Keyword Ranking: How to Track Your Google Rankings For Free

By using AI tools along with your own knowledge, you can do great SEO work and stay ahead as things change. We are still determining exactly what SEO will be like in the future. If you keep learning, try new things, and focus on making your site good for users, you can keep your site visible even as things change. Google knows this, so it now looks at how your site works on phones when deciding where to rank it.

A backlink is a link to your page that comes from another website. A page with a lot of links pointing back to it indicates to Google that the particular page is providing exceptional value, and is coming from a credible website. But one link from one quality domain is much better than multiple links from several low-authority websites.

Using Ahrefs To Find Opportunities

Rankings aside, it also helps a user skimming through search results instantly understand what your page is about. And so putting your keywords at the start can suggest to its algorithms that these words are the most important. But forming a comprehensive SEO strategy—and following the steps in this guide—can help you rank higher on Google. When looking for link-building opportunities, I recommend simply going outside and looking around. Then, turn to your business contacts — these may be your partners, providers, customers, etc. If you need new local keyword ideas, try Rank Tracker’s Keyword Research module.

• Instead of ranking for a single Holy Grail keyword, a better goal is to rank for multiple keywords focused around a single idea.
• But when we got this infographic in front of the right people, they were happy to embed it on their blog.
• Then follow the steps in the resource below to update these posts.
• Here are some real examples of content that is currently ranking in Google’s AI Overviews.

Topic Clusters for Local SEO: Types, Tips & Examples

To maximize your chances, write blog posts that are long-form in nature. Definitions of “long-form” content vary widely, but most people would agree it means writing at least 1,000 words, and more like 1,500 or more. Blog posts under 1,000 words are much less likely to rank highly—see more in my guide about how long a blog post should be. Of course, it also makes a lot of sense to include your website in your bio – and to post links to your blog’s content. That way, you’ll hopefully get some people clicking through from social media to view your website.

Have a table of contents

Do you know what your target audience actually wants to know about the topics that you plan to write about? You might think that they already know all the basics about a topic like influencer marketing and want to know all the in-depth details or vice versa. Expertise refers to the credibility and experience of your author(s).

For each keyword entered you’ll see a “keyword intent” label. Choosing easy keywords will not only help you begin ranking, it will elevate BHS Links the overall authority of your website, making it easier to rank for more difficult terms in the future. No matter how much content you create to target those keywords, you may never rank. Later in this article, under the measurement section, we’ll explain how to find out which keywords you’re ranking for.

If we reach out to the author and introduce our beginner’s guide to SEO, there’s a chance they may add it to their page. Looking at the referring page, it seems the link comes from a section listing three of the best SEO guides. Internally linking this phrase may help our post to rank higher. Making the purpose and relevance of your page clear to Google and searchers is the job of on-page SEO. It’s the icing on the cake that highlights the work you put into matching intent and covering the topic in full.

If you have two pages that cover similar topics and target the same set of keywords, you are likely to run into a duplicate content issue. There are two big problems that happen when you have duplicate content. If both show up in the SERPs you can then end up with fewer backlinks to each page.

These search result pages answer specific search queries which are made up of keywords and phrases. Google’s AI is also able to understand the meaning behind each query – and therefore processes them in concepts rather than just individual words. This algorithm works similarly to the way we humans understand and process language – and is therefore called Natural Language Processing (NLP).