Where To Start With Your SEO
We touched on this in our last SEO blog post, but I wanted to dive a bit deeper into the importance of splitting your SEO strategy into short and long-term goals.
When you begin your keyword research, you'll fill your list of target keywords with various branded keywords, industry terms, and other related words and phrases. As you pull the data on these, you'll see keywords with tens of thousands of searches a month, but you'll most likely see it accompanied by a high keyword difficulty (KD). That means the top sites on those search pages are established, have high authority scores, and will be difficult to overtake. Notice I said difficult and not impossible.
Next, you might look at other variations of those difficult keywords, related phrases, or other words on your list. You'll eventually come across words with a search volume of anywhere from 100-5,000 searches but a low KD score. Your initial thought may be, "Why would I waste my time on a low search volume term?" Your thought process would be about half correct. You don't want to spend a TON of time on these keywords, but you'll want to focus on them first.
Going after these low-hanging fruits is how you will initially start improving your ranking. Create a blog post surrounding that keyword, or build a page that lives in your site's junk drawer (the bottom section), but always match the type of content to the pages that are already ranking, as they'll indicate the intent of that search term. What happens is that Google will start improving your ranking on those pages, driving more traffic to your site. If the content is good, they'll stay on your page long enough for Google to understand you're providing quality information, thus improving your own authority and giving you a fighting chance to start working on the more challenging keywords.
Regarding the limited traffic, think about this as though your website is your living room. You'd notice if you had an extra 100 people move through there in a month. What could you do with 100+ new people visiting your site monthly? Then, if the keyword has a high click potential and transactional intent, you're in business!
The last thing to look at is your competition. Enter your competitor's sites into a tool like Ahrefs or Semrush and look at the terms they're ranking for. Not the terms they want you to think they're ranking for, but the ones that they actually show up for. You can also open an incognito window and type some of your target search terms to see if you or your competition appears on the first page. This will give you a better indication of which terms to target, and which ones you can take over from your competition.
By taking these initial steps, you'll be in a much better position to then tackle the more challenging keywords with a long-term strategy.
