I still don't understand how you guys manage to get your website to the top of Google.
you gotta give google what they want, not what they say they want even if, many times, what they want and what they say they want is the same thing...
Like, for example, they say they want quality content and that's true, they do want quality content. But they want it not for their users, but to train their AI on, and to influence and brainwash people.
And the reason for which I know they don't want quality content for their users but for their own selfish gains is because if they cared about users they wouldn't fill the page 1 of their search engine with ads, spam, and irrelevant pages for many good keywords that only authority sites and / or google partners are ranking for despite of some of those sites not meeting the "helpful content" guideliness that google - presumably - seems so hellbent on enforcing...
So anyway.... you gotta give google quality content and hope that - in their mercy - they reward you with rankings for a few months until they shuffle the SERPs again like they've been doing a lot over the last several years. So, quality content is one thing...
The other thing is... google doesn't want websites to create backlinks, but backlinks are the #1 reason for boosting your site's authority and since google loves authority.... well, they love backlinks, despite of what they're saying.
So, quality content and backlinks... What else? Oh yeah, money.... Google - like all monopolistic and capitalistic ultra rich corporations - also love money. So, if you give them money (in the form of Google Ads) or if you're part of their clique of ultra-billionaires you're going to get free rankings and traffic and leads and sales and everything that comes with being rich. So, be ultra rich and popular and google will rank you up top for a lot of highly profitable keywords without you doing too much. After all, they do love authority...
If being ultra rich is not your thing you gotta work on the other things that their algo pays attention to, such as:
- clean, fast, intuitive, mobile friendly site
- structured data / schemas
- internal linking (each piece of content that you publish on your site needs to link to and from other RELEVANT pages on your site, in a NATURAL way)
- good (or even perfect actually) technical SEO (no broken links, no missing tags, etc.)
- good trust and topical authority signals (I don't know how google evaluates trust, so I can't speak about this, but it's one of the important things nowadays)
Of course, you need to delve deep into each one of these, as there are a lot of small moving parts that need to be integrated into your website, but I'll leave you the freedom of looking them up on the forum / in google, as there's no point in posting dozens of links here
The most important lesson I guess is that you need to pay attention to what's working now, and implement those things into your site. And to know what's working you can check the forum regularly, check your favorite blogging authority sites (Ahrefs, SEL, SEJ, SERT, etc) regularly, and also reverse engineer the competition using tools like Ahrefs or Semrush.
And, of course, you gotta implement all of your findings too, if you don't try things out you will never know what works, so you gotta put all of this knowledge to use, otherwise....