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Regardless of your experience with SEO, the benefits of ranking high in search engine results are clear to most people. The challenge, however, is understanding the most effective areas to focus your SEO efforts and the methods for doing so.
There are several factors to consider when ranking your pages at the top of SERPs (search engine results pages). As a result, it’s extremely easy to waste too much time on areas that create small margins of value while barely contributing enough effort toward those things that do.
To save everyone the hassle, I wrote the following article analyzing and refining your SEO plan depending on your keyword rankings.
Related: 3 Powerful SEO Techniques That Will Increase Your Website’s Ranking in Search Engines
The danger of oversimplification in SEO campaigns
With SEO playing such an important role in the growth and success of businesses, it should come as no surprise that there are tons of different organizations out there offering advice on the best ways to do this. And since most people are looking for quick results, many of these resources will oversimplify the process and tell you to focus on just one or two variables.
Many SEO companies measure the “performance” of a campaign usually by adopting one of the following criteria:
While these are clearly integral elements of any SEO strategy, focusing on a single variable is a misleading approach.
Many companies tend to focus on items that come easy to them because… well, it’s easy for them. But the reality is that SEO is not a one-size-fits-all game, where more always equals better. While these metrics can certainly assure you that you are moving in the right direction, there is a limit to the impact of a single variable.
Adapt your SEO strategy based on your keyword ranking performance
When perfecting your SEO campaign, a good strategy is to make adjustments based on how your keywords perform in terms of SERP rankings. This helps you focus on the keywords that have the most value and can perform better over time.
Here are some tips for adapting your SEO strategy based on keyword ranking:
Keywords ranked from 50+ to not at all
If your keywords are underperforming or failing to rank, your main concern should be the type of pages you publish. This mainly involves focusing on search intent.
Search intent is why a user performs a particular type of search. Are they:
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Searching for a particular website (navigation)
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Trying to find an answer to a question (informational)
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Intention to make a purchase (transactional)
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Are you looking for more information about a (commercial) trademark?
By finding out why a search was made, you’ll be able to tailor your content to better meet those requirements.
A practical approach to measuring search intent is to look at the content currently ranked on the first page for your targeted keyword. These pages are there for a reason: they successfully respond to users’ search intent. For example, if you find that there are a lot of “what’s this” type articles on the first page, it indicates that the search intent type is informative.
Once you’ve established search intent, you should align that need with your content. This doesn’t mean copying what’s already available, but instead, providing valuable and unique content that meets user needs.
Related: 8 Ways to Qualify and Rank Keywords in Google Search Results
Keywords that classify ages from 40s to teens
When your keywords start ranking between 40 and 15, this is a sign that some of your content may already be relevant and valuable to some extent. But there is still a lot of work to do, especially when it comes to link building, for your page to reach the first page.
SEO is incomplete without link building. Backlinks are used by search engines to crawl the web and are also used by Google to understand which pages on the web are the most cited and referenced.
As for how many links you should target, a good place to start is by seeing the average number of backlinks your first page results currently have. This gives you a target to aim for, although it shouldn’t be considered a hard rule. A few quality links from relevant, authoritative sites can have a greater influence on your page ranking than numerous low-quality links.
However, there is an important caveat to note. If all the sites on the first page have high domain authority (their sites have been established for long periods of time) it may take more time and effort to surpass them.
Keywords that rank first page
Congratulations! Your keyword has landed on the first page of search engine results. However, maintaining this positioning still requires work.
Even though link building played an important role in getting you on the first page, its impact diminishes at this stage. In our experience, you can’t just connect in the first place. This is where other elements come into play, specifically domain authority, topic authority, and user experience.
Domain authority and topic authority are crucial ranking factors that are not easily influenced in the short term. Domain authority reflects the overall credibility of your website, while topical authority indicates your expertise in a specific topic. Both take time to build and require consistent, high-quality content and positive user engagement.
Given the time-consuming process of building domain and topic authority, we recommend focusing on more easily controllable factors: user experience, page load speed, and conversion rate optimization.
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UX (User experience) is the interface between users and your site. You want users to return to the page in SERP and find what they are looking for without clicking on another result again.
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Page speed is an essential element of user experience. Slow loading speeds are known to cause frustration among users, which leads to them “bouncing” off your site. It is also known that Google will upgrade or demote sites that are too slow.
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CRO, or conversion rate optimization, is all about making subtle changes to your website that increase the likelihood that visitors will take a desired action, whether that’s purchasing a product or signing up for an e-newsletter.
Related: Getting Your Top Ranking on Google: Everything You Need to Know
If you’re on the front page, your content is obviously already something of value, and that’s an important foundation to have. However, at this point, it’s about proving to Google that you are actually useful to users and that they are having positive experiences, which in this case means not returning to the search results and going elsewhere.
In this article, I wanted to offer a map that can help you distribute resources where they are needed most. Pay attention to the quality of content creation, user engagement, and other elements that may show a more lasting effect on performance. By continuously monitoring and improving these key factors, you will be able to establish strong domain and topic authority over time, leading to better rankings and increased organic traffic.