You’re chasing growth and you’re looking for every edge you can get. Paid advertising is great, but it’s a cashflow nightmare and can be fickle at the best of times. You need a way to grow organically…
After a little research you discover SEO and content marketing… which leads you to keyword search, which is the the key to being found on search engines. Unlike traffic from paid advertisements – eyeballs coming from search engines can carry a higher level of intent and care about your product because the users made the time and came seeking what you have. And that intent becomes even more lucrative when you don’t have to pay for each click. So without further ado, here’s how to improve your Google search results through keyword research. Why should I care to check keyword rankings? PLUS – What is the fastest way to rank a keyword…How do I improve my Google search results?
The process you go through to improve your Google search results is called search engine optimisation (SEO). SEO is basically a set of tasks you do in the hope of appearing on the first page of the search results when a user performs a relevant search. For instance, if you sell manuka honey and someone comes searching for information about the health benefits of manuka honey, you want to be the one that appears in the search results. If you answer their question, build credibility, and at the bottom of your article you link to your product… you stand a high chance of getting a sale.- Build a fast website that offers the best user experience
- Publish relevant content and keep it up to date
- Answer frequently asked questions
- Always optimise the metadata for each aspect of your website
- Create content that other people will share or link to
- Fix broken links and other technical errors
- Use relevant H1 and H2 headers and H-tags
- …the list goes on. You can find more information about SEO here.
What is a keyword (with example)?
Keywords are the focus words in a piece of content. They’re usually a group of nouns and verbs. And they’re extremely important for helping search engines to understand what your content is about. For example, if you sell manuka honey, the two keywords you’ll want to focus on are ‘maluka’ and ‘honey’, and you’ll also benefit from focusing your content on long-tail keywords like ‘the health benefits of manuka honey’ and ‘when can children have honey’.What does keyword search mean?
A keyword search is simply an algorithm that searches a database with the aim of surfacing content related to the keyword being searched. In the case of search engines, companies like Google have servers full of data from billions of websites around the web. Each time you perform a search, you enter the keywords related to what it is you’re looking for, then Google uses those keywords to determine which content is most relevant to your search, and therefore, where in the search results a given webpage ranks.What is the fastest way to rank a keyword?
Keyword rankings refer to your web page’s position within the search results of a search engine when a user searches for the given keyword. And because people are generally lazy and click on the first relevant result they see, the closer you can rank to the first position, the more traffic you’ll likely receive. So ranking your website for a given website as quickly as possible is often the name of the game. There are many factors that determine your search engine rankings, but here’s a starting point:
- Conduct keyword research and identify high volume, high intent, low competition keywords, avoiding commercial keywords.
- Use a tool like SlangScribe to come up with content ideas and target keywords your website has the authority to rank for – it’s inefficient trying to rank for keywords you just aren’t even close to being competitive for. Eg, Goodluck outranking Facebook Inc for the keyword ‘Facebook’, but you might for long tail keywords like ‘how to create a facebook business manager account’.
- Write an article – or even better – create a Youtube video and post it live. Embed the Youtube video into the article, and submit the article URL to your Google Search Console for indexing.
- Optimise your Headers, H-tags, Meta Description, Alt Tags, the first sentence in each paragraph and Schema (the meta data in the back of your content that tells the search engine what your page is about) for the intended target keyword.
- Ensure the page you’re trying to rank (and your website generally) loads quickly. Under 3 seconds on mobile ideally, but the faster the better.
- Promote the page on social media – sponsoring or boosting your posts if you have the budget.
- Be patient – it can take between 6 days to 6 months for keyword rankings to stabilize, especially for a new page.
- Track your keyword rankings to monitor your progress and attribute results.
How can I check my website ranking and track my keyword rankings?
While there are a number of SERP tracking tools available, nothing is more accurate than Google Search Console. GSC is Google’s own portal for helping website owners manage everything to do with their search engine, including rankings.
To view keyword data, go to Performance, then click Queries. Here you’ll see all the keywords you rank for, how often you’re appearing, the position you rank, how many clicks you’re getting and your click through rate.
Can I build custom SEO ranking reports?
While you can refine the results in Google Search Console, a much more user friendly and insightful way to track, read and visualise your SEO rankings is to build a reporting dashboard using Google Data Studio.
Google Data Studio is a simple to use tool for creating reports in the cloud. To build a customer SEO ranking report, you can simply connect your GSC account to Datastudio then use one of their pre-made templates, or build and edit your own to suit your needs. You can also link Data Studio to your other Google Analytics, Youtube and Ads accounts, as well other third party platforms.
Why should I care to check keyword rankings?
Keyword rankings are valuable because the higher you rank, the more impressions and clicks you’re getting to your website, without having to pay for the advertising. You’ll have to invest in optimising your website and content in order to rank highly enough to be seen, but the rankings (and therefore the return on that investment) can often be ongoing, so the benefit compounds day after day. That said – your keyword rankings can fluctuate by the second, user by user, region by region – so you shouldn’t stress too much about it day to day.
How to do keyword research (for beginners)?
Step 1: Brainstorm a list of important keywords related to your product or service. These are referred to as ‘seed keywords’. Generally a good start would be to think about what your customers will be typing in when searching for what it is you offer, then branch out from there using a keyword suggestion tool (like Google Keyword Planner).
Step 2: Organise the keywords into buckets, which are also known as content silos. For instance, if you’re an Accountant, you might silo your keywords into ‘Tax Accounting’, ‘Bookkeeping’, ‘Outsource CFO’ etc.
Step 3: Use a keyword research tool (see below) to expand the list of related searches for each content silo so you end up with a long list of all the possible keywords and phrases your customers may search when looking for your product or service.
Step 4: Sort to the top the ones that you already rank close to the first page for, have high volume, indicate a high intent to purchase (rather than irrelevant research), the ones with low competition, and if you’re the one producing the content – the ones you are most interested in so you enjoy creating the necessary content.
Step 5: Repeat step 3 for the top 25 keywords which should give you a very niche list of related keywords – also called semantic keywords. These outliers can often have less competition, and thus, easier to rank for.
Step 6: Scroll back up to the ‘What is the fastest way to rank a keyword?’ section of this article for how to turn this list of keywords into actual search engine rankings.
What is the most accurate keyword research tool?
While there are plenty of awesome tools available, for doing your own keyword research, it’s best to go straight to the source, which is Google’s Keyword Planner. Of course, Keyword Planner won’t show you the rankings of your competitors, that’s where you can benefit from using a tool such as SlangScribe, SEMrush, Ahrefs, SpyFu or Serpstat… but keep in mind – these tools are looking at search results from an outside perspective and they may have their own calculations applied to the data sets, so take it with a grain of salt.
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