And give you insights into your potential traffic gains if you make the right changes. Obviously, there are times when long-form content doesn’t make sense (like for an ecommerce category page). But if you can publish long content you generally should publish long content. This is why I made sure my page covered EVERYTHING anyone would possibly want to know about optimizing their site for mobile devices. I’m competing against giant authority sites like Semrush and Search Engine Journal. For example, one keyword that we rank #1 for is “Mobile SEO.” And this is a REALLY competitive keyword.
Ahrefs
- If you’re new to SEO, you should absolutely make sure your website is friendly to search robots such as Googlebot.
- Next, optimize your content for readability and user experience.
- In truth, it’s incredibly difficult to rank a single page by itself for a handful of keywords – especially if there’s any competition at all.
- He lives in spreadsheets—crunching data, building dashboards, and creating visuals to drive decisions.
- Choose a primary keyword (a focus keyword for your page) with a manageable KD score (keyword difficulty), and use the others as secondary keywords.
This has lead to relationships – which eventually lead to links. But I have never linked to NichePursuits.com via article directories, Fiverr gigs, etc. For authority sites, I would never recommend those “manual” tactics.
Your first step is to simply type your blog’s name into Google. If it’s live on Google, in most cases, it should come up near the top of the results. We touched on this above, when looking at on-page SEO, but I wanted to reiterate how important it is to give each blog post a clear and descriptive title. You should see a list of 2 or more links, depending on how your sitemap is structured, and on whether you’re using an SEO plugin like Yoast. Let’s say someone BHS Links comes across your blog’s name in an email or on social media.
This is a simple way to monitor Google ranking and make smarter, data driven decisions. SEMrush is another great tool we advise you to use to track Google ranking. Here you can see your website’s average position on search results. But don’t panic—these updates aren’t meant to knock you down but to help you understand which areas of your site could be improved. If you are unsure how to use “incognito” or what it is all you need to do is to press Ctrl + Shift + N to open an incognito window if you’re using Windows.
➡️ Internal Linking
It will also help you see which pages are slipping in rankings so you can prioritize improving those. Some broken links on a website are normal and Google doesn’t consider 404s to be a problem per se. If your keyword’s missing from any of these areas, you’ll be prompted to add it. For example, it’ll check your focus keyword (target keyword) use.
Now consider that 34.36% of all clicks go to the number one search result, and it becomes clear why search engine optimization (SEO) is so important. If you want to rank in Google, creating content that aligns with search intent is critical. Some places are more prominent in the offline world, and search results try to reflect this in local ranking.
You just never know what long-tail keywords Google will pull up in PAA, giving your post an opportunity to rank higher than the #2 results for a high-volume keyword. For example, our free Website Grader landing page ranks on page one for the keyword “website grader.” On initial glance, it may look like it doesn’t have much content. But scroll down below the fold and you’ll find a treasure trove of words in the form of FAQs. If I target that keyword with my website screenshots, it’s not going to rank. But if I target it for “website design ideas,” now that’s another story. You’ve got less than a minute to make an impression on your website visitors.
