SEO Ranking for Competitive Keywords

How do you rank high organically for a competitive keyword?  Before we look at this, first consider if the competitive keyword you want to rank for is the right one.  Sure, there are obvious keywords in each business.  But, consider less competitive long tail keywords too for “winning strategies.”

If you want to make the investment of time and resources to rank well for a very competitive keyword, here are some factors to consider.

First, study the ranking results on the first page of organic search results for your desirable keyword.  If more than half of them are not relevant to your target audience, I take you back to the point above and consider other keywords. 

For purposes of this blog post, let’s assume all the search rankings on page one are relevant to your target audience and you’re not ranking on the first page.  Where are you ranking for this keyword?  If you are currently ranking on page 25 for this keyword, is this keyword really the best use of your time and resources.  If you are willing to make the investment and have the patience, read on.

So, you’ve decided you are willing to make the investment of time and resources to compete for this keyword.  And, you are willing to be patient.

First, study the websites ranking on the first page for your keyword.  Study their content, their meta data, their source code, their URL structure, their domain age and their link count. What is their PageRank and what is your PageRank?  As Sun Tsu wrote in the Art of War, the way to defeat your enemy is to know their strategy and defeat their strategy. 

When you study the content and links from the competitors on page one you will gain insight and ideas into how they got there and what you need to do to compete effectively for your desired keyword.

In many cases, you may face a real uphill battle (refer back to the long tail strategy).  But, if you are able to get even to position #10 on the first page, that can be a good accomplishment.  But, you may need to be realistic.  If some of the rankings on page one have a combination of content, links, domain age and website architecture that you simply can not compete, then either be content with a lower ranking, or defer back to the long tail keyword (winning SEO) strategy.

Studying your competitor’s (ranking on page one) content will give you insight and ideas for what you need to do.  Because, if you are expecting this blog post to reveal some secret formula, you will be disappointed.  You will need to develop a lot of really good content and attract links.  And, there are many effective ways to do this. 

You can write content about how your (keyword centric) product is used, who uses it, why they use it and all the great things they accomplish by using your product.  I’m sure there are many people who also agree with all these great factoids, so they should contribute to your content.  For example, are there specific industries who benefit from your products?  Write about all of them, and write a lot.   

Writing all this content can take on several forms.  In addition to adding web pages with this content, you should consider press releases, articles which can be syndicated and blog posts.  If you don’t have a corporeate blog, start one.  If you do, add more content and look for relevant blogs where you can conttibute about these topics. 

You should promote some of this content in selected social media destination sites for visibility and natural link building.  After all you will need to build links for your content to compete for your super competitive, desirable keyword. 

If all of this sounds like time consuming, hard work, it is.  Did I forget to mention that?  Sorry….

 

 

Content is Still King

I talk every day with clients and write often in this blog about the importance of links in any SEO strategy. Anyone who has spent more than ten minutes reading about SEO knows that back links are critical ingredient for organic search engine rankings.

One point I make often is that a good link strategy will yield limited results or no material results without a strong foundation of content. In fact, we say that (in round numbers) 30% of a website’s SEO success is based on “on page” factors. On-page factors refer to well-optimized content with good use of keywords, meta tags, header tags, search engine friendly URLs and optimized source code.

The math is obvious. We like to say that about 70% of a website’s SEO is based on off-page factors. Primarily, this refers to the extent to which others think your content is good. At first, this sounds very strange. How can others determine how good my content is? And, how can Google (and other engines) determine what others think?

Consider a comment made by a Google engineer at the Online Marketing Summit conference I attended last October. He said this: “Google doesn’t care about your content. Google cares about who cares about your content.” What he means, is when other content (on other websites) link to your content, they are “casting a vote.” for your content.

The Google technology explanation describes how this works.  Essentially, other web pages link to your content and Google considers that a “vote” for your content.

To accentuate this point consider how Google’s origin as Backrub, is based on this concept of keeping score of the popularity of your content.

So, if creating links to content is so critical to SEO success then why don’t we just go out and buy a g-zillion links to our content?  Well, some do.  First, consider that if you pay a site to link to you, that is frowned upon by Google and the other major engines.  We don’t condone it.

Let’s go back to the comment by the Google engineer.  In fact, Google does care about your content.  He went on to say that the more relevant, keyword-rich content you have (along with a search engine friendly architecture), the more links your content will naturally attract.

Then, if you pay someone to build legitimate links to your website (not pay the website to link to you), those links will be well supported by your content and provide good SEO value.

Now, let’s go back to the 30/70 ratio although, this is admittedly hearsay, not a statistic backed up by Google.  The point to this ratio is this.  If you build a strong foundation in your SEO plan with great, relevant content, then the links you get will carry weight in SEO value. 

Of course, the Google PR value of the source of the links counts as well.  The point here is that links without content are not effective.

So, it comes back to this – content is king!