How to Rank for a Keyword in Google (Even the Tough Ones!)

if you want to know how to rank for a specific keyword in Google I'm gonna go over everything you need to know and we're starting right now if you want to transform your website into a customer or lead generation machine I'll show you all my best tips tactics and secrets to get there fast let's dive in hey there I'm West McDowell web strategist for the deep end and if you're not subscribed to our channel yet we do two new videos a week you're not gonna want to miss any of them so go ahead and click the subscribe button and a little bell icon next to it so you never miss another video you need to succeed online if you run a business you probably want to be found online for what it is you offer right well in that case you're definitely going to want to show up at the top of Google searches but what exactly does it take to get there you know there's a lot that goes into proper SEO including what you put on your pages itself you know how do you structure your pages what content do you put on your pages but going into 2019 it's still really important to have a lot of good external signals to your site which means backlinks and of course a backlink is just any time another website links to your site but the other thing you have to know about backlinks is they are not all created equal you know some come from really on reputable spammy sites and some could come from Forbes and on top of that some links are actually called nofollow links which means Google knows not to really count them they can still help in some ways but they really aren't counted in the traditional way that Google normally counts a link so one of the biggest factors that really makes a link help you rank for a certain keyword is the anchor text or the words on the other website that link to your page or form that hyperlink you know so in this case it would be the words click here and I think the reason it's such a big signal is simply because that really shows Google what your page is about because not only are they seeing that keyword on your page but hey this other website thinks your page is so much about that topic that that's the words that they chose to use to link it now lots of SEO experts as well as Google themselves kind of go on record saying anchor text isn't really that important anymore I think it's just because they don't really want you to manipulate it but so many tests have proved otherwise it is still a very important ranking signal in 2019 so you're definitely going to want to pay attention to it so that sounds easy right just build a bunch of links with the right anchor text for the the terms you want to rank for right not so fast there's a catch so Google really hates being manipulated and they don't want anyone to actually go out there seeking links in a perfect world for Google they want every link just to be earned back in the day Google was not super smart about this tactic so you would just go out and get as many links as you can and you would just optimize the anchor text to be the keyword you want to rank for and you were good to go but since then Google's rolled out the penguin update which basically seeks this kind of thing out and analyzes anybody with too many links that say the exact same thing it looks unnatural like you had something to do with those links rather than a bunch of site owners just liking your content and naturally sharing it you know think about it if 10 different web sites we're all to link to your website what are the odds that they would all use the same keyword phrase when linking to your site so let's say your locksmith you know I bet some would use locksmith locksmith in your city the name of your business itself or the actual website address you know what wouldn't happen is all 10 of those websites using the same phrase locksmith and Phoenix it's unnatural and Google's just gonna slap that down so the problem is if you ever want to rank for a keyword you do need some of these exact to match anchor text links but you can't be too aggressive about it I'll show you the plan I use to figure out how many overall links you're gonna need how many should be exact match anchor text and how you can go about building them safely so we're gonna need to go over the computer for this so let's get started okay so the first place we're gonna come is kW find your short for keyword finder now I'm assuming you already have the keywords that you know you want to be found for if not I do have a video that I just made very recently that shows you how to find the keywords you're gonna want to use and you can get that by clicking on this little card right up here but assuming you know the keyword you want to rank for and you're signed up for kW finder go ahead and get started so let's keep going with the locksmith in Phoenix example let's just type that in there and we're gonna click on find keywords now we're not actually doing this today to find the keywords because it remember again I'm assuming you already know the keywords you've researched you know you want to use but what we're doing right now well we're paying attention to are the competition so basically it's going to show you these are all the guys that are showing up in the Google search right now for this term and it shows you the top 10 so basically the name of the game here is just to do a little bit of recon and see who's here and how likely you are to beat them and what you need in order to beat them so we've got right at the top we have Yelp this is very common especially for service based businesses you'll see the Yelp listings at the top quite often and it's gonna be pretty hard to beat Yelp to be honest they've got a really high domain authority at ninety four not just so you can't beat them I've seen it happen but what I would want to focus on right here is this guy right here pop alikom so that just sounds like a local locksmith to me so what we want to pay attention to are you know basically these ranking signals we've got domain Authority which is just how strong the overall site is page Authority which is the same thing but talking about that specific webpage not the site itself and then we've got citation flow trust flow but what we really want to look at or the number of links right here so it's showing they have seven only and they're number two so let's go ahead and get a little bit more information on them by clicking on the little three dots over here to launch this little section that says show backlinks okay so right here that page is loaded so basically it's going to show all the backlinks they have which shows a lot more than seven but don't get fooled because a lot of these are broken links that are no longer active so what we're gonna do is we're gonna filter this list out we're gonna click on only active so it gets rid of all the broken links right away and we're also gonna click on do follow this is only going to show us those valuable do follow links not the nofollow links which are more just standard directory links that don't do as much good so now we have a much clearer picture of what exactly these links are I'm gonna go ahead and make this window a little bigger so we can see the anchor text as well and this is really what I want you to look at so the anchor text this first one says na I think that probably means it's probably an image link meaning it's probably make their logo that's a linked up to their website but all the rest of them it's pretty clear why they're ranking number two because they've got locksmith Phoenix Arizona all the way down