SEO has changed an incredible amount in recent years. It’s not the same as it used to be compared to 2016 or even 2018. There’s a lot that happened and in this post I’ll be unpacking what you need to know to thrive in these uncertain times.
Topical research over keyword research
The days of finding a single keyword and ranking for it are gone, you can still do it but it’s a dated strategy. When there’s a keyword that gets a lot of search volume, you’re probably not going to rank for it, more on ranking for competitive keywords later.
If you’re a new site, rankings for high volume keywords are incredibly difficult. Even if that keyword has miniscule competition, Google still doesn’t trust you. So instead, it’s best to aim your page at multiple keywords or a topic.
For example, instead of going after the search term ‘best pen for dentists’ or ‘best pen for nurses’ or ‘best pen for physician’. You would go after the topic, ‘best pens for health professionals’ and then you can use ‘best pens for doctors, nurses’ etc. as subheadings.
This way you’re targeting multiple keywords on a single page. You’re lowering the risk of creating pages with small amounts of traffic.
Doesn’t targeting multiple keywords on a single page lower the likelihood of ranking for all those keywords VS a single page?
I’ve tested both and sometimes targeting a single keyword is better than multiple. But today it’s far better to go after multiple keywords than a single keyword at least 90% of the time.
I’ll never go back to the days where so many of my pages were going after a single keyword.
Internal links for clicks over link juice
If you’ve been doing SEO and ranking businesses for a long time like me then you’ve probably been using internal links to help rank other pages on your site as the primary reason for linking. This is something that you of course should still be doing but keep CTR (Click Through Rate) in mind.
The key to getting people to click on another page is relevance. Let’s say your page is titled, ‘Best way to clean quartz countertops’. You can include links to relevant pages such as ‘At what temperature does quartz crack?’, ‘How to fix chips in quartz countertop’, ‘How to polish quartz countertop’ etc.
These are highly relevant links that should be placed no further down than 70% of the page.
This will help power-up other pages and increase the number of page views you get. Increasing rankings and can also increase the bottom line.
SERP features VS CTR
There are many features on the search engine results page including YouTube videos, rich snippets, people also ask, images and more.
You have to fight to get clicks more than ever today and some battles aren’t worth it. Let’s say you’re thinking of targeting a keyword and that keyword shows a big YouTube video covering a lot of the search result. Chances are you’ll never get above that YouTube video and if you’re ranking just below it, only a handful of people will click.
Let’s say the search result has a featured snippet first, then a YouTube video, then a people also ask section and then the normal search results. Your goal would be to score that rich result.
Your goal here is to pick your battles carefully, you won’t always win them. Go for the keywords that aren’t dominated by SERP features you cannot achieve.
So, after reading all this you may be wondering whether you can do it yourself or should you hire an expert.
Well, if you are looking for the best SEO company Idaho Falls and need to hire a marketing company? Look no further. Visit Arcanemarketing website today and learn about their services.
