That's why SEO specialists exist because there are a variety of techniques.
Just a few things I've learned along the way:
- Google favors mobile web performance. If you want to rank higher, your site needs to render fast on mobile. The reasoning is that Google's search objective is to serve good content (whether they are succeeding at this is a different debate) so they want pages that will load fast for the end user, contain the relevant content, and provide the best experience for the broadest audience of visitors.
- To make mobile web performance fast, you need to send tight, compact HTML with CSS inlined where possible. This is why SSG/SSR are all the rage these days because Google favors it for search results. SPAs are indexed in a different pipeline. See: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...
- In some cases, you'll need to use advanced techniques like using service workers to offload some of the page loading to a background thread to speed up rendering. See libraries like PartyTown: https://partytown.builder.io/
- Google can surface structured markup data (JSON-LD, RDF-A, Microdata formats) which will make your results visually stand out. Incorporating it into your HTML output is a must in some domains like e-commerce since pricing and product data is surfaced via this markup. See: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structu...
- Google's search crawler factors structural HTML into account. Therefore, make use of meta tags, <title/>, <h1/>, and other semantic HTML5 tags to mark up your document. See this link for reference: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/title-l...
- Google uses sitemaps to find your content. You can improve your results by properly tagging images, videos, and so on. Make sure you do it well. See: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...
- Google's heuristics change all the time. See: https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2Gw...
My lesson learned is that this is a very, very hard game to do well. But if done well, your content will eventually make its way up. Because Google re-indexing could take days or weeks, the outcome can take time to actually see.
If your site isn't showing up in search, it's because you're competing against thousands of professionals that are 100% focused on this specific domain of expertise and follow Google's updates to their search heuristics with each release and adjust.