Our favorite report
Your Position List Visibility Tracking
First, your Position List is typically a list of selected phrases that you have defined to track.
Companies will often report on their overall visibility which shows ALL key phrases that rank in the top 100 of search. The issue here is that you may have a ton of key phrases that are not relevant to your business and phrases that don't have buying intent.
The importance of a position list is that you carefully select the right key phrases that you want to ensure you rank for.
So, what are some of the things that we look at in determining what words to track:
- Relevance
Obviously, you want the phrases you choose to be relevant to what you have to offer. This is one of the key factors of the positions list though because you can easily rank for a lot of non-relevant terms in the overall visibility.
- Buying Intent
Buying intent is one of the most important factors to understand and get right. The more spot on your intent, the higher your conversion rates are likely to be.As an example, we know that if someone searches "Web Design" that the intent is often education and the audience is looking to learn how to do web design rather than buy from someone.But, "web design agency" or "SaaS website design" change the intent of web design to be much higher likelihood of demand for services and a conversion.
- Monthly Searches
The number of monthly searches for the phrase determines the amount of potential visitors that you can achieve for the term. Phrases with high monthly search volume that you can rank in the top three for will produce a solid amount of traffic.
We typically look for phrases with at least 50 monthly searches, but it may depend on your industry and what is likely.
The more niche and narrow you are, the higher the conversion rates but often also the lower the search volumes.
- Competition
A signal of how hard it is to reach the first page of results based on how many other pages rank for that term.
Now, if you are able to find a key phrase with 400 monthly searches that is highly relevant to your offering and has a lot of buying intent then rank in the first 3 results of a search engine, this is extremely valuable for lead generation.
You can’t effectively optimize your site without doing research. You need research in order to understand your target audience, how people are currently finding your site, and what keywords are being used in in search results. It’s also helpful to know which of your posts are being viewed the most and which need a little love. Using a tool such as Google Analytics will help you tweak your strategy to fit the results of the data you now have access to.
Tweak Your Title Tags
This is a change that can make a drastic difference when it comes to optimizing your website. Your title tags give search engines the right information about your site’s content and purpose. Don’t make the mistake of leaving them as the default “About Page,” but instead use keywords and phrases describing the page that boost your placement in the SERPs.
Create Quality Content
We continually stress the importance of quality content when optimizing your website, and it’s for a reason. Search engines place a lot of weight on relevant content when determining where your site ranks. Although it’s important to include keywords and phrases in your content, what’s more important is making sure the subject of your post is interesting to your visitors. If you are creating content that is in demand, people will come. Flooding your site with every keyword you can think of might cause the search engine crawlers to view you as spam and rank you lower instead of higher.
Build Inbound Links
Search engines look for both inbound and outbound links when they search your site. Inbound links redirect to another page on your site, and outbound links will bring the reader to another site. It’s important to include both types in your content if you want to build your rank, but make sure the links are meaningful. Just like how flooding your posts with keywords you think will stick is considered spam, using too many useless links will detract from your ranking.
Get Help
Many people take SEO into their own hands without any knowledge of how to go about it. When they don’t see the results they want, they become frustrated. If you’re not an expert but you’re in charge of optimizing a large site, then it might be in your best interest to get an SEO Expert who really knows what he or she is doing.