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Keywords are the phrases that help any website to rank higher. It is not easy for a new website to rank at the top, but it is not impossible too. It is possible with proper SEO strategies and content marketing, and it is not sure that you will get 100% result, it is based on the strategies and techniques you are following.
In this article, we will discuss, how to rank a keyword with the fundamental 10 steps. With this technique, you can rank your keyword at the top position.
10 Steps to Rank a Keyword
1. Lay your Groundwork
This is the first step or pre-step that should be done to rank for a keyword. You need two basic things to rank a popular keyword they are, a strong website and a network to share your work.
A strong website is one that exists for a long time and acquiring traffic growth and earned backlinks with the proper Google Webmaster Guidelines.
You need a network to share your works and get some views and popularity. It is important to have social media business profiles like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest etc.,
This is a basic strategy to improve your website ranking and to rank your keyword in the first position.
2. Initial Keyword Research
Keyword research is the important process to select a proper keyword that is easy for ranking. It is important to choose a keyword that is less competitive with more searches. You can make use of many online Keyword Research tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, etc.,
Avoid choosing branded and difficult keywords, these types of keywords are difficult to rank. Take a list of keywords with high traffic and choose the best for your website.
Your website may be service-based, business, or a blogging site, it is important to choose a keyword that is exactly related to your website. Negative keywords are irrelevant to your business website that creates a bad impression among users and Google.
3. Check out the Competition
If you settle down with a proper keyword, then it is important to check the competition of your keyword in different search engines like Google and Bing. It is important to note the things like,
- How many URLs and domain names contains your selected keyword?
- How do titles incorporate with your selected keyword?
- What are the types of content that are ranking for your selected keyword? It may be blogs, pages, or videos.
- What types of businesses are ranking for your keyword? Are they large websites or small businesses or new websites?
- Check the authority and age of the websites that are ranking in the top 10.
With this information, you can optimize your content and website for the targeted keyword. You should plan and organize more than your competitors to rank higher than them.
4. Consider search Intent
It is important to choose long-tail keywords that helps Google to crawl your content easier. For example, here are some of the keywords like,
- Glasses
- Eyeglasses
- Kids eyeglasses for sale
The above keywords are related to each other, but the first and second keywords do not give a piece of clear information. The third keyword ‘kids eyeglasses for sale’ have an intent to show your results.
The Google founder says a search engine will serve only one result for a perfect keyword and that result should be yours. But it is not possible in today’s world because of the competition.
So, choose your keyword with an intent and a long-tailed one.
5. Conceptualize the Content
If you are planning to create content to rank the chosen keywords, then you might consider these strategies. A keyword can be ranked with,
- An article
- A blog post
- A product page
- An Authoritative guide
- An infographic
- A video
It’s not just creating content; you should optimize your content to rank the focused keyphrase.
It is not difficult to create content, an infographic, or a video, publish your well-optimized content and publish videos and infographics linking to the source i.e., your blog post.
6. Execute
Execution is an important process, and you should be more patient. You cannot get the result immediately, so it is not important to rush your work. Avoid stuffing more keywords in your content and try to improve your keyword ranking organically than paid one.
7. Optimize your Content for the Keyword
Here comes the above step, avoid stuffing your keyword, there are some procedures to optimize your content where you need to include your keyword.
Try to include your focus keyword in the title tag, sub-heading (h2), URL, image alt-text, introduction, and conclusion. This is the perfect SEO content to rank your keyword, include some related keywords throughout your content, having related keywords in subheadings is good.
8. Publish
Check your content and On-page SEO at least 3 times before publishing. Because, if you have a good and authorized website, then your content will be crawled by Google immediately, and re-publishing or editing your content can affect the ranking.
Check all the terms like category, metadata, and tags which is helpful for you to edit your content according to the Google guidelines.
9. Promote
Your work should not be stopped after publishing, you should make your content popular and visible to a maximum of users.
Here comes steps 1 and 5, where you can utilize all the social media platforms to have a backlink. Try to build your published links with social media posts, infographics, and article submissions.
These are some of the effective promoting strategies for your blog posts.
10. Analyze
It is important to analyze the performance of your website that helps to screen the growth of your keyword ranking. As an SEO, it is important to integrate your site with Google Analytics and Google Search Console, which helps you to analyze your website.
Rather than third-party tools, you can make use of Google tools that helps you to crawl and index faster. Utilize the Google Page Insights that helps you to find the loading time, with these tools you can optimize a user-friendly website and content.