While searching for new ways to improve your SEO, it’s important not to overlook the high-volume keyword optimization opportunities that may currently exist throughout your website. It’s possible that some higher-volume keywords have started to rank well for different pages without full implementation of SEO best practices. This is especially true for sites that you’ve recently taken over or for older pages that may not have ranked well in the past. But by consistently monitoring your keyword rankings, you could find some of your most effective chances for increasing relevant organic traffic right in front of you.
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As an example, we recently saw that one of the pages for a particular client was ranked 25th for the keyword “overtime calculator,” which is searched 12,100 times per month. While this is a relatively solid ranking for a keyword that is searched over 12,000 times, it still wasn’t driving any organic traffic to the website as a result of being on the third page of Google’s SERP results. But upon further review — even though it ranked 25th out of 100 organic Google results — there were a number of SEO best practices that hadn’t been implemented. We believed we could update this page to feature those best practices and improve this keyword’s ranking to the first page of Google — and it worked.
By leveraging SEMrush to find high-volume opportunities — pages you’re currently ranking for with keywords that have high search volumes and are not on the first page of Google — we found that “overtime calculator” was ranked 25th. We then reviewed the current construction of that page to find fundamental SEO opportunities to increase keyword rankings and organic traffic.
While the page had a well-optimized URL containing only the target keyword “overtime calculator,” it did not have a fully optimized page title. It was also missing a meta description. So we started with these two SEO keyword optimizations.
After confirming that the URL met SEO best practices by containing only the target keyword, and optimizing the page title, meta description and H1, we then conducted a content audit.
The steps involved in that content audit included the following:
While this page already featured a free overtime calculator tool, we helped build out the copy so that users would be more clear on how it worked and what the data it produced meant. SEMrush’s writing assistant told us that we were roughly 200 words short of where we needed to be to rank well, and its Keyword Magic Tool provided relevant supporting keywords we could target with that copy.
One month after updating the copy, our ranking for the keyword “overtime calculator” moved up onto the first page of Google. It went from ranking 26th, and not generating any organic traffic, to ranking 9th on the first page and generating a significant amount of traffic .
Consistently applying SEO fundamentals and best practices will give yourself a chance to improve organic rankings more often than not. Those fundamentals include having an optimized URL, optimized page title, meta description, H1 and copy throughout the page. But more than that, we wanted to share this particular example because it’s also important not to miss the SEO keyword optimization opportunities that may exist right beneath our fingertips.
So often in SEO, we are creating new pages and trying to get them to rank for keywords we determine to be important — which is something we should obviously do. But sometimes, a solid keyword we might not be targeting at the moment has started to rank for a particular page on our site. We need to see those keyword optimization opportunities when they present themselves, too, and to update them as aggressively as we do when creating new content.
