How to Identify Highly Effective Keywords for Quick SEO Wins

Is there anything such as a quick SEO win? Conventional wisdom says No. At least not for SEO.

Algorithms are becoming smarter and smarter, and only the content that delivers immense value makes it to the top. However, there are some lesser-known tactics and practices you can adopt to get some sensational SEO results super quick. Opportunities for quick SEO wins are rare in this industry. In this guide, I’ll tell you how you can latch on to the ones that highly effective keywords present you.

Look for Low Hanging Heavy Fruits

It will surprise you to truly understand the number of web pages on your website that rank well for certain keywords, even if the rank is not in the top 10. This makes your website’s traffic analytics data a virtual gold mine, ready to be mined. If you have been using Google Search Console data for long enough, you would already have sufficient data related to keywords that have been performing well and are related to your main keywords.

For instance, a webpage about ‘aloe vera health benefits for skin care’ could be ranking well for highly effective keywords such as ‘aloe vera health benefits acne and pimples’. For all such pages, it makes sense to decide whether there’s scope for optimizing them for the keywords they’re ranking highly for.

Another great way to do this is to use SEMRush’s Site Explorer tool.

• Enter your root domain.
• Sort your website’s analysis results by position and find out the keywords occupying positions between #11 and #20.
• Check the URLs that are ranking for these keywords, and shortlist the top 5 that can be optimized.

With very basic optimizations such as improvements in title and meta description, adding image alt tags, expanding content with the focus on the ranking keyword, you will observe that these URLs will rank better than earlier, and could be on Google’s first SERP.

Content Optimization to Leverage Long Tail Keyword Opportunities

Statistics vary, but it’s safe to say that more than 70% of web searches are for long tail keywords. See the graph below, the long tail that goes on and on represents the volume of searches for long-tailed keywords.

If your website has several pages whose primary keywords are short, you have several reasons to look to re-optimize them for long-tailed keywords. That’s because long-tailed keywords show:

• Less competition
• Higher click-through rates
• Significant search volumes
• Higher conversion rates
• Lower cost per acquisition of customer

Keyword Magic from SEMrush is a superb tool for performing this activity. Go to the tool URL, key in your seed keywords, and it will generate a list of long-tailed keywords related to them. On the left sidebar, you will see usefully summarized subtopics, which will help you think of subheadings for your webpage content expansion or re-optimization.

Another great method of doing a similar activity is as follows:

• Do a Google search for a keyword you’re looking to re-optimize your content for.
• Identify the most relevant competitor page from the top 5 results.
• Use any keyword or domain analysis tool to find out your competitor’s top organic pages report.
• Find out the top 10 pages, search traffic, and number of keywords they rank for.
• Extract the list of keywords for the most relevant pages; you will find the most useful long-tailed keywords here.

The above-mentioned competitor analysis for relevant long-tailed keywords can be easily performed using SEMRush again.

I’ve explained all methods using SEMrush so that you don’t have to switch between tools.

International Targeting

If your website is dedicated to a local business, there is scope for some really quick SEO wins. Often, websites with a pure local scope use very generic top-level domains such as .org and .com. That said, their primary keywords have geographical, cultural, or linguistic identifiers in them.

For these, specific geographic targets can be specified in the Google Search Console.  With international targeting, you help Google understand which countries your website is relevant for. Go to Search Console, choose your website, and go to Search Traffic. Here, select International Targeting.

Make sure that your website has some relevance for the local search terms and queries used by users. International targeting, in such cases, will help your pages rank better, very quickly. This comes at the cost of losing exposure in all other countries.

Final Words

Any of these 3 methods are very likely to deliver quick SEO results in terms of improving the SERPs rankings for many of your web pages. So get cracking today!