Have you set your sights on a keyword? Do you want your website to be on Google’s top page for a certain search term? Make the following preparations: It won’t be easy unless you’re Wikipedia or The New York Times. But it’s also not impossible.
Ranking for a keyword in organic search is a process that can be achieved. You won’t always get the results you want, especially if you’re a new website attempting to rank for a big term, but if you take content marketing and SEO seriously, you can start to see results. Rankings, traffic, and sales, to name a few.
The following are the 10 methods to rank for a term on Google.
Step 1: Lay the Groundwork
- A Solid Website – The longer your website has been online, the more authority and links it has accumulated. It’s also critical that your entire site adheres to SEO best practices — if you’re not sure what that means, start with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
- A Network to Draw From – It’s highly helpful to have a built-in network to share fresh information with, in order to rank quickly for a keyword — a blog following, an audience on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, email contacts you can reach out to for occasional aid with a link. If you’re not sure what it implies, it’s time to think about link building as connection building.
Step 2: Do Your Initial Keyword Research
You may believe you know what keyword you want to target, but double-check your idea. Before you finalize your keyword choice, use different keyword tools to obtain a feel of the search volume and competitiveness for the phrase. Your primary concerns will be:
- Choosing a Term with High Volume but not Excessive Volume – In general, you don’t want to target a keyword with low relative search traffic if there’s a substantially more popular similar phrase. For example, there are often more than twice as many searches for “blah blah employment” than there are for “blah blah careers.” However, don’t always aim for the phrase with the most volume or difficulty; some keywords are simply too competitive and aren’t worth your effort. You won’t rank for “airline” unless you actually are an airline.
- Choosing a Keyword Related to Your Company Model – If a keyword is related to your site and company, you have a better chance of ranking for it. You’re also more likely to get a meaningful return on your ranking – keep in mind that rankings aren’t especially effective unless they drive worthwhile traffic and leads. A party planning company, for example, would target “how to prepare for a party,” but “how to cook rice” is unlikely to be relevant to them or their target audience.
Make a list of close variations on your principal keyword at this stage of the process. These will be useful later on when developing and optimizing your content.
Step 3: Check Out the Competition
Once you’ve decided on a keyword, conduct a search for it on Google and a few other search engines to discover what your competitors are doing. Pay special attention to:
- Domain Names & URLs – How many of these are exact match domains? Is the term included in every URL in the top ten?
- The Titles – How are the keywords included in the title tags?
- What kind of Content is Ranked – Product pages? What about blog posts? Videos?
- The Kinds of Companies That Rank — Are they household names? What about small businesses? What about news websites?
- How Reputable Are Those Sites – You may use a plugin to determine the age of the top ten sites, the size of their link profiles, and so on.
You’re searching for methods to set yourself apart from the crowd. To defeat your opponents, you must accomplish as least as much as they do. You should ideally be doing more and doing it better.
Step 4: Consider Intent
The more detailed the keyword (think long-tail keywords), the easier it is to determine the searcher’s intent and show up what those searchers are likely looking for. In search marketing, “intent” is our best estimate of what the person typing the search query truly wants. Consider the following keywords, and observe how much simpler it is to deduce the purpose from the words alone as you progress down the list:
- glasses
- eyeglasses
- discount eyeglasses
- discount eyeglasses frames
- discount eyeglasses frames for kids
Consider what type of material best serves the term. It would certainly be a range of kid’s glasses for sale in this scenario. You can’t determine if the individual is seeking eyewear or drinking glasses based on the first word. Even for the second, the user may simply be searching for images of eyeglasses; there is no obvious desire to purchase. An e-commerce site will primarily strive to rank for commercial keywords.
According to Google’s architects, the ideal search engine would return only one result. You want to be the one result that meets the searcher’s needs so they don’t return to the search results in search of a better response.
Step 5: Conceptualize the Content
Next, devise a strategy for the actual content you’ll be producing that will – ideally – rank for your selected keyword. There are several ways to rank for a keyword, including but not limited to:
- An article
- A blog post
- A product page
- An index or directory of links (to other pages on your site or around the web)
- An authoritative guide
- An infographic
- A video
How long will the content creation process take? Who should design it? Will you handle everything in-house or outsource it? Do you have all of the necessary resources and budget? Don’t succumb to defeat: You have the power to produce a blog post regardless of your size or budget. More resources will be required for content such as infographics and videos. Sometimes using a tool, such as a mortgage calculator, is the best method to answer a search inquiry. If this is the case, engineering resources will be required.
Step 6: Execute
Put your strategy into action. Again, you should not rush any of these stages, but this one is extremely crucial. Search engines are increasingly searching for high-quality material that benefits the searcher, rather than keyword-stuffed spam or pages full of adverts that only benefit you. Investigate PPC if you’d rather buy traffic than put in the effort required to get “free” organic search traffic.
Step 7: Optimize for Your Keyword
Steps 6 and 7 should, in fact, be combined. Instead of optimizing your material after the fact, optimize it while you’re developing it. This is when the keyword list you created in step 2 comes in handy. Use such keywords in your text as often as possible, but not to the point of sounding like a mad robot. Remember that there are many “invisible” areas for keywords, and I’m not talking about putting white text on a white backdrop or doing anything else that goes against Google standards. I’m talking about things like picture file names — visitors won’t see them unless they’re looking for them, but they may help your keyword rankings.
Check out SEOmoz’s guide to the “ideal” page for a comprehensive list of on-page optimization elements. Another useful suggestion is to mimic Wikipedia, whose articles have excellent on-page SEO.
It’s a good idea to quickly double-check your keyword research before hitting “publish.” It’s probable that your content has changed during the development and creation phases, and you’ll need to ensure that the keyword and content are still aligned.
Step 8: Publish
It’s (nearly) time to release your material into the wild. You may need to be cautious about timing this step depending on the sort of material. This isn’t normally a factor for evergreen content, but it may be for material that’s related to something in the news, an event, or a trend. When introducing material linked to a new product or service, you may also need to cooperate with PR or other interested parties inside your company.
Step 9: Promote
This is a Vital Stage That Should Happen Right After Publication — In fact, for large pieces of material, it’s ideal if you can perform some media outreach before the item goes online. Make every effort to get your material in front of as many eyes as possible before it has a chance to rank for the keyword:
- Share your material on your company’s social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. If possible, do this through your personal accounts as well.
- Use social sharing buttons or widgets on your website to encourage independent sharing – Make it simple for readers and viewers to continue the chain. If all they have to do is click a button, they are more inclined to tweet or share your post.
- Create hyperlinks to your content – Whatever the future of PageRank holds, link building is a critical component of SEO (even if it is the most annoying part). If you want to learn more about link building, check out our blog archive.
Step 10: Analyze
You’re not finished yet! The web is a live medium, and it is never too late to improve the quality of your material. Check your keyword ranking manually (make sure you’re not signed in and that you’re not seeing highly tailored results) or with a rank checking tool. Use your analytics to check what keywords your content is ranking for — they may not be the ones you first targeted. If you aren’t ranking for the proper keywords after a few weeks, you have more work to do. Check that your content:
- Is truly optimized
- Is truly high-quality
- Is truly visible
It’s also likely that the term you choose is very competitive, in which case you should cut back your aim. Until you’ve established more authority, try targeting less competitive keywords.
That’s all! This is the method we use to rank for hundreds of search marketing keywords. Whatever your company specialization, you may apply the same technique to it.