1. Target keywords with your website

Google doesn’t just notice good websites. It notices relevant website pages that are best suited for specific searches.

Writing keyword-relevant ads with high quality scores is one thing. But you also need to consider your on-page SEO.

Make sure each page of your website clearly targets a specific topic. That means conducting in-depth keyword research to find high-volume, relevant keywords, and incorporating those keywords on your page and in your meta tags. The more specific and targeted the topic, the greater the opportunity each page has to show up on the first page of Google and get noticed.

Source: wordstream.com

2. Focus On Low Difficulty Keywords

Keyword difficulty is an important metric you need to keep an eye on while choosing a keyword for your blog articles. The higher the keyword difficulty, the more fierce the competition is and the harder it is to rank for.

When choosing keywords, the general rule of thumb is to find the ones that have a decent traffic volume with low competition.

To find keyword difficulty, you can either use a free tool, like AdWords Keyword Tool, or a premium tool, such as Ahrefs.

For keyword researching, I prefer Ahrefs because it shows me low-hanging fruit among my keyword ideas that are easy to rank for. It also gives insights into the estimated number of clicks for the keywords.

Ahrefs gives each keyword a difficulty score on a scale of 1 to 100.

For example, Ahrefs tells me that keyword difficulty (KD) is 77 for the keyword link building, which is quite a competitive keyword to rank for. But if you click on the questions tab you will get a list of low KD keywords.

For example, the keyword best link building tools has a KD of 30, which is relatively easy to rank for.

Source: blogtyrant.com

3. Word count

First off, it's important to note there's no precise, "optimal" word count. Extremely short content (e.g., 50 words) has been known to outrank 1,000-word blog posts, which suggests that any length can work if it's written well.

That said, research has shown that high-ranking posts tend to be longer and more in depth. Searchmetrics, for instance, found that the top 10 pages contained an average of 1,285 words. serpIQ, on the other hand, has found 1,500 words to be a good target length.

What's more important is focusing on the quality of your content. Ask yourself, "Does this content do the best possible job of covering this specific topic?"

Google's John Mueller has confirmed that there is no minimum length, and that quality is key. He writes, "There’s no minimum length, and there’s no minimum number of articles a day that you have to post, nor even a minimum number of pages on a website. In most cases, quality is better than quantity. Our algorithms explicitly try to find and recommend websites that provide content that’s of high quality, unique, and compelling to users. Don’t fill your site with low-quality content, instead work on making sure that your site is the absolute best of its kind."

Here is a content marketing guide I put together to help knowing the best way for you.

Source: forbes.com

4. Put Those Keywords in the Title, Headings, and URL

Once you choose the keywords you’d like to focus on, it’s important to use them in the right areas of your post. Google gives hierarchical credibility to your post’s title, headings, and URL, so you’ll want to use your keywords in all three: the title, the paragraph headings, and the web address.

Source: indigomarketingagency.com

5. Design your site for speed

Next, you’ll want to evaluate your site speed. It’s been shown that users who can search faster are happier. In fact, Google found out that slowing down search results by as little as 400 milliseconds will actually reduce the number of searches by over half a percent.

In the SEO realm, however, speed isn’t as much of an important signal as the relevance of a page is. But like with most things online, when it comes to speed, problems can accumulate. So, you need to fix as many of them as you possibly can, speed being one of them.

How fast is your site? Use Google’s Page Speed tool. This is what I came up with when I tested Quick Sprout:

The report, which takes less than five seconds to generate (maybe more on larger sites), showed me recommendations that ranged from experimental to high priority. I don’t know about you, but I find that very helpful.

Click on the link “enable compression,” and you get this page:

As you can see, I need to get to work.

Another tool to measure the speed of your site is Site Performance page inside Webmaster Tools. You can find out how people use your site around the world, what kind of response time they have on the site, what monthly trends are and recommendations on improving site speed.

Since the only expense to improve your site speed is how much sweat you invest, it pays to do it.

Source: quicksprout.com

6. Drop Keyword in first 100 words:

The ideal place to start putting keywords in an article is within the first 100 words. There are many to whom these come naturally, but a large number of bloggers prefer a long intro before bothering with a keyword. This is inadvisable because of the obvious reasons that Google wouldn’t find it very relevant in the search results.

Here is an example from Positionly (Unamo SEO already):

A keyword “content marketing” was used at the very beginning of the article. Placing a keyword near the beginning of the article ensures that Google has an easier time in understanding the topic and relevance of the article.

7. Don’t neglect technical SEO

In short, technical SEO refers to making sure that your website is designed in such a way that search engines will be able to crawl and index it easily. Content is still king, but if the search engines can’t find, crawl, and index your pages, all your efforts will be in vain.

For example, you’ll need to make sure that:

All your pages are secure

Your site is optimized for mobile

You don’t have any plagiarized content or similar content on different pages of your own site

Pages load quickly

All the links work

Source: influencermarketinghub.com

8. Write click-worthy meta descriptions for each page:

Meta descriptions are one of the most important and visible elements – next to your title tag and URL- that convince people to click through.

If you want traffic on your latest article and efficiently on your website, make sure that the meta descriptions are attractive and informative. They should arouse the viewer’s curiosity within the 150-word limit.

Remember that YOU too click on a particular result after reading it’s meta description. The same mentality extends to your audience. Pay attention to the meta descriptions, and you will naturally see the results.



9. Use Internal Links to Build Up Cornerstone Content

Cornerstone content is the content you deem to be the most useful and highest quality on your site. Use internal links back to this content wherever you can in other posts for phrases/words relating to this piece of content.

For instance, we run a weekly marketing show, and we’re based as a Los Angeles social media agency, so whenever we mention it in another piece of content we link back to it. This helps tell Google which content is important and gives the crawler another path back to this piece of content. Yoast (WordPress plugin) has a great post on cornerstone content I recommend reading.

Source: cavesocial.com

Conclusion

If you want your blog articles to rank higher on Google, you’ll need to put in some work to make it happen.

By using the strategies and tactics I’ve recommended in this article, you can make massive SEO.

It will take time to see results as you will see your rankings slowly climb versus just jumping to the top of page one. But you can track to see if you are on the right path by continually checking your impression count on Google Search Console or you can use tools like Serpbook to track your rankings.

These techniques are sure to skyrocket your rankings and increase the amount of traffic you see coming to your site.

That will directly result in more sales, revenue, and profit.

How will you optimize your blog articles to rank high in Google search?



Source: neilpatel.com