As digital marketers we have come to know that growing SEO rankings is a slow and steady process. It can take months, even years for your website and content to start ranking on Google’s first page. However, there are plenty of best practices that you can use to help expedite the time it takes to start ranking higher in Google. By focusing on the right pages and the right keywords you can begin to improve your rankings and break through to the first page.
Identify Your Best Keyword Opportunities
To first identify where to begin you’ll want to make sure you have a Google Analytics account set up and tracking properly. Once you have your Analytics account, you can start to review the Queries Report. This is a report generated by Analytics that pulls all the search queries that your site currently is showing for in Google.
Once you have reviewed your Queries, you can begin to identify where your best keyword opportunities are. Google only has room for 10 positions on the first page for any given query. Identifying which queries are closest to the top 10 will help you to focus on what keywords are going to help push your content to a higher overall position.
Optimize Your Content for Ranking Opportunities
Once you have identified which queries are most relevant to your business, and are within striking distance of a first page ranking, you’ll need to start optimizing for that query. Going back and revising your content to include more mentions of a particular query can greatly increase your chances of ranking higher for that query.
The best way to optimize for these queries is to include them in your headlines, body copy, and title of your content. If you find that there is little mention of the target query you’ll have plenty of opportunity to include it and make it the highlight of your content piece.
Optimizing your content for certain queries is key as Google rewards relevance when it comes to ranking your content. If your content is hyper relevant and focused on answering specific search queries and keywords, you’ll have much more success in ranking higher because Google will see your site as an authority on the subject.
Improve Your Content With Semantic SEO
Semantic SEO is the process of building more meaning and topical depth in a piece of content. Essentially what this means is in order to keep ranking higher and eventually rank number one, you’ll want to flesh out your content pieces even further. However, you don’t want to just add more keywords, you need to add more value.
Some items you can add to your content to help improve its depth include videos, pull quotes, data & statistics, internal links, and images. All of these help improve the overall relevance of your content and can be viewed by Google as a valuable piece of content for a particular query. Additionally, by improving the depth of your content you can even start to gain SERP features such as featured snippets which is a hallmark of a great continent piece.
The Takeaway
The key takeaway here is that in order to improve your Google rankings you’ll want to focus on improving the overall relevancy of your content as it relates to specific queries. By improving the depth of your content and providing more value to it, you can begin to greatly increase your Google rankings as the search engine will begin to recognize you as an authority for specific queries.