here which is actually putting them in a huge risk of danger of being over optimized so while they're still ranking today Google could come up with an algorithm update tomorrow that would wipe them off the map with this so you know I'm counting here they've got six exact match anchor links and so basically what that says is you want at least seven okay so now you know how many web sites you need links from but here's the other thing you can't just get them all right away that's gonna look unnatural again so what you need to do is kind of drip them out a little bit and the amount of time you need to drag it out for is gonna really depend on the age of your site and how many links you already have so if you've been around awhile and you already have a lot of links you can probably go a little faster but if you're brand new it's gonna look really suspicious and shady if you just get a bunch of links right away so you're gonna want to go a little slower in that case so I'm gonna give you a little schedule here so if you're a newer site you can think of this as a monthly schedule if you're if you've been around for a bit you can think of this more as a weekly schedule okay so in week or month one you're gonna want to focus on basically these trust building links so these are mostly gonna be nofollow they're gonna come from mostly your social profiles and directories then in a week or month to now you can start going for those more Authority links you're gonna want to move kind of slowly and cautiously so you're gonna want to go for more you know naked URL so that's basically just the website address website calm or locksmith in Phoenix comm as well as branded anchors so like that would be the name of your business so if your locks if your locksmith company is called Acme locksmiths that's what you would want to use as well and basically you're gonna want to try in week or month two to be building around 20% of the total links you need now moving on to week or month three you're gonna continue with those Authority links you're gonna go for more branded anchors again that's your company name and now you can start by trying for one or two exact match anchors so that's the keyword phrase you want to rank for in this case locksmith and Phoenix go ahead and do a couple of those and then do some blended so basically you're blending your business name with the key word so would be Acme locksmith in Phoenix and in this time frame you're gonna try to build out around 30% of those total links you need alright moving right along to week or month four through six so these are the the links you're gonna want to build in those last couple months so you're gonna want to ramp round these out with a variety of links so what I would want you to do first is try to find some related or synonyms to your keyword phrases and use anchor text based on that you know this might be something like locksmith service in Phoenix or 24 hour locksmith in Phoenix something like that then you can go for a few more exact match keyword phrases and then go for some more of those blended so that would be again be the brand mixed with the exact match so again that example was Acme locksmiths in Phoenix and these phases four to six and are you gonna want to spread that out getting that remaining 50% of the total links you need in the end you'll definitely want more exact match to links than your competition has but here's the catch you need to keep those two under 30 percent of your total links so let me illustrate that point so if your competitor has it has seven exact match links you want at least eight exact matches plus a variety of 18 additional links you know these should be naked URLs branded with your company name synonym keywords related keywords and you might even want more you know you also want total links then your competition has total links so you need to not only beat them in the exact match links being to beat them overall link numbers as well so it really depends on your competition level you you may have very little work to do or you may have quite a bit of work to do as you research your competition it may look like they're getting away with murder like they've got way too many optimized anchor text links back to their site here's the thing though you don't want to play that game just because they're getting away with it because what's gonna happen is Google get smarter all the time they've got new algorithms all the time and you don't want to be caught with your pants down when they finally do the algorithm update that's gonna get you in trouble so that's why it's really important to do things the right safe way so what about the quality of the links you're gonna get you know you're definitely going to want to seek out good opportunities not spammy ones so I want you to focus on websites with a domain Authority of over 20 and a trust flow score of over 15 and keyword finder will show you those scores when you're researching a website now I recently did a video showing you exactly how to build really high quality backlinks and you can get that by clicking right up here but I will warn you those methods do make it kind of hard to control the anchor text that links back to your site because you're dealing with other websites and their editorial guidelines so to get the exact match anchors might be difficult not to mention it's a time-consuming process so I'm gonna recommend that you probably outsource your backlink building I use a company called the Hoth for SEO and link building and all that stuff they do a really good job that are affordable and the good news is you can control that anchor text with the links that they build for you I probably recommend getting their foundational links packages they're really affordable and like I say you can control the anchor text 100% they've got plans as cheap as 60 bucks a month and if you do this I recommend going with standard English and out premium English just to save some money these aren't really going to be read by people it's definitely more of a pure SEO play and of course I'm going to link to them in the description below so you can click you get started with the Hoth but now I want to hear from you I want to know are you planning on actually using this plan with your own website or do you have any extra backlinking or SEO tips that other people watching this video might want to know about go ahead and leave it all in the comments below and if you have any questions I'll go through those as well and answer any that I can alright and if you're not subscribed to our channel yet you're not gonna want to miss out just click the little circle icon right here to subscribe and if you need any kind of one-on-one help for me I do offer one-on-one consultation kickstart calls so you just click right over here to sign up for one of those and so I can answer any questions you have you have me for an hour alright guys West McDowell for the deep end I'll see you in our next video

Channel: Wes McDowell

Views: 63,598

Keywords: how to rank for a keyword in google, how to rank for a keyword, how to rank for a keyword 2019, how to rank for a keyword fast, how to rank for a specific keyword, how to rank, how to rank #1 on google, how to rank high in google, how to rank in google, how to rank on google, rank 1 in google, rank in google, google, google ranking, rank on google, improve google rankings, keywords, off page seo, seo ranking, seo techniques, seo tips, seo tutorial, white hat seo

Id: rmsDpLQTlK4

Length: 14min 2sec (842 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 04 2018