Your keyword page ranking is one of the most important factors your website can have when trying to rank on Google. You have to specifically target the exact keywords your customers search when they want to find what you offer.
Lucky for you, your industry should have a variety of keywords and phrases to target. This article will help you decide which terms your website needs to highlight in order to be on the first page of Google.
Choosing the right keywords for your page ranking is actually really easy and it’s not required to have all the expensive tools that you might think. Don’t get me wrong, I do endorse using a variety of tools if you’re serious about ranking for competitive terms, but the concepts covered here will be more than enough to get your started.
How to Select Cornerstone Keywords for Your Website
The first thing you need to understand about keyword page ranking is how Google thinks. With the Hummingbird update, from Google, it’s not completely about using the exact keywords anymore on your website. Before the update, website creators would “spam” a specific keyword as many times as possible on each web page to boost rankings. This is essentially called your keyword density.
This works for decades until Google changed the game, in favor of content that actually helps the reader get the information they desire. Thank you for that, because the internet was a pretty noisy and uninformative place prior to that.
Now, in order to boost a your ranking on Google you actually have to create information worth reading or viewing. This means creating authoritative blog posts that are factual and helpful. These kinds of pages will rank higher for the keywords they target.
So, what should you do? If Google, requires usefulness on its highly ranked pages, then dedicate yourself to becoming an expert on that subject and you’ll be way ahead of the game. Before, being an expert was not required at all and many people profited from weak websites. Ultimately, the consumer is one that suffered.
Creating a Blog Strategy
If you’re thinking about blogging, you need to have a long-term keyword page ranking strategy. Without that strategy, your blog will not send the right signals to Google. This means that if you’re trying to rank for terms in your niche, you need to optimize each page for a specific keyword or phrase that your website is capable of ranking.
In the beginning, try to rank for terms that are within your reach, which means if you site is new, your “authority” is not very high in Google’s opinion. It’s best to look for less competitive terms.
For example, if you’re looking to rank for digital marketing, which is a competitive term, you should look for terms more specific then that. Try using a free tool called Ubersuggest to find related keyword ideas. This tool will also help you find the competitive nature of the term itself.
If you’re new to SEO then look for longer search phrases instead of the main term. Digital marketing is tough, so try ranking for something like “digital marketing for X” instead. Just adding a few words will reduce the monthly search volume, but increase your chances of being on the first page which is what it’s all about.
Analyzing Your Competition in the SERP
When choosing search terms, tools are great, but sometimes it’s better to look at the page ranking results or SERP before you dive in. Go to Google and search your industry or if you know what people looking for you product would search then try that instead.
Don’t worry about the paid search ads at the top for now. We’re more concerned about the organic search results at the moment.
What you’re looking for are websites similar to yours and see what their pages look like. If you’re a blogger trying to get your content to rank higher then look what’s on the first page.
On-Page SEO signals to look for…
- How many words they have on the page?
- Use Ctrl + F and search for your targeted keyword. Write down how many times it was used.
- Record how many images they are using.
- Are they using videos?
- Count how many links they have on the page. Check the quality of those links. How many are internal/external? Are there any broken links?
- Are they using subheadings? Plug those subheadings into Ubersuggest and find out their volumes, competition, and SEO difficulty.
These are just some of the ways you can beat your competition. The main concept here is to 1-up your completion with this data. If they use 500 words, then you do 750. If they have bad links, you use good links.
Using the Google Hummingbird Rule-set for Search-Friendly Content
As I stated before, using the exact keyword phrase is not necessary for a high page ranking. As long as the keywords in the phrase are being used frequently and in conjunction with each other you should be good. Being readable and helpful is what you should be most concerned with, so focus on answering your audience’s most burning questions.
Latent Semantic Indexing – LSI Keyword Page Ranking
The key is mastering latent semantic indexing or LSI keywords, which are basically the synonyms of the words your trying to rank. It’s not as simple as getting your trusty thesaurus out, but it is similar.
If you’re trying to rank a web page for something broad like “what is social media marketing?” You could have that phrase in the article a few times without appearing to be “spammy,” but continuously saying that question over and over again will turn readers off in the form of a bounce. That is terrible for your page ranking.
The number one factor for any digital marketer is “dwell time,” which is the time spent on that page. You want to maximize the time a reader spends interacting with that page with juicy content, exciting videos, instructions, tips, useful images, and much more. This is why you must read a lot of blogs if you’re looking to increase your webpage rankings. You have to know what is available so you can leverage what tools your competitors are not using and use them to your advantage.
LSI keywords simply allow you to create more readable content worthy of the first page of Google.
Answer Your Customers Questions
Another key SEO signal is if you’re answering questions your customers are searching for. There are two great tools to make sure this is happening: Quora and Answer the Public.
Both of these tools keep records of the most common questions regarding your niche, but they both function in two different ways.
Quora
Quora is a social network where people ask questions and people chime in to answers. Then those answers are discussed and and users have the ability to up or down-vote the answers themselves. The more an answer is up-voted the more visible it is.
Of course, with any non peer-reviewed journal, you should look for consistencies in the answers or similar posts and look at the quality of the comments. Also, check the sources of the answers. To be credible in my eyes, they should have other similar content and a background that supports their expertise.
For the sake of the Google rage ranking, if the answers on Quora are highly viewed and upvoted, you can bet that people are Googling those same questions. Providing answers to those questions is a great way to get to the top of SERP.
Answer the Public
Answer the public tells you every question that your customers are asking about in your industry. What you’re looking for are the most popular questions that are the most logical.
Then take those questions, plug them into Ubersuggest and find out which keywords are for you. Simple as that.
The Strategy for Ranking on Google
You’re probably wondering how to make these tools work for your business and how long it takes to have a ranking website on Google. I have to be honest. It takes a while, but if you follow the tips in this blog it won’t take as long some may think to get significant traffic if you target the right words.
When you understand what terms your customer base searches to find your products, plug them into Ubersuggest, Quora, and Answer the Public. Grab the most common questions from Quora and Answer the Public and find out the volumes for each one.
Take all the questions, terms, and phrases you find and public them into a Google Sheet or Excel document. Mark down the volumes and CPC price of the words and phrases that are in the green for SD – SEO Difficulty. Then search those green phrases and construct blogs and web content around those terms.
If you’re wondering how to construct the headings of those blogs, all you have to do is look down the list of related keywords and phrases and include them in your blogs in a logical way. Don’t overuse these terms. Use them in a way that makes the blog better for the reader.
For more information on using SEO optimization for your business, check out this article for more information.
