Last week you may have read our case study on our own blogging methodology to increase Google ranking for a specific long tail keyword; ‘outsourced blog writing’. Now, let’s walk through how you can put the same ideas into action with your own blog or your client’s blog to improve rankings.
NOTE: This plan assumes that you are already blogging and are effectively tracking your keyword rankings for the posts on your blog. If you’re not there yet, start with this infographic to get you off on the right foot.
But, since you are blogging madly and tracking your keyword rankings, here is what you can do to increase Google ranking around a particular long-tail keyword.
4 Steps to Increase Google Ranking
#1 – Learn.
Your goal here is to discover why people are finding your blog, in other words, what is the reader’s intent? Discovering intent is the key to creating valuable content that will not only reach your users, but also allow you to focus your content generation on search intent optimization. As you blog, listen to your customers and audience for feedback.
There are tons of ways to gather feedback. Read the comments on a blog post. See who shares a post on social media and why. Or, you can be even more direct. Email or call your customers and readers to ask them how they found you and why. Turns out, people are really psyched to tell you about their journey, what they think, what they like, etc.
Most importantly, record what you learn from your customers and why they found you. This will unearth intent.
#2 – Target.
Analyze the responses you get from your users in order to identify the long-tail keywords which you will target to increase Google ranking.
The best way to understand a what a long-tail keyword is through an example:
Given the Summer Olympics were so recently on, a keyword we might consider is ‘Olympic race’. But we can refine that keyword by making it a long-tail keyword, zeroing in on a particular niche of inquiries related to the Olympics. We could try ‘Olympic medals race’. Or even more focused; ‘historic Olympic medals races’. This long-tail keyword focuses on the specific intent behind users’ search queries.
When targeting a long-tail keyword, ask yourself: “Is this keyword worth writing about?” To answer yes, you want a keyword in which you can compete against the competitors’ content AND for which you can create valuable content.
For more information, see how we answered this question here.
#3 – Execute.
Once you have the long-tail keyword to target, you want to build and execute a content campaign around your long-tail keyword.
What does that look like? Three things you gotta do:
- Set a goal. Want your keyword to rank #1? Top 10? Above your biggest competitor? Quantitative is better than qualitative in this case.
- Create your blog topics incorporating your target long-tail keyword, then create the content (Verblio can help) to make it easier on yourself. If you try to shoehorn keywords in after creating the content, your work will be cut out for you!
- Promote, promote, promote! Without a promotion plan as part of your content campaign, your blog posts will be all dressed up with no place to go. Here’s a specific example of how to promote your posts on LinkedIn.
#4 – Measure.
Track the keyword; this is your primary result. Again, if you’re not tracking keyword performance already, check out how we do it here.
The key here is to set a time limit to measure how your campaign performed, based on the initial goals. Did you accomplish your goal in one month? Three months? Name it, measure it, close the campaign, and assess.
#? – Learn (again).
See what I did there?
The content game is a game that keeps giving. In times of success or failure, you always have the opportunity to learn from experience.
When Verblio (formerly BlogMutt) set out to increase Google ranking for ‘outsourced blog writing’, we learned that although we created engaging content, we had a really low click rate. Our takeaway was that we needed to incorporate stronger CTAs into and throughout our content in order to engage the readers further and drive more to action.
In success, you learn and then scale. In failure, you learn and then pivot.
By following these critical steps, you can focus your blogging to increase Google rankings with specific long-tail keywords, improving your overall SEO and bringing more qualified leads to your site.
