How to Rank #1 for Competitive, High Volume Keywords
Ranking for competitive, high-volume keywords is the holy grail of SEO. Wikipedia has nailed the strategy perfectly: Create timeless, evergreen content worthy of attention Regularly update and improve your old content Recalibrate and reformat your content for specific niches and industries Promote your content It is not as easy as we make it sound, however. Here’s our internal process for targeting and ranking for competitive, high-volume keywords in Google search: 1. Identify the competitive keywords This should be the foundation of your content marketing strategy. One simple way to do it is to do deep keyword research yourself. The keywords must be relevant, have a high potential to funnel traffic, and must be intent-driven. But the search volume should also be substantial. The purpose is to maximize your returns not just on the money but also on the effort you put into your campaign. So, how many do you think is the ideal number of keyword variations? Five? 20? Nope. Try 1,000. But do not forget your competitor as well since you will benchmark your SEO strategy with theirs. For example, which of their keywords are most successful? Apps like SpyFu are valuable tools to spy on your competitors. Then you can reverse engineer the process to develop your own. In the same vein, you can also spot gaps in their campaign where you can take advantage, understanding that sometimes the advantage to you may be targeting no or low-volume searches. 2. Map the landscape Now that you have an idea of the competitive keywords in your field, the next step is to look at the big picture. Conduct a more exhaustive audit of the competitive keywords in your specific industry. You need to identify the reasons why some websites rank for high volume keywords and find some common grounds that you can build on. You can ask yourself the following questions: What are the competitive keywords they are using? What are they using for their title tags? Why are these effective? How did they produce their content? Which content is getting the most engagement? How can you implement best practices to your SEO campaign? 3. Internally link to your blog posts But not just any blog post. Remember the three elements of a good content post stated above? Using analytics, audit your content and determine which ones resonate with your audience better. However, make it relevant to your new content thematically and not just link for the sake of rankings. In this way, you can ramp up the activity on your website. You can also get some of that juju from your most successful blog and into your new post. If you’re in need of someone to help, our link building services should be a good match. 4. Optimize for voice Voice is going to be the future of online search. More than three billion people today own a device equipped with a voice smart assistant. About 5 in 10 people are using online voice searches. You can expect the figure to rise since voice search is faster and more convenient. Unlike with text, voice search is characterized by several elements: The long-tailed keywords are longer, perhaps five or more words The tone is more conversational, like you would talk to someone in front of you More geared toward local listings The keywords are simple and direct to the point Designed for question-type keywords They tend to include filler words It is not to say that you should focus your resources on targeting voice search. For now, text search is still the standard. But it is nice to have this strategy in your back pocket that you can pull out during emergencies. 5. Focus on Industry terms Your homepage should generally target a broad spectrum within your specific industry. However, you have to hone in on your target market with surgical precision. To do this, you need to create sub-categories containing products, articles, infographics, videos, or images. The main goal is to address the pain points of your audience. In this way, you can create contextual links to each post–both internal and external links–whenever necessary. Once they rank for the keywords they want, your life becomes easier since they will naturally attract organic links like bees to honey or raccoons to trash. 6. Content as a blank canvass Think of your blog post as a blank canvass and you, the crazy and struggling artist. Once you have finished the template–a well-researched article that addresses the pain point, it is now time to do the analytics. You have to audit your work to gauge its success. Auditing your work will also enable you to tweak the content to make it better. You can scale up and scale down, depending on the need. But you must be deliberate with your actions. You continue to open your ears to listen for content demand so that you can immediately deliver the desired content. Using your brush, you can then add more colors, wash away some of the tints, perhaps add some more birds if that is what your audience wants? Updating your content is necessary because some new information might have surfaced that makes your assumptions obsolete. The goal is to make your post the best available resource on the topic to force Google to sit up and take notice. Believe us; there is a method to this madness. 7. Proper Keyword Placement In the early days of SEO, marketers found a hack to outrank in the SERPs. They simply flooded their content with keywords, and the result was a heap of nonsense. Thankfully, we have come a long way since then. Google constantly updates its algorithms to make sure that the results would be most relevant to the search. Google constantly moves the goalpost, so marketers are always playing catchup. It is the primary reason why it is difficult to rank these days. Now, Google does not want you to pepper your blogs with relevant keywords. In fact, that is the