Keywords with high KD (keyword difficulty) often seem impossible to rank for. Top-ranking websites tend to own the broad-spectrum words and phrases your small business hopes to rank for—words like hiking boots, truck tires, dog food, et cetera, have near-undefeatable keyword authority. No matter how optimized your new hiking boots services page is, or how well written your dog food blog is, it’s not very likely that you’ll suddenly outrank folks like PetCo or Merrell. However, there are a few strategies, SEO best practices, and fun optimization workarounds that can help improve your chances of ranking for high difficulty keywords.
Let’s explore some effective strategies to beat the competition and achieve a higher search engine ranking.
It’s all about precision, quality, and advocacy
Suppose you run a travel blog and want to rank for the high difficulty keyword best travel destinations. To work around this highly competitive keyword, there are a few things you can do to show Google you’re the boss you say you are.
Target long-tail keywords: Be precise
Instead of targeting best travel destinations, your travel blog narrows its focus to best offbeat travel destinations in Europe. By choosing a long-tail keyword, the blog taps into a specific niche within the travel industry, attracting a more targeted audience interested in unique and lesser-known European destinations. This approach narrows down the competition and increases the blog’s chances of ranking higher for this specific long-tail keyword.
Do this, and you will begin to accumulate clout for the primary keyword (best travel destinations) you’re competing for.
Create high-quality, comprehensive content
The first step toward optimizing for best offbeat travel destinations in Europe is to create a comprehensive blog post that goes beyond surface-level information. The content should include in-depth research, stunning images (with optimized alt tags), and practical travel tips for each offbeat destination. Additionally, your blog post should also feature relevant statistics and authoritative links to support its claims. If you can make your point fast with hard data, you should.
By offering valuable and comprehensive content, search engines recognize the blog as a credible source, enhancing its chances of ranking higher for the targeted long-tail keyword.
Build high-quality backlinks: Climb the ladder of notoriety
Reach out to fellow travel enthusiasts, bloggers, and reputable travel-related websites. Earning backlinks from authoritative sources boost your blog’s authority and increase its potential to rank.
But you might be asking yourself, why should someone link to me? This is where quality comes in—if your blog truly does offer good, comprehensive information, your hard work will help these authoritative sources look good, encouraging them to link back to the blog’s post.
Leverage user intent
Understand that users searching for best offbeat travel destinations in Europe are seeking specific and unique travel experiences. Which, in SEO terms, might translate to an Informational or Transactional intent. To speak to these intentions, your blog post should provide in-depth information, travel recommendations, data, testimonials, and perhaps even insights from off-the-beaten-path experiences.
In short, meet your visitors’ needs. By aligning the content with user intent, your blog increases its chances of ranking higher in search results for this long-tail keyword.
Last but not least, always optimize on-page SEO
Pay meticulous attention to on-page SEO elements. To accomplish this, here’s what you need to do:
- Craft compelling meta titles and descriptions that include the long-tail keyword best offbeat travel destinations in Europe.
- Structure your content with appropriate header tags (h1, h2, h3), making it user-friendly and easy for search engines to understand.
- Optimize images with relevant alt text
- Write concise URL tags
- Ensure that the page loads quickly and is mobile-friendly.
By optimizing on-page SEO, the blog enhances its page relevance and user experience, positively impacting its ranking for the targeted keyword.
Or, just use SEO Central instead
We hope some of these best practices give you a little hope to rank. They’re tried, true, and help rankings almost every time. But if you don’t want to go through the hassle of dealing with hard optimization tasks (especially the on-page SEO), or if you just want to focus on being creative and/or running your business, we have a tool that can help cut the work in half.
