First, find a competing site that’s already ranking well in Google. That way, you’re reverse engineering sites that already know what they’re doing. That said, I tend to have more luck simply looking at keywords that my competitors already rank for. Research shows that people online are more likely to click on content that contains a number. As you can see, the happier you make Google’s users, the higher you’ll rank.
For example, if people are looking for “daisies” and come across a rogue SEO Anomaly edelweiss in search results, a higher quality image would help them distinguish the type of flower. Many people search visually, and images can be how people find your website for the first time. For example, if you have a recipe blog, people might find your content by searching for “fruit tart recipes” and browsing photos of various types of fruit tarts.
How To Find Competitors’ Keywords: Tips & Tools
- In addition to linking to your homepage in social media profiles, you should also be regularly sharing your blog posts with your feed.
- To help, Forbes Advisor evaluated more than two dozen agencies and identified the best SEO services available today.
- Unlock the secrets of AI Overviews and realign your SEO strategy for improved visibility and relevance on Google.
- The tools we provide help you to improve your website, to find topics to write about and to track your website’s performance.
Like title tags and meta descriptions, OG tags provide information about the content shared on social media platforms. Typically, businesses should do this immediately after launching their website. Most backlinks from social media profiles are nofollow, meaning they won’t help your SEO, but they can still send you a lot of traffic. It’s important to create categories that make sense for your content.
best SEO examples from real businesses in 2025
Achieving thought leadership in a niche is a content marketer’s dream goal, but many businesses may get discouraged from pursuing this goal due to the amount of competition. However, ignoring comments or disabling them completely has downsides. While many of these people might just be casual readers, some might actually be potential customers thinking about spending money. Mentioning your company in every single blog post, for example, makes readers question your authenticity. While adding a call to action into your content can make sense in certain circumstances, some businesses make the mistake of selling too much in their content. It takes time to build an audience and generate momentum, so marketers need to have the proper expectations before they begin.
5. Steps for Keyword optimization in SEO
To sum it up, the most important factors for Google ranking are relevancy, user experience, language, and location. Websites are ranked primarily based upon the competition between your web pages and other web pages for a particular keyword. The web pages which follow the best practices outrank every other web page in the competition and rank on top for those keywords.
Remember to tell Google Search Console what your sitemap URL is, keep it up to date. Reaping the benefits of your SEO labor may be a bit of a slow process at first, but once you’ve managed to achieve some results, your success will build upon itself. When we analyzed millions of Google search results to learn more about Google’s CTR, we found that using question title tags significantly boosted CTR. Well, it’s 10x easier to hop on a podcast than pitch, write, edit and publish a guest post. Here’s a simple SEO advice that will help you find sites to guest post on.
Click-through rate refers to the number of people who see your search result compared to the number of people who actually click on it. That tells me that a blog could be a good fit for this term but that people are also looking for books on publishing. I would then revise my initial head term or revise my blog strategy to slant toward thought leadership. Featured snippets, local packs, image packs, knowledge packs, and “People Also Ask” boxes can be valuable sources of information that can help you optimize your website later.
And some of those people might link to you, which can help your rankings. Google considers content ‘freshness’ when ranking results, so going through your posts and modifying them to reflect better your industry changes can significantly boost your visibility. There are several ways to check whether keyword cannibalization is causing issues for your site. Using a tool like Ahrefs will allow you to check if more than one page ranks for your target keywords. Whenever you write a blog post or publish a page on your site, you should always have a main keyword in mind.
There are many sites, books, and guides (we even wrote one here at Search Engine Journal) to help you get started. But you might find that many resources offer conflicting information. The higher your site ranks, the more visible your business is, and the more traffic and sales your business is likely to generate. When you are looking to increase the volume of customers coming to your store, incoming calls, and online orders, you need to be visible in Google Search. Start small—maybe optimize one important page or fix a technical issue. Set the time range to the latest full month and check the “Organic Search” row to see how many visits your site got from search.
This can be useful in revealing issues and blocking factors that you were never aware of, particularly as you’re likely to be very familiar with how your site works, giving you tunnel vision. As with all of the reports available in GSC, only a sample of URLs is provided, but this gives us a pretty good idea of the types of pages that have issues. However, these tools base the results on data from your machine and internet speeds, which may not reflect your users’ experience. The mobile and desktop charts have been split into separate reports, allowing you to check whether your pages have good page experience scores across each device. If your site scores well on mobile, but poorly on desktop, your pages will only benefit from the ranking boost in mobile search results, and vice versa. Page experience is used as a ranking signal for mobile and desktop rankings.