5 Important SEO Factors to Consider

Outranking your competitors in the organic search results can be a very valuable thing for your business. It allows you to bring in more high-quality, targeted traffic to your website, which inevitably leads to more sales for your business.

The tough part about this is finding a way to outrank your competitors. I am going to discuss the five most important SEO factors to consider when putting together an SEO strategy.

№1 Keyword Research

Almost everyone who wants to improve their SEO knows the importance of keyword research, but most people don’t do this step. If you skip this step or don’t perform it correctly, this will trickle down and affect your SEO strategy in a very negative way.

The keyword research stage is where you determine which keywords you are going to try to rank for. The two biggest mistakes are either picking a keyword that is very difficult to rank for and picking a keyword that doesn’t get searched for much.

If you have a budget for SEO, I would recommend looking into SEO tools, for instance, consider an Ahrefs or SEMRush account. This makes keyword research very easy. It gives you many important metrics to analyze to understand which keywords will help you the most.

If you don’t have a budget, don’t worry. Ubersuggest and the Google Keyword Planner are two helpful tools that are free. They aren’t quite as powerful as the paid tools, but they will certainly help you determine which keywords you should target.

I like to start by putting my initial keyword ideas into the Google Keyword Planner. This will give me metrics such as search volume, cost per click, and competition. It will also suggest related keywords that I like to analyze.

After I get a few keywords with a higher search volume and low competition, I plug those into Ubersuggest. This gives me more precise metrics to analyze. Ubersuggest gives you similar metrics, but it’s nice to validate metrics across two different platforms.

After I feel comfortable with my keywords, I move on to content planning and creation. It’s important to focus on creating high-quality content that is better than the competition.

№2 Keyword Usage

It is important to be smart about keyword usage in your content. You want to use your keywords when it is natural but be sure that you don’t stuff keywords.

By this point, you should have some keywords picked out that you want to target. When writing your content, try to include your target keywords when it’s natural. If you are writing your content correctly, you shouldn’t have to impede your keywords anywhere. Your keywords should show up in the content naturally.

You can see in my post on SEO for plastic surgeons, I included different keyword variations. I also tried to include those keywords as naturally as possible.

The next thing I want to touch on is using keyword variations. Instead of using only exact match keywords, it will benefit you in many ways if you use variations of your target keyword.

Here are some of the benefits of using keyword variations:

• Comes across as more natural to search engines
• You can also rank for those variations
• It will provide a better user experience

Using exact match keywords too often or keyword stuffing will only hurt your rankings in the end. Google has gotten smart and can easily determine when you are using your keyword unnaturally.
Finding natural places to include your keywords and using keyword variations throughout your content will help you rank higher, and for more keywords.

№3 High-Quality Content

Having high-quality content is the most important ranking factor. You can do everything else right, but if you don’t have good content, you won’t rank well.

After you have your keywords picked out, you can start to determine how you want to write your content. My favorite way to do this is to look at the sites on the first page for your target keywords.

I always ask myself these questions:

• Why are they on the first page?
• How long is there content?
• How much media do they have on their page?
• How in-depth do they go on the topic?
• How many backlinks do they have?

If you can answer all these questions, this allows you to know exactly what you need to do to outrank them.

When I write my content, the goal is to do what my competitors are doing but do it a little better. I try to make my content go more in-depth, have more media, and more backlinks.

It’s never a good idea to copy the content, but you can use some of their headings and topics to steer you in the right direction for your content. If you can create better content than your competitors, you have a great chance of outranking them.

№4 User Experience

Creating high-quality content and creating a good user experience go hand in hand. I made them separate points because I think they are different enough to be important on their own. You can have high-quality content that isn’t optimized for user experience, but this is something you want to avoid.

Creating a good user experience includes:

• Creating high-quality content
• Having your content easy to consume
• Providing high value to users
• Avoiding big blocks of text
• Including extra resources and media when possible

The main goal search engines have is to create a good user experience for their users. They want users to continue to trust their brand, so they want to create the best user experience possible.

Focusing on high-quality content and user experience will only help your rankings.

№5 Backlinks

Backlinks are another important ranking factor that needs attention. If you try to rank for any keywords that are competitive, backlinks will be essential in ranking higher. You may generate them writing for platforms related to your industry.

The reason why backlinks are important is that they show search engines that your content is valuable. If there are a ton of people linking out to your page, then there is a good chance your page is high quality one.

One of the best ways you can go about getting these backlinks is to promote your content as much as possible. Introduce your content to your followers. If they like it, they will want to include a link to it from their own website.

Another way you can build backlinks is by analyzing your competitors’ links. If you have better content than your competitors and can replicate their backlinks, it’s only a matter of time before outranking them.

Conclusion

If you want to outrank your competitors in the search results, these are the most important SEO ranking factors to consider. There is a good possibility your competitors are lacking in at least a few of these factors, so if you can spend time on each of the above-mentioned factors, you have an excellent chance of improving your rankings.

Tyler Nalbach