There is SO much content on ranking and SEO and optimizing your pages. Most of the time, these blogs and articles can feel either way too broad or way too in the weeds. It can make it really frustrating for people with an intermediate experience with SEO to feel like they are making progress.
We’re here to help. In our new four-part series, we will break down the top 20 tips for ranking on Google. This step-by-step guide will give you all the tools you need to do a thorough audit of your website and get your SEO in order.
At the end of this four-part series, the objective is for you to have all the tools you need to feel confident about tackling your website’s SEO and get your page moving up the rankings. Let’s dig in.
1. Think Broad
A lot of people spend way too much time fixating on a single keyword they want to rank for, but you don’t actually want to rank for just one keyword. You want to rank for hundreds or thousands of keywords.
That’s right, you heard me. Hundreds or thousands. The key is that you can do this with the same amount of work as trying to rank for a single keyword. Where does this all start? With keyword research.
There are some key mistakes that you’ll want to avoid:
- Choosing keywords that are too broad
- Choosing keywords that are too competitive
- Focusing on keywords with too little traffic
- Picking keywords that aren’t relevant to your business or product
- Trying to rank for only one keyword at a time
Think about the way you search for content. In general, you probably search for longer phrases and very specific phrases. Like “funny cat doing the tango” and not just “cat tango.” These are called long tail keywords and they can represent over 80% of all search traffic.
This is why you don’t want to focus on one keyword at a time. Diversifying your keywords is like fishing with a net and not a spear. For instance, let’s say you have a food blog and want to rank for “vegetables.” Instead of just trying to get that one word, try to get “vegetable recipes,” “easy vegetable ideas,” “quick vegetable recipes,” and/or “best vegetable recipes.”
Go from a single keyword to a keyword theme.
2. Plant the seed
Seed keywords are where you want to start. These are the words and phrases you think you want to rank for. Start with some brainstorming. Make a list of all the phrases and words that you think that you want to rank for.
Good seed keywords answer a few questions.
- What is my website about?
- What do I offer?
- What do I think I want to rank for?
- What ads do I want to buy?
Keep these seed keywords broad but not too broad. You want to give space to grow. Think about what keywords you already rank for. What keywords your competitors rank for and what SEO tools tell you people search for.
3. Find Your Keyword Theme
Once you have all your seed keywords, start to group them together into a theme. Themes help give you a lot more space to grow when it comes to ranking. The more keywords that work around a single idea, the better.
Start with your seed keywords and then work on making them more specific. Focus on colors, locations, who the product is for, what the product does, or how the product makes someone’s life better. The more ways you can work your seed keyword into specific long tail keywords, the better.
4. Use Your Competitor’s Intelligence and Effort
Did you know you can see what keywords your competitors value with just a little digging? They’ve already figured out what keywords work best for them and they likely use them in their URLs, product headers and more.
All you have to do is find the URLs of your competitors that rank for your target keyword and then find the other related keywords around the URL.
A lot of third party tools can give you this insight and it can be a really valuable and easy way to start to optimize your ranking strategy.
5. Finding the Stand Out Stars
By now, you probably have hundreds if not thousands of potential keywords. It’s time to find the best of the bunch. These are the requirements you want your keywords to hit:
- Does the keyword have sufficient search volume?
- Is the keyword relevant to your business?
- Can you create content around that keyword that is better than everyone else?
- Can you rank for the keyword?
This simple exercise will help you find the stars in your keywords and help focus your attention and energy.
Now you are ready for the fun part: content. Join us for Part Two soon!
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