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There are countless ways to get or increase organic traffic to your blog or website, from SEO to paid traffic to backlinks to content development and all of that. Some of these methods only work for a period of time as Google Algorithm becomes smarter and smarter. Before, you could use your target keyword too many times on your blog and rank quickly on Google. However, if you do that now, Google will identify that method as spamming and not only will you not rank higher but Google will also reduce your rankings. Google updates its algorithm frequently.
However, there are two proven and outdate-proof ways to rank higher and get more traffic to your website — SEO and backlinks. In order to rank well, your website content has to revolve around the exact keywords (primary and secondary) that your target audience are searching for (SEO), and Google needs to trust that you give the best or most needed information about that keyword or related to that niche to their users or customers (this is done through backlinking).
Now, I know, you may say I’ve heard of this before and I do SEO, but how optimized is your website’s target keyword. You need to know EXACTLY what your target audiences are searching for. Look, even if you’re an expert on the topic you blog about and you constantly create and post very useful content related to your niche, if you do not properly optimize your primary and secondary keywords and by that I mean use the exact phrases your target customers use to search for information in that niche, your website will not be seen simply because Google doesn’t know that your website contains relevant content because it does not revolve around the exact phrases that customers in that niche search for.
For example, If somebody wants to know about “how to bake a red velvet cake without an oven” and your website’s content primarily centers on “cake” and you have a post of “how to bake a red velvet cake without an oven” and other posts on secondary keywords that people searching for this kind of information also search on Google (like “red velvet cake recipe”) and there are strong backlinks (i.e backlinks from websites about cakes) to your website, Google will think that “Oh, this web post talks about the exact keywords that this user is searching for and other cake websites refer their viewers to this website, so it must provide the most relevant information about what this user is searching for” and Google will automatically rank you higher so that more people have access to the information you provide.
However, if your website or business’s content revolves around ‘’how to bake a red velvet cake’’, but the title, headings and general content of your web pages are not optimized using SEO, and your domain authority is low because you don’t have backlinks (or because of other factors), then you wouldn’t rank higher on Google.
Google aims to provide the most important information about whatever you ask it, but it cannot read every post on every website, instead it uses keywords and backlinks to determine how important the information you are providing on your website is to Google’s users in that niche and ranks you based on that.
That is why in my opinion, in order to get more traffic to your website as a result of ranking higher on Google, you need to do Search Engine Optimization and get strong backlinks to your website.
Many different tools are available for use on the internet but I personally recommend SEMRush. This tool has all the information you need to know about a niche and can help to rank higher.
Not only is it trusted by great brands and websites but it has a difficulty checker that can also tell you how easily it would be to rank for a particular keyword. With SEMRush, you can analyse your website to see what could be killing it’s SEO and improve your site’s ‘health’. Actually, why don't you check out your website's overall health right now - here. It wouldn't kill you to try, it might even be good for you.
SEMRush also has a competition checker that helps you check competition in that niche, the primary and secondary keywords they rank for and their domain authority. You could use it to check potential websites to write blog posts about in exchange for backlinks and many many more.
Don’t take my word for it, see what people say about SEMRush here.
You can also do further research about this SEO tool if you still don’t trust me but I suggest you just give it a try, it literally won’t take you more than 2 seconds to check out their free trail.
Learn to do proper keyword research here.
You can also easily get quality backlinks by simply writing a post for websites with high Domain Authority. In order to discover websites in your niche with high domain authority, you can use SEMRush Top Competition category, check each website there and get a list of the websites you can reach out to in order to write for them.
HOW TO RANK HIGHER ON GOOGLE USING SEMRUSH
I’m going to be showing you how to do keyword research and how to find optimized keywords both primary and secondary (long-tail) keywords to integrate into to your website’s content.
1. Keyword Research
If you’re starting a new website, I’m sure you’ve had a few ideas on the niche you want to pursue. If you already have a niche, you can also continue with the following instructions.
Write down the different search terms you think a customer looking for the content you provide would type on Google. Write down a bunch of them, you can use notepad or Microsoft Excel.
For example, let’s say you want to rank for ‘’weight loss for women’’, women looking for ways to lose weight could type ‘’how to lose weight for women”, ‘’how to eat to lose weight’’, ‘’women weight loss workout’’, etc. Note that there is no right or wrong here, even if these suggestions are not optimized, we can still use them as the foundation of our keyword research. The key is to find keywords and search terms in the niche we want to venture into.
