By Kasia Kowalska

I’ve been in content marketing for over a decade, and let me say that it’s never been this hard to rank highly in search.

The reason is that there’s a lot of content out there — Google says that it indexes “hundreds of billions of webpages,” which take up over “100,000,000 gigabytes in size.”

With these numbers, does it even make sense to publish new articles? Absolutely — you just have to change your approach to creating content to improve your keyword rankings.

Here’s how to find out what your current rankings are, along with 11 tips to help you boost your positions.

Table of Contents

• What is a keyword ranking?
• How to Check Your Keyword Ranking
• How to Improve Keyword Rankings

What is a keyword ranking?

A keyword is a phrase you enter into a search engine to get an answer to your query. In an ideal scenario, you’ll get a list of results matching your intent. Keyword ranking refers to a web page’s position in those search results.

For example, if we Google “best content marketing tactics,” HubSpot ranks first for this phrase and Outbrain second.

Why are keyword rankings important?

Since I started my marketing career, brands have fought to secure a spot in the top three search results — and for good reason. The number one result has an average click-through rate of 27.6%, which is 10 times higher than a source ranked in the tenth position.

As the saying goes, the best place to hide a dead body is on page two of Google. Most people don’t want to go through hundreds of websites to find an answer. They focus on the first page, trusting that a high-ranking site means high-quality content.

How to Check Your Keyword Ranking

There are two types of tools for checking keyword rankings:

• Admin panels like Google Search Console (GSC), which provide data directly from search engines.
• External software designed for keyword and rank tracking.

Let’s say you’re starting from scratch and haven’t set up Google Search Console or Google Analytics yet. In this scenario, it’s easier (and faster) to run a quick ranking audit through an external tool. There are plenty to choose from on the market. Personally, I use Keysearch.

That said, you can’t rely solely on commercial solutions like these. Your owned rank tracking tools show you first-party information. You’ll see not only your keyword positions and traffic but also your website performance.

Rank tracking tools let you manage your site technicalities and alert you about any site performance issues — both of which could impact your SEO ranks. You also need them to set redirects between pages and to index your web pages faster.

To set these accounts up, you need to follow the instructions from search engines — here’s a step-by-step from Google.

In this section, …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron