Increase your visibility and bump up your organic traffic numbers by scrolling down on your keyword rankings to see what’s next.
Keywords and Ranking
Keywords are the terms and phrases used in your online content, like blogs or website copy, to help your website be found by search engines. Where those rank is the place where your website page lands in the often-long list of results when a user searches for a specific term. You might be in the top-20 ranking keywords, or you could land somewhere further down the line (or worse: not rank at all).
If you’ve been successful with your top 20 ranking keywords or you’ve landed in the coveted top 10 or even 5 spots in the SERP, what should you do next?
More Top-20 Keywords, Please
Even though you may have your priority keywords dialed in, don’t stop just yet. With any strategy, the goal is improvement. If you’re wishing for greater website visibility, improved ranking with more top-20 keywords will help push you there. Bonus points for this keyword strategy, because it’s lower effort, higher impact!
As part of Solid Digital’s Digital Growth Marketing reports, one metric we track for clients is the number of top-20 ranking keywords. Because our clients goals include getting even more keywords in the top-20, we pulled from the info that was already in front of us: the keywords that hadn’t quite made the cut.
Step 1: Grab Low-Hanging Fruit
That’s what we call the keywords ranking 21 to 30, with good reason. This low-hanging fruit is just a couple of spots away from bumping up into the Top-20. It’s far easier to move a keyword from 21-30 to a top-20 ranking (rather than moving one from position 80 to 60). Once you’ve busted through the top 30, the extra bit of effort you put in to reach top 20 ranking will be entirely worth it.
Step 2: Audit Keywords
To increase your website’s visibility, you need more top-20 ranking keywords. Pulling from your stash of 21-30 ranking keywords, examine them closely alongside their search volume (to see if they’re worth pursuing) and use SEO tools to help guide your efforts.
Search volume – Pick a winning keyword or keyword phrase by looking at search volume—something that has 200 or more searches a month in search volume will be a better choice than something with 10-15 searches per month.
SEO tools – Using SEMRush or Moz, you can conduct keyword research on the 21-30 ranking keywords to see which ones you should focus on. Plus, SEMRush’s keyword generator tool can give you better insight into what to tackle first.
Monthly reports – Look at your 21-30 ranking keywords. Which ones are achievable and just need a little boost? Which ones could easily fold into your current content calendar? What are you doing right now that’s working?
Step 3: Build or Boost Content
When you find the right keyword to work on, you should be able to see where you’re affecting your SEO, and, hopefully, your organic traffic. Your content marketing is the key to helping your keyword rankings. We tell all of our clients to aim for at least 10 pieces of content per month—that can be blog posts, videos, reports, and more.
If you have an SEO and content strategy, but your content writers don’t know what keywords to use, or what to write for new content, this list of 21-30 ranking keywords will breath new life into your next content brainstorm.
There are essentially two directions to go with content, in the context of your keyword strategy:
Boost your current content
Using current ranking content, you can add in contextual links, add in keywords to the headings, copy, meta tags, meta descriptions, if applicable, and boost your current content with the keywords your audience is searching for.
-AND (do both!)-
Build new content
Use your 21-30 ranking keyword list as a content guide. Write new supporting or related blogs linking to the pages you are trying to boost. You might also create product pages and solution pages around the keywords if that’s fit.
Of note: If you’re building new pages, pay attention to the URLs. Use hyphens to separate path and page keywords, and keep the URL length on the shorter side. Whatever’s better for the user will likely be better for your rankings.
After you’ve worked on your content boosting and building, review your results every month—SEO rankings shift all the time because of search trends and seasonal changes. Use the data and information you see to continue to guide your content strategy.
Solid Digital’s Keyword Strategy Success
You’re not the only one seeking success with your keyword strategy. Last year, in our own marketing department, we focused on adding location pages based on keyword data we saw from the locations we were already ranking for. As a nationwide company with services in various cities across the U.S., we built up pages with various locations, like “Chicago web agency” and “Portland web design agency.” And after getting some traction, we could see where there was more opportunity.
We saw decent rankings (yes, in the 21-30 range!) for “Austin digital marketing agency.” So we built out a second Austin page to support that ranking, and linked the two pages. Additionally, we added specific links in our website footer, including the main Austin page, which helped boost our SEO, telling Google that this page was important.
Next, we linked to other blogs, and helped push it up even further in the rankings.
After a few months, we ranked in the Top 20 keywords for “Austin digital marketing agency.” Now, we continue to push the keyword up further in the rankings and people who wouldn’t have ever found Solid Digital before are coming to our site.
Increased visibility for searchers can lead them to engage and convert (fill out a form, download an e-book) and new, different people can find us. Tapping into the almost-there keywords helped us tap further into our target market by expanding who could find us.
If we’d only ever looked at our top-20 ranking keywords, we may have missed the opportunity to boost our rankings for that low-hanging fruit.
Think of it this way: You are so close that with only a few tweaks and adjustments, you can achieve more of those coveted spots in the SERP—it’s within reach.
Use the 21-30 ranking keywords to help your content team improve rankings, drive new traffic, and create maximum impact with minimum effort for digital marketing success.