Now, using this our list of keywords, we’re going to use SEMRush’s Keyword Overview Tool , type one or more of these though-up keyword phrases and click on analyze.
You’ll notice a lot of data and stats around these keywords. The ones we’ll be focusing on is keyword difficulty and monthly searches. Our aim to find long-tail keywords around our niche with low competition but enough monthly searches. This will help us to rank faster and easily. We can use this to drive targeted traffic to our website. Also, when a user clicks on the article on this low competition keyword phrase, he/she could also be directed to other sites on the website with relevant information. The longer new users stay on our website, the higher we will rank on Google because Google will assume that we have useful information to offer. A thousand monthly searches and above is okay and keyword difficulty less than 40 is also okay.
We can add a keyword to our list by clicking the +To Keyword Manager sign by the upper right corner at the top of the list.
Now, using these stats, we’ll have two types of keywords on our list — the first type is keywords with high-volume of monthly searches sometimes with high competition. This will help us to attract organic traffic and will provide us with the greater number of our monthly searches. We’ll use this list to write comprehensive pages on the general idea of our niche and adding them to our headers, page title and html name.
Then, our second type is keyword phrases with low-competition but average to high number of monthly searches. This will help us to provide content on information that our competition don’t talk specifically about on their website that users may be looking as well as help us to rank quickly for those particular keywords which will in turn boost our overall ranking. The Keyword Magic Tool can also help with your research on lower competition keywords to add to your list.
You can also click on all suggestions under the Bulk Keyword Analysis to get a number of long-tail keywords that we can add to our content. Click on the keywords and you’ll be taken to another page with more stats and information about that particular keyword. There, you’ll see a keyword variation box which will help us with building and optimizing our keyword list.
(Start building your keyword list)
2. BUILD STRONG BACKLINKS
a. Finding Our Website’s Domain Rating
First of all, you’ll need to analyze your website to know where you stand and how you can compete before trying to build backlinks. We’re doing this to know our website’s ‘’Authority Score’’ (which is just SEMRush’s term for domain rating or domain score) and find websites with higher Authority Score than ours so much that a backlink from that site will increase/raise our Authority Score by a significant amount. We can check our Authority Score by copying and pasting our website’s URL on the Bulk Backlink Analysis tool.
b. Check our competition’s Authority Score and Comparing it to our own
Alright, then we move to the Keyword Manager tool on the menu by the right, and click on our list.
There’ll be an arrow near the URLs on the ‘Top Competitors’ column. Quickly copy some of these URLs somewhere and head over to the Bulk Backlink Analysis tool and run these on URLs there.
c. Creating a list of website to get backlinks from
If all your top competition have scores between 40 and 50, your aim should be for your website or business to have domain rating between 55 and 60. So, you need to work on getting quality backlinks to raise your rating above that of your competition. This will help increase the probability of ranking higher in search results.
Now, we need to make a list of websites from this ‘Top Competition Column’ with significantly higher Authority Score. Write this down somewhere, maybe on notepad on your desktop, if you’re using Windows. With this list, what we want to do is to reach out to these websites or businesses and propose free content related to their niche in exchange for a few backlinks. Send a few topics you know that their customers will like to know about that they haven’t yet written about on their website. These topic ideas can be gotten from our long-tail keywords list. Reach out to a number of them and at least 50% of them will reply you and at least 30% will allow you to write for them. It’s a win-win, they get additional useful content for free and you get quality backlinks. Everyone is happy.
I’ve said this before but don’t underrate the power of backlinks and its ability to boost SERP ranking. It’s one very important factor that helps Google know how important a website is to a particular group of users or customers in a niche. Simply put, it works like this — one or more trusted websites or businesses tell Google that you can also be trusted and so Google increases your rank on search pages because it has been given a memo that you can also be trusted.
Usually when you get an idea on how to promote your online business, how to get more traffic, how to rank higher or whatever, you might stumble on an idea that seems very feasible and different ideas start running in your head, but you don’t take action.
When you come back the next day, you forget the good ideas you had previously and get confused because of the many new methods and ideas you’re seeing on the internet on how to go about that problem and at the end, you do none of the ideas in your head. I fall victim to this many times and my advice for you is that you focus on perfecting one idea and taking action today!
Get traffic to your website now!
To get the best out of SEMRush, I advice that you subscribe to get full access to all its tools, however you can get a 7-day free trail today. Why not use those 7 days to do a little research and analysis on your website and see what I’m talking about. If you don’t like their service, you could always cancel your free trial before it ends.
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