Google’s algorithm has become more advanced. This means that sites that provide better answers to visitors are valued higher than those that are just full of comparable keyword terms and phrases. If you want your website to rank well, you can’t just focus on what search engines are looking for. You should also consider how your site’s visitors feel. Before optimizing your content to obtain the desired outcomes, you must analyze the total value your website provides to users. Let’s take a closer look at some of the ranking factors and discuss how you may better use keywords to enhance search traffic.
- Know where you stand in terms of rankings: Without a strong understanding of your baseline keyword performance, you won’t know how far you’ve come or how far you’ve progressed. Learn to export data such as keyword data from Google Search Console and traffic from Google Analytics landing pages. Analyzing this data will reveal the most lucrative keywords/landing pages, as well as places where you may improve, underperformance, and so on. Next, improve the rankings of keywords in the third to tenth places.
- Select the Proper Keywords: Determine whether the aim is for informational/educational purposes, transactional purposes, or navigational purposes. Knowing what it takes to rank for a given keyword can help you figure out what content development activities you’ll need and how to create a content plan. Semrush’s SEO Content Template is excellent for this type of analysis. Simply enter a keyword, and the tool will evaluate the top results on Google and provide SEO-friendly content recommendations.
- Analyze Your Competitors: Your competitors are the greatest source to hunt for keywords for which you should rank. They’ve likely discovered and taken advantage of many more possibilities. Why not make use of such data and the structure they provide for content planning? You’ll need to use a third-party tool for more advanced competitive research. There are a number of free tools available, but they only provide you with limited access. Paid tools like Ahrefs Keywords Explorer and SECockpit analyze competition in great depth.
- Target Long-Tail Keywords: Long-tail keywords, or terms that are specialized to a niche, should also be considered. If you’re looking for a keyword like “training,” it could mean anything from athlete training to puppy training. With your keyword, you must target the right audience. Try to be more explicit whenever feasible. For example, “sales training” is an effective way to get your point out. On the other side, “B2B business training” is much better.
- Make Variations Work For You: There are a variety of free keyword research tools accessible to help marketers choose reliable and effective keywords. Ubersuggest is one such example. It’s a keyword recommendation tool that allows you to type in a broad term (e-commerce security) and obtain a list of related terms (“security risks in e-commerce,” “e-commerce cyber security,” and so on).
- Utilize traffic analytics: Tools like Google Analytics can help you choose keywords for your SEO content plan. For instance, you may analyze traffic patterns to determine which keywords are driving the most traffic and then produce content around those phrases.
- Create High-Quality Inbound Links: Begin by looking for opportunities to cross-link to content on your website using keyword-rich anchor text. As a result of this, users will be guided to relevant content and keyword connections will be built. The most successful strategy is to obtain incredibly authoritative and beneficial inbound links from third-party websites. That means you have to create link-worthy content based on your keyword research and analysis of what is ranking in the top search results to assist establish inbound links and improve keyword rankings.
- Promote Your Content in a Strategic Way: We use SEO tricks all the time. But it’s also important to use non-SEO tactics to boost awareness of your content and enhance your link-building efforts. When it comes to promoting an asset, you’ll have a list of possibilities. This may include the use of a variety of social media sites, email subscriptions, setting up Google Alerts, etc.
- Continuously improve and optimize content: Quality content is more crucial than everything else when it comes to determining how well your site replies to a query. If you remember only one thing from this blog, it should be the importance of receiving high-quality information. The term “excellent quality” is highlighted. Your content should persuade both search engines and visitors that you are an expert on the topics that surround your keywords. Because search engine results are constantly changing, you must constantly optimize and improve your content at a regular interval.
Final Thoughts: While ranking is crucial, it works best when the above-listed ideas are used. If you want to learn more about keyword rankings, you can always learn for free on youtube. There are thousands of SEO and keyword tutorials on YouTube. Use Career Ninja‘s LearnTube for hand-holding training on YouTube. Learn Tube organizes the results of your YouTube search into a course framework. If you want to learn “SEO tutorials”, search the term on LearnTube and it will show you a bunch of youtube videos like an online course. As a beginner, you’ll click through the videos from the first to the last, as if you were taking an online course tailored specifically for you.