Search Engine Optimization (SEO) became the best way to reach a broad audience within the shortest possible time some time back. Even so, it has only recently gained immense popularity among most organizations.

Though several things have changed over the years to suit different technological advancements, following multiple major search algorithm updates, keywords remain one of the primary elements that determine your position on search engines.

Picking the best keyword for a specific business is only half the battle in achieving handsome returns in online marketing. Ranking for the keyword is the most challenging part of your advertising. Thankfully, this is not altogether impossible with the right strategies and tools to guide your choices.

The following are a few guidelines on how to rank for a keyword fast and at the very top of search engines.

Conduct Keyword Research

Keyword Research is the start of everything.

And also extremely important, so we’ll be spending more time talking about this.

Determine which keyword you want to rank for, and identifying its related keywords to use in the content is the first step of your SEO effort.

Your keywords should be the leading ones used by your target market and be well-aligned with your business values.

Though a particular keyword might be meaningful to you, it might not do much for your rank on search engines. Guesswork will only waste your time and the cash you spend on online marketing.

Refer to the keywords your competitor is ranking for

You can use any tools you like, but here at SEOPressor, we use BiQ’s Rank Intelligence tool to discover our competitors’ ranking keywords.

BiQ is really simple to use, I just type in the website URL and the tool will run for a few minutes, and voila, there’s the list of keywords the website is ranking for.

Which you can then steal, cough, I mean to refer to as your own keywords.

Or…in another simpler way,

you can do a keyword gap analysis. 

RankingGap is one of the tools with simple UI/UX that any SEO or keyword research newbies can navigate easily.

All you have to do is create a project that compares you and your competitors’ websites and viola! A list of highly valuable keywords generated that you can gain insights from.

If you are wondering how…the RankingGap tool reveals keywords that:

1. You and your competitors are ranking for (Common keyword view).
2. Keywords that your competitors all have but you don’t (Missing keyword view).
3. Keywords that only some of your competitors have (Gap keyword view).
4. Keywords that are uniquely yours (Unique keyword view).

Higher search volume, higher competition, go for long-tail keywords

Research for the keyword with just enough search volume for your site so that you make informed decisions.

Some people go for keywords with the highest volume, but these might be too competitive more so for new websites.

You should also ideally start with long-tail keywords, so you build a website’s reputation before moving to short-tail ones as you grow.

Long-tail keywords in short, is keywords specific to your business, or what you’re selling, or the topic you’re talking about, they can be perhaps 3 or 4 words long, they tend to not have explosive search volume, but the search trend is steady and you go for the long and steady win the race kind of strategy.

Using LSIGraph to discover valuable keywords to rank

One of the best tools for your keyword research effort is the free LSIGraph tool.

This tool helps you discover keywords that are related to the one you want to rank for so you can build an outline for your long-form content.

Use a Catchy Headline

People nowadays are in a rush.

They want to skim through your article fast to get what exactly you are offering and decide whether or not it is relevant to them.

It is essential to include catchy headlines that will boost the odds of people getting interested in your articles and reading or viewing it.

A research carried out by BuzzSumo concluded that emotional headlines for online articles were the best for driving engagement. If you intent on making your clients curious about your content, go for keywords that induce some kind of emotions.

The number 10 and list posts in headlines were also proven by the research to be extremely powerful for SEO.

To start, you can head over to Blog Title Generator to insert your keyword, pick if it’s a generic keyword, or is it a brand, or something else. And you’ll be presented with 10 headlines which can serve as your starting point to crafting your own catchy headlines.

Build Links

Having a varied and strong backlink profiles is one of the ways to push your domain, and serves as a boost to all the keywords you’re trying to rank for.

When someone links to you, it proves to search engines that your content and your domain are authoritative because people will barely link to mediocre sites.

Other than this, people trust sites with backlinks since these show that your content is exceptional enough to be shared with others. This will, in turn, build online traffic to your website and generate a lot of exposure in the right circles.

Building links is, however, not an easy task.

A good way to build your online presence to attract people’s attention to your website and in the way attract some backlinks is by sending out a press release.

At SEOPressor we use MarketersMEDIA. They have great reach to premium news sites like Yahoo Finance, the price is not terribly expensive like other famed newswires in the industry, but it gets the job done.

All in all, press releases reach a broad audience within a short time and are among the best choice you have to make a bang for your site online quickly to gain those backlinks.

Repurpose Your Site’s Content

You need not use different types of content to reach clients on different platforms.

You can research on the article that is performing best on one platform then share it on other platforms to reach clients looking for something different. The content can also be linked to each other, voila, backlinks!

You, for instance, can repurpose text contents like a blog post into videos and photos for YouTube and social media platforms.

This is because people on these platforms barely pay attention to long, wordy, thousand words posts.

Videos and photos, on the other hand, can be changed to long text posts and slideshows for the LinkedIn audience.

Google Search Console is the best tool when repurposing your content.

This tool analyses the impressions, traffic amount, and performance of the content on different platforms. This way, you can pick the best articles to repurpose and link to your site to maximize your returns in online marketing.

Do a Competitor Research

To gain insight into what works and does not for your industry, you should know what your competitors are doing.

Researching the content your competitors are using and how well it is working for them is your ideal approach in this case. You can then use your findings to inform what content to steer clear of or replicate then refine to become the best-performing content.

Not everything in your research will be relevant.

Focus on the URLs and domain that competitors are using and how well their title tags apply keyword use. You should also consider what business sizes are ranking best for specific keywords.

If, for example, you are a small brand, it would make little sense to use the same keyword as a huge brand in your field.

Again, for competitor research, BiQ is one of the best tools out there.

This is a suite of tools, including keyword, content, and ranking intelligence and rank tracking of the keywords and content that people in your industry are using. There are different pricing models for BiQ to suit your marketing budget and give you some crucial insight into the elements on which you should center your marketing content.

Pay Attention to the Elements of On-Page SEO

Most online marketers are excessively focused on getting backlinks and drawing traffic to their sites that they forget their on-page SEO.

Once you get relevant traffic to your website, you should know how best to keep them there and convince them to take some desired action. Things like slow-loading pages, broken inbound links, and duplicate content only drive away clients.

To optimize your on-page SEO, use GDoc SEO Assistant.

This is a free writing tool that automatically calculates the SEO score of your article as you write and point out any issues that might affect your on-page optimization.

The tool also guides you on the best way to guarantee that search engines will understand your content better and, in so doing, rank your site high.

Other than that, make sure to link from one post to another.

This is called interlinking and it can make a huge difference in helping the search engine, like Google, to understand your website, as a whole, better. Remember, the better Google can access and understand your website, the bigger chance you have to rank high.

Conclusion

Ranking high on search engines is the only way to actualize profits in the current competitive world of online marketing.

Few people will, after all, proceed to the second and third pages on search engines once they type in their query. If, therefore, your article does not show up within the first pages of search engines, your chances of making profits are significantly low.

Fortunately, the above guidelines will give you the best head start to know the keywords you should use and how best to apply them to optimize your SEO position. Keyword optimization for SEO not only applies to your website but also your social media sites. This way, you are sure to gain your desired position on search engines and social media platforms within the shortest possible time.

Let us know how you like our tips, or if you have your own little tip to rank high, fast. Now, good day and I’ll see you in the next blog post.

[CASE STUDY] The Best Strategies to Rank Your Content on Google

• 5 Effective Ways to Drop Your Content Bounce Rate
• 7 Surprising Results that Actually Affects Google Ranking
• Rank Your Content with Not Just One, but Multiple Keywords

Updated: 25 April 2024