Use a Ranking Report to Improve a Content Strategy
There are many reasons that we advise clients to not get hung up on the keyword ranking report. After all, it’s not the most accurate way to measure SEO success. Keyword rankings fluctuate on a day-by-day or even minute-by-minute basis and are based on factors that can’t be controlled including search history and search location. However, is this to say that a keyword ranking report should be ignored entirely? Not at all. The report provides important business intelligence that can guide your SEO strategy going forward, particularly in the content marketing space.
Reviewing a keyword ranking report will give you important insights into how the search engines view the content of your website. You’ll quickly be able to notice themes as you analyze the report. Some of these themes will be encouraging. You’ll notice which types of keywords you’re ranking prominently for and be able to understand where you are most trusted. Other themes may be discouraging as you notice the types of keywords that don’t have much traction. Both of these areas should be viewed as areas of opportunity as you develop your content marketing strategy.
Let’s start with the products/services/verticals etc. where you are ranking best. This is where the search engines consider you an authority. Whatever you are doing here must be working so now it’s up to you to continue to build upon that in order to dominate the space. Even if you are happy with the results here, you never want to scale back. As soon as you do that, someone else is going to swoop in there and take your place. The only way to maintain the success that you’ve achieved is to continue working hard at it.
On the opposite end of the spectrum are the areas of weakness that you notice within the keyword ranking report. Essentially the search engines don’t view your website as trusted in these areas. Because your authority isn’t as established as you’d like it to be- how do you change that? An important way to establish authority is with content. There’s a good chance that you don’t have as much content in these areas or that its quality isn’t as high. That will need to be changed. Look at the keywords that aren’t performing as you’d hoped and create content such as blog posts about that topic. You can also go back and review your existing pages that cover the topic to ensure that the right keywords are targeted and that they appear prominently on the page and in the back end meta information.
Whether you are creating content to maintain and support areas of strength or to address areas of weakness, it’s important to remember that this content is ultimately for end users and not the search engines. Yes, keywords should be implemented naturally but content that is forced just to incorporate keywords is worse than not having that content at all.
Categorized in: Content Marketing
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