We’ve all seen the movies—a young woman (probably a babysitter of some sorts) goes about her life. She makes average teenager decisions, has a good time with friends and is oblivious to the outside world.
Then…
Dun, dun, DUNNNNNN.
All of the sudden, there is a masked murderer outside her window, ready to wreak havoc.
What does this have to do with search engine optimization (SEO)? Well, just like this poor, oblivious girl, your strategy could face the SEO equivalent of a masked murderer. But even if your SEO is a horror scene, we can help!
Undesirable Keyword Research
We’ll first visit the horror film trope of the girl with a new boyfriend. She’s young—at the prime of her life! (Or so people say.) And she just met this guy who is going to show her the world! But the world can be a scary place for our poor heroine.
This is how many of us feel when we first purchase SEO software. We have this new, awesome, shiny thing in our lives! But when we log in to run our first keyword report, we quickly learn just how terrifying and overwhelming the SEO world can feel. That first keyword report can show you good news, such as the fact that you are ranking for some keywords that are important to you (yay!). It can also show you some less than favorable rankings.
If there are some tricks (undesirable keywords) mixed in with your treats (the targeted keywords), then there’s no need to panic. Most keyword reports will provide you with links to the ranking pages. Knowing that information, you can go in and edit the copy on that page to change the focus keyword.
Ignored Quality Content
The next horror film trope we’ll explore is one of the most frustrating ones. Our heroine hears something...and it is in the basement. As she makes her way toward the door, we all scream for her to “STOP! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! YOU KNOW THIS ISN’T A GOOD IDEA!”
But our frustrated yells fall on deaf ears. No one is listening.
The same goes for Google’s crawlers and our content.
We work extremely hard to create quality content that will rank well on Google. Specialists spend hours researching, writing, editing and publishing this content. But even as we shout as loudly as we can for Google to pay attention, it simply doesn’t.
To fix this, you need to take two approaches. The first approach is to make sure your content is linking to other sources, and other sources are linking to it. We’ll get into that more in the next section. The second approach is to go back to the drawing board and optimize the content. Be careful when you do this because Google doesn’t like overly optimized content. But identify primary and secondary keywords to support your content and rework it a bit.
SEMrush has a helpful tool that analyzes the top several pages that also rank for the desired keyword and provides a roadmap to help you rank higher.
BAM! Startling Promotion
The last horror trope we’ll explore is the jump scare. Our heroine is moving through the movie when…
BAM!
Something (scary) jumps out at her.
If you are trying to get your content to rank higher, you need links, which come from link building. An integral part of link building is developing relationships with influencers, bloggers, journalists, etc. But if you jump scare these poor people, they will run!
The important thing to remember while link building is that you need to, well, build. Start from the ground. Don’t just approach these publications/outlets/websites when you need something from them. Interact with them on social media first. Compliment something they’ve written. You can even just download their content calendar to see how you can help them.
If you make the effort first, you are much more likely to secure a link with them.
Fin.
Did we say we were done with the horror tropes? We lied. There’s one more up our sleeve—the Final Girl.
This is our heroine, who trudged through all the horror and survived to tell her tale. Your business can be the Final Girl, and we can help! Contact us to learn how we can aid you in your SEO journey (and make it less of a horror scene)!
