Site ranking tips from IBM’s SEO Strategist

Our newsletter series brings you insightful tips from industry-leading experts

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Our biweekly newsletter series brings you insightful tips and perspectives from industry-leading SEOs and marketing experts. In this issue, Jesse MacDonald, Global SEO Strategist at IBM, shares tips on how to identify keyword opportunities to propel your site to Page 1 of the SERP. How to identify keyword opportunities to boost site rankings By: Jesse MacDonald One of my favorite ways to use Semrush is to find "low-hanging fruit," meaning keywords that are easy to rank high for, but still bring good results. Identifying these keywords helps me to prioritize, maximize resources, and make a noticeable impact that satisfies stakeholders. One of the tools I use is the Organic Research tool. First, I put my site into the search bar within the tool. I then navigate to the Positions tab and consider how much monthly search volume I or my stakeholders would consider "impactful." For smaller sites, 100-500 searches a month can provide high impact to a site. For a larger enterprise site, 1,000-5,000 might be a more reasonable minimum. The key is to not set your minimum too high. Our goal in this scenario is to find that "low-hanging fruit" category. Next, I filter my keywords to only show terms sitting in position 11-20. Filtering in this way will reveal terms that you're on the cusp of ranking on Page 1 for. This means opportunity.   Perhaps the opportunity is polishing content you already have instead of reinventing the wheel. Or, it may mean writing a new piece of content around that keyword. Or adding logical internal links to existing pages to improve your site's architecture. Or acquiring more backlinks to this page. The takeaway is that this process gives you insight into how to align your content to better match the intent of a query.   Once I have my list together, I export it, sort through it, and create a roadmap of keywords to focus on for my content creation. Depending on the difficulty of your niche, it might take some time to see improvement in your search engine results page rankings, but this keyword evaluation and content optimization process will help you prioritize what to work on first. Try it now in Organic Research →         Jesse McDonald   Global SEO Strategist IBM

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