How to rank higher on Google with keyword research – three tips to guarantee success
TARGETING the right keywords is arguably the most important part of your long-term SEO strategy.
This will improve your search engine rankings and allow more customers to find your business.
TRAFCK can do all of the hard work for you as part of their long-term SEO audit.
However, here are three top tips from our industry leading experts to help you boost your online visibility.
1) Check what your competitors are ranking for
Do a Google search for the keywords that you want to rank for.
You need to look into all of the websites that rank above you for your target keyword.
Do a deep dive into their website and find out what they are doing that you are not.
Do they produce more content?
Do they have an optimised, keyword-rich meta-title?
Do they target the term in their Google Business Profile?
Do they use optimised images?
A good way to check a competitors’ keyword success is to use SEMRush.
Simply copy and paste the link into the ‘Domain Overview’ tool to find out what they rank for.
If you click view details, you can see all of the keywords they rank for.
A new addition to SEMRush now also allows users to see how much traffic a site drives from each keyword.
If they’re driving traffic from it and you are not – ask yourself why.
If you do not have access to SEMRush, you can do competitor analysis manually.
Simply type the keyword into Google and work out why the pages rank above yours.
2) Pick the right keywords for your business
As simple as it sounds, you need to decide on the keywords that you want to appear for.
For example, a plumber might want to target the keyword ‘plumber in London’ or ’emergency plumber Norfolk’.
Once you have identified the keywords, you can check how often these terms are searched online.
According to SEMRush, there are 74,000 monthly searches for ‘plumber near me’.
This tool will also show you keyword difficulty – which shows how easily you will rank for the term.
If you are looking for a free alternative to SEMrush, you can search the term in Google Trends.
Simply type in the keyword, adjust the date and look at the ‘Top’ related keywords.
If your content does not target that keyword, you are not going to rank or be found.
This could mean you are missing out on thousands of customers per month.
Once you have found these keywords, you can begin to build authority on them.
You can do this by creating articles, section pages or via your Google Business Profile.
3) Content is key
Google use EEAT to ensure they surface helpful, relevant results on search engine results pages.
EEAT stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.
Experience – Does the content demonstrate your experience? If you are writing about a location for a travel blog, you should visited it.
If you are reviewing a product for a job, you need to have tried it.
If you are writing a comment piece about the latest food at a local restaurant, you need to have tasted it.
Expertise – To improve your chances of ranking your Google, you need to prove you have a high level of knowledge.
For example, an article about ‘The best mortgages for first-time buyers’ will stand a better chance of ranking if it is produced by a professional in the mortgage industry.
Authoritativeness – Is your site the go-to source of information surrounding a specific topic?
For example, is your blog about Arsenal the go-to place for fans to look for transfer news? If not, why not?
Trustworthiness – This highlights the importance of publishing accurate and legitimate content to your website. Citing trustworthy sources within your work is a good way to show this.
If your site is producing top tier content that shows EEAT throughout – you will increase your chances of ranking.
Want us to do it all for you? Reach out to TRAFCK. We can do the keyword research, identify the keywords we want to target, create a content plan and even produce the content for you.
