One of our clients painstakingly expressed “most of our articles are not ranking on the top.”
When I did a quick check I realized not only was their content bad, when compared to other pages in the SERPs, but their meta titles were horrible.
These mistakes are common across most B2B & SaaS companies.
Poor content
Poor structure
Poor metadata…
…are some of the many reasons why an article may not be ranking for it’s target keyword or related semantic keywords.
We have since improved their contents and their articles are ranking in top 5.
Here are some tips you can use to revamp low ranking articles.
Do a thorough SERP analysis
When it comes to SEO, your competitors are the sites ranking high for your target primary keywords. Most marketers make the mistake of researching their direct competitors, how they’re writing content and then try to best them.
What you should be doing is be better than the SERP competitors. So, the first tip to improve a low ranking article is analyze the top 10 ranking articles from these three angles:
How is their content structured? Look for style & precision in explanation and KW clustering in headers. Did they use just written content or did they use good visuals too? Look at their meta data - page title, meta desc, H1 title etc.
Where can you provide better information? Look for loopholes in the content and how you can answer the questions better. Think of ways to make content realistic to the end user, instead of generic of AI content.
How is their link profile? If they have links from really high domain sites, then you should up your game. For example, digital marketing is an incredibly tough KW to rank for. If my client asks me to rank for that keyword without giving me at least a $50k to get links then I won’t even consider it. So choose your battles wisely!
BTW, after you analyze and find areas of opportunity, implement them. And do so fast!
2. Page title should address the search intent
SERP results display the Page Title and not your H1 title. Also, H1 and page title don’t have to be the SIMILAR.
Page title is what Google or any search engine would consider when crawling. Not your H1. Of course, both of these titles should definitely have your target keyword but Page title should exactly address the intent.
Most marketers totally ignore page title and just concentrate on the main header title on the page. Ensure you get your Page Title right.
3. Improve UI of blog posts
A terrible UI will make your user bounce faster.
In most cases, marketers concentrate on Core Web Vitals (which is definitely necessary) but ignore how user friendly is the blog post layout. Concentrate on providing the best user experience and your ranking will increase.
4. Build links from good sites
Of course, links are necessary without fail.
Build atleast 3-5 links for each article you revamp from good sites, if you want your new ranking to last for atleast 6 months. If KWD is higher then you need to build more links.
SEO is very competitive. If somebody else targets the same keyword, create better content and does better promotion, then they will eventually outrank you.
These tips, when applied, will make a difference
A lot of times we read fancy articles like this one and just flip it off.
However, I can assure you that when you truly apply these tips, your low ranking articles will start improving.
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