Looking for an Austin SEO Expert or an Austin SEO Company? Well you found one and I am going to walk you through how I targeted the phrase “Austin SEO Expert” to get you to view this page and rank in Google’s SERPs.
As an SEO Expert based out of Austin, Texas, I use a lot of SEO tools. One of my favorites right now is a tool called SEMRush (https://www.semrush.com).
SEMRush allows SEO professionals to do all sorts of SEO related tasks including keyword research.
If you prefer to watch a video on how I went about ranking the keyword phrase “Austin SEO Expert”, I have included both a video on Youtube and Facebook in this article.
AUSTIN SEO EXPERT KEYWORD RESEARCH
Here in Austin competition for SEO related words is pretty tough. There are plenty of SEO firms and companies that have been in the Austin area for years. They are well established and have been using their skills to rank their SEO companies and target Austin SEO terms. So you might be wondering how does a new company such as Hang Ten SEO or any Search Engine Optimization company compete for ranking? That is where Keyword Research comes in.
Keyword Research is all about finding High Volume – Low Competition keywords or what I like to call UNICORNS that you can rank for.
When using SEMRush, I like to use their [Phrase Match] functionality to view a keywords Volume and Competition Score.
SEMRUSH VOLUME AND KEYWORD DIFFICULTY (KD)
Volume represents the average number of times users have searched for a given keyword, like “AUSTIN SEO EXPERT”, per month. In SEMRush’s case it’s an average of the last 12 months of search activity.
Keyword Difficulty (KD) represents an estimate of how hard a keyword is to rank for on a sale of 1 – 100% and is based on the domains that are currently ranking for the term or phrase.
When doing keyword research you can see in the image above that “AUSTIN SEO” has a Volume of 1000 and a KD score of 45.84, which means it is relatively competitive and hard to rank for. Scrolling down the list Austin SEO Expert pops out because it’s KD score is much lower, with a score of 34.69 and a volume of 170. The keywords and phrases above it and below it either are more difficult to rank for or have less monthly volume.
The trick is to find keywords and phrases that have good volume, but are less difficult to compete for. Based on my analysis the phrase “Austin SEO Expert” is the ideal candidate that can be targeted.
VALIDITY CHECK TITLE TAGS & URLs
Once you have found the phrase you want to target, it’s a good idea to do a validity check on how it is being presented in Google SERPs. Below I searched on “Austin SEO Expert” and the results looked very promising.
What you’re looking to see is if your targeted keyword is being used in the Title Tag and in the URL. In the example below for the top 10 listings, the exact match of Austin SEO Expert was used 6 times in the title tags and 3 times in the URLs, which is a very good sign that we will probably be able to rank on page 1 for our keyword.
YOAST SEO & KEYWORD RESEARCH
Once you have found your keyword or keyword phrase and done all your keyword research, it’s time to create your article. I highly recommend a tool called Yoast SEO (https://yoast.com/), which was developed for WordPress. Yoast SEO provides SEO related feedback during the creation of an article and tells you how to best optimize the page for maximum SEO exposure.
Yoast will give green circles for items that are considered good SEO wise and red or orange for items that need work. So for example if my title was missing “Austin SEO Expert”, Yoast would give a warning that my main keyword was missing from the title. Same would apply for Meta Description and so on. As you can see the article I have written for Austin SEO Expert is just about perfect.
AUSTIN SEO EXPERT KEYWORD TRACKING
Once you have performed your keyword research and written an article based on your targeted keyword or phrase, you will want to track progress of your keyword SERP rankings. Again I use tools like SEMRush or SEOProfiler (https://www.seoprofiler.com) to track keywords over time. It usually takes between 1 to 2 weeks before you will probably see how well you’re ranking. In some cases depending on the keyword and competition, you may be able to rank in less time. The goal is to get to page 1, position 1 and stay there, but obviously depending on the competition that can be extremely tough.
Below is our starting point for where we ranked. Notice that our page Austin SEO Company was actually ranked for the term “Austin SEO Expert”, but realistically Google probably wasn’t ranking it for Expert, but rather Austin and SEO as you can see by the black highlights.
A ranking of 102, which means 11th page in Google searches might as well be 1000 because it’s so far down the SERP listings. I highly doubt any traffic for people entering our target keyword.
One day later and our ranking moved up considerably. Notice now that the page’s URL that is ranking is actually this page rather than the “Austin SEO Company” page. Over the next few weeks, our ranking will probably jump around a lot, but hopefully if we analyzed the competition correctly we should see a page one ranking.
By watching your ranking score you’re able to see if your article needs to be tweak based on how well it is doing and what the other competition is doing with their articles. Remember that SEO and writing articles to rank keywords isn’t a one and done deal, it’s always evolving and changing. I will often scan the top 10 listings for a specific keyword and compile a best of article that takes the competition’s ideas and twists it with my own ideas to come up with an article that hopefully will outrank the competition.
One way to boost a page’s ranking is to provide link juice to it or what is referred to as a backlink. Backlinks are important in SEO and pages that have more backlinks tend to rank higher. A good place to start is creating an internal backlink to this page from the homepage or another page that has high traffic volume.
If nothing else remember CONTENT IS KING and FRESH CONTENT is critical for your website traffic and SEO performance, so find those keywords and start writing great articles.
