It’s not easy to get an SEO organic ranking if you’re a blogger or own a website. Depending on your niche/business it can be more or less difficult. With a competitive topic, getting content ranked (for a particular keyword) can be a huge challenge. In a less competitive niche, it can be much more attainable. Whatever niche you are in however, you can target long tail keywords to give yourself more chance of a ranking. Or, low competition but obtuse keywords can work well too!
With a long tail keyword there’s far less competition as with strange and obscure keywords which aren’t often used in competing content.
The “ranking” companies (aka spam emails) which tell you they can rank your site number 1 are mostly lying to you! How do they know they can rank you? And for what keywords to they claim to do it? Of course they can’t in many cases. At best they still can’t promise anything! A particular niche might be hugely competitive and Google ranks sites according to multiple criteria, many of which you may not qualify for:
- Domain age
- Back links pointing to your site
- Authority of sites pointing back links
- Content on your site
- Domain authority
- Visitor paths and time on your content
- Click away rate
- Plus many more
A new site will therefore take much longer to rank their content than an authoritative site with tens of thousands of back links. Sites which have been around for decades will take the bulk of SEO traffic. Where does this leave new websites? How can new sites get a better SEO organic ranking?
SEO Organic Ranking – Long Tail Keywords
Long tail keywords are a good place to start. While you may not easily rank for shorter keywords which are suitable for your site, their long tail derivatives offer much less competition on the like of Google, Bing, Yahoo and Duckduckgo.com To find these hidden gems you can use all manner of keyword tools but Google’s free Keyword planner is a good place to start. Place your main keyword into the planner and the tool will give you multiple long tail derivatives of your main keyword. These keywords are already being searched for on Google and the numbers you get will denote the monthly search enquiries for each individual keyword in the list.
Once you find a good longer tail keyword which is appropriate for your audience, you can create some content targeting that keyword on your website.
SEO Plugins
A good SEO plugin is Yoast SEO which helps you optimise your content based on your chosen keyword. Yoast SEO is a free plugin which connects with any WordPress website. See also best free blog plugins for WordPress. Other plugins can help you get more social shares from your visitors (social share button) and help syndicate your content so you can get the most from it.
Sharing content and promoting it is just as important, if not more, than creating it! Without views on your content, it’s more difficult for Google and other search engine bots to “see” how people are interacting with it, and therefore determine its value and SEO rating.
The more social media sites you can share your content on the better. As more people see and interact with your content, more should also like and share it. This can create a cascading/compounding effect and even lead to content going viral.
BackLinks
Back linking is a pretty important part of SEO and often the most difficult part. Initially it’s important to concentrate of building valuable content which is share-worthy. But back linking is also a major ranking factor and has a huge influence on your SEO organic ranking.
To help build. backlinks to your content start with giving huge value in your content. Content is king! Share as much as possible on social media. If people find value in your content they should naturally share it too. People will link to content over time if it provides value and is deemed useful. They won’t link to bad content! Over time this produces a natural looking link profile which can be seen by the SEO search bots. It’s therefore important to build a natural looking link profile since Google will see an unnatural one and mark it accordingly.
To help your link building you can:
- Reach out to other blogs and websites in a similar niche to your own
- Offer to guest post for other bloggers, in exchange for back link
- Enlist the services of a professional link building company
- Blog comment on websites and blogs in your niche
- Build back links manually by creating off site links from other websites
SEO Organic Ranking – Keyword Domains
Keyword domains are another way to gain the attention of the search engines and potentially get an SEO organic ranking. Nothing is guaranteed in SEO but a keyword domain can have a positive effect. Often the search engines will look favourably on a domain name which contains the main keywords you intend to rank a website for. This of course does depend largely on the competition already ranking for your chosen keyword.
With a locally based business this can especially have a good effect usually because locally based businesses compete in a smaller circle for the desired keywords. See building a niche website for local based business.
Long Tail Keywords With Low SEO Difficulty
One of my favourite tactics is to target long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.
As described above, use Google’s keyword planner to do this, or some other keyword tool. Find a long tail keyword relevant for your business and compare the relative competitiveness with a quick Google search. Do this by typing your keyword into Google on a desk top computer and looking for the number at the top of the search results. A large number (over 100 million) will have much more competition.
You can also do a phrase search by putting your keywords in quotes “like this”. Again, this search gives you a small insight into the relative search results competition for your chosen keyword. Look again for the number at the top of the search results. Less than 10,000 means there’s more chance of ranking for this keyword. More than 30,000 means there’s much more competition for it, and chances of ranking are more unlikely.
