this video next. Thanks for watching, and happy ranking