Update 1: 6/30/2017 | 6 Days Later
After writing this article, 6 days later the article is now ranking on the First Page of Bing in 8th position for Austin SEO Expert and the article keeps moving up on Google.
To give the article more ranking juice it is recommended to build backlinks to the article through social media and other websites. I have used LinkedIn and Facebook and will use Twitter. Another good tactic is to add a video (Youtube) to the article because in general Google tends to rank articles with multiple types of content higher.
Update 2: 4/1/2017 | 11 Days Later | Austin SEO Expert
Our “Austin SEO Expert” article is still hanging around Page 2 of Goggle, but has moved up to position 1 on Bing and Page 1 on Yahoo.
Google is still not giving the article the ranking we had hoped, so we are going to try to add more content to the article that is location based including.
- Add a Google Map for our office location (Let google know we are talking local)
- Add some links to local establishments (This might help establish that the article has some local signals.)
- Add a video talking about the article to youtube with the tag Austin SEO Expert
Since Austin is part of the keyword, it could be that Google is ranking articles based on location, so if we add more location information, that could help boost the article. Remember Search Engine Optimization isn’t an exact science, so you have to modify articles to see if those changes may.
Austin SEO Expert | Downtown Austin
Hang Ten SEO is conveniently located just west of downtown Austin. If you would like to meet up to discuss your Website and SEO needs, you can contact us or we can meet you at various locations around Austin including.
Recently I wrote an article on performing keyword research. The phrase that was chosen was "Austin SEO Expert". In the video I walk you through how I came up with that phrase and how to write the article.https://hangtenseo.com/austin-seo-exper…rd-research-2017/#SEO #Austin #SEMRush #keywordresearch #keywords #SearchEngineOptimization
Posted by Hang Ten SEO on Monday, September 4, 2017
Update 3: 9/6/2017 | 13 Days later | Austin SEO Expert
It been almost 2 weeks now and the “Austin SEO Expert” article has remained in position 1 of Bing. The article is ranking between bottom of page 1 in Yahoo to top of page 2. It’s ranking around 20 in Google. I added a Youtube and Facebook video yesterday, to hopefully boost the article’s ranking.
Update 4: 9/8/2017 | 15 Days Later | Austin SEO Experts
Well today our rankings took a hit and we are down to top of page 2 on Bing and ranking 20 on Google.
I decided it might be time to tweak our home page title
From : Top Austin SEO Consultant | Hang Ten SEO | Local SEO Experts
To: Top Austin SEO Consultant | Hang Ten SEO | Expert Optimization | TX
Sometimes just little changes can make a difference in ranking. Taking off the “s” in Expert might make a difference. The rule of thumb here is fine tune your listings when the rankings aren’t what you’re expecting and it could make a change.
After making the change and waiting a few hours the Home Page shot in ranking to 12th or top of page 2, so Page Titles appear to carry a lot of weight.
Here are just some of the methods we are using to boost our rankings for “Austin SEO Expert”
Update 4: 9/11/2017 | 18 Days Later | Austin SEO Experts
Today was a fantastic day for our rankings. We finally made it to page 1 of Google and ranked in the 6th position. Our website also ranked in Bing and Yahoo. Actually they all ranked in the 6th spot, but I didn’t want to display 6 6 6 in the image. This isn’t devils work, it’s common sense SEO tactics. What I have been seeing is page 1 of google for the term Austin SEO Expert is very volatile with companies ranking up one day and then down the next.
Hopefully I have been able to show that SEO takes time and patience to reach page 1 of any search engine and even when you get their you could be bumped off the next day by competition or better written articles.
Update 5: 9/16/2017 | 23 Days Later | Austin SEO Expert
After 23 days our targeted keyword Austin SEO Expert actually hit the #1 spot in Google. This is the ultimate prize when trying to rank keywords.
A few observations.
First we didn’t rank this article in Google, but we did rank the website it was posted on.
I went to town creating a bunch of backlinks to the website and article using various methods including
- Building a LinkedIn Company Page
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/austinseoexperthangtenseo - Building 2 websites using Google Sites and Strikingly
Google Sites: https://sites.google.com/view/austinseoexpert
Strikingly: http://austinseoexpert.strikingly.com/ - Building Trello Board
Trello: https://trello.com/b/wAsjIcHa/austin-seo-expert - Paying a Fiverr $5 Gig for backlinks to the LinkedIn account
What I am finding now is these accounts are now starting to show up in the listings, which increase the visibility of the Hang Ten SEO brand name and potential traffic to the website.
Update 6: 9/27/2017 | 34 Days Later | Austin SEO Expert
This will probably be my last update to the Austin SEO Expert article. The article hit #1, page 1 on Bing and seems to oscillate between #1 and #3 on Google and has remained high in the rankings for at least a week.
So there you have it. Using sound SEO techniques I was able to rank Hang Ten SEO page 1 for Austin SEO Expert.
Update 6: 10/09/2017 | Austin SEO Expert
It’s been well over a month and the website is still ranking on page one between position 1 to position 3. I wanted to add this video that was made targeting the keyword “Austin SEO Expert”.
Great tips, I’ve learned so much from this article… I wish I would have found this before waisting 4 months of time and money paying an seo firm that yielded me little to no results.
Hi Brian,
Thanks. Check out my book Local SEO A roadmap to successful local ranking. It’s available on Amazon. I give a lot more tips in the book.