Often, your site will already be ranking for some keywords that you didn’t know about. Now that you have verified ownership of your site on Google Search Console, you can see which keywords are bringing traffic to your site, the volume of that traffic, your position for those keywords, and more.
Low-hanging Keywords
To see your position on the search engine results pages (SERPs) for keywords already bringing you traffic, go to Google Search Console, select the web property you want to view, click Search Traffic then Search Analytics in the left-side menu, and check the box next to Position.
In the table showing the results, click the Position column header to sort by position on SERPs. Any keyword with an average position of 10 or less means your site is showing up on the first page for that keyword.
First, let’s give your high-ranking content some quick SEO juice. For any keyword where you’re on the first page of results:
- Click the square-with-diagonal-arrow icon (looks like below) next to the keyword to bring up the SERP.
- Find the search result that links to your website and identify the page it points to.
- For that page, simply adjust the <title> tag to include the keywords for which the content is performing.
The <title> tag is an example of a meta tag. We’ll come back to meta tags later as they deserve their own dedicated exercise, but you can find it in the <head> section in HTML between the <title> and </title> tags. If you’re using a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, the <title> tag is usually generated automatically from the title of the post, so make sure your post’s title includes the keyword that it’s ranking for.
Quickly Get More First Page Rankings
Next, let’s do the same type of <title> tag adjustments for the content where you’re ranking on the second or third page. In Google Search Console, find the keywords where your site is ranking in positions 11-30 and perform the same steps you did for the first page keywords.
It’s not guaranteed, but this is a really easy trick that can help boost the positions of your existing content over the edge to get that enviable first page spot.
Anything beyond the third page will likely require more than this <title> tag trick. In the next exercise, using those keywords along with the keyword list you created earlier, we are going to set the proper cadence for your budget and start creating some content!
Action Steps
- Find the keywords your site already ranks for using Google Search Console.
- For the keywords where your content ranks on the first three pages of SERPs, adjust the <title> tag to maximize your SEO juice.
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Or, continue on to the next exercise on setting a content calendar.