3 Steps for Finding Easy-to-Rank SEO Keywords

The critical thing in search engine optimization isn’t getting backlinks or your website design. Before any of that can even come into the picture, you must first choose the right keywords to target. You’ll start getting traffic and profits immediately by choosing easy-to-rank keywords instead of waiting months to see results.

How do you choose keywords that you can rank quickly?

Go for Long Tail Keywords

Generally, you’ll want to be targeting keywords that are three words or longer. Target keywords with at least 1,000 searches a month, more if you have a PR 2 or higher website.

Do an exact match search for your keyword. In other words, put your keyword in quotes, i.e., “this is my keyword.” This will give you the exact number of competing websites.

Ideally, this number should be less than 50,000.

Evaluating the Top Five

Your goal is to get in the top five positions in the SERPs as quickly as possible. There’s so little traffic below the top five that it’s not even worth bothering. 

The weaker the top five, the better your chances of ranking for those keywords quickly.

First, evaluate whether the top five results are deliberately trying to rank for the keyword you’re targeting. There’s a good chance they just ranked by accident, making pushing them off much more straightforward. 

Do they have the keyword you’re targeting in their title tag? Is the keyword in their meta keyword tags? If so, then you’re in for a more challenging fight. If not, the going will be much easier.

How many backlinks does your competition have? Use ahrefs.com to check.

Also, gauge your competitor’s ranking by using tools like SemRush. Then look at the domain age and the number of pages on your competitor’s sites.

The easiest keywords to rank for will have competitors that aren’t specifically targeting the keyword don’t have many backlinks, have low domain authority, and low domain age. Hard to rank for keywords that will have just the opposite.

Try to Find Keywords without the Root

Most keywords that contain the “root” keyword will have much more competition than those that don’t.

For example, if you’re in the diet niche, keywords like “best diet,” “low carb diet,” or “six pack abs diet” are going to be highly competitive.

On the other hand, keywords that don’t have the word “diet” in them will have much less competition. For example, “get a 28-inch waist” will be much easier to rank for.

Combining these techniques gives you a solid strategy for finding keywords that you can rank for within two to six weeks. Remember that SEO is as much an art as it is a science and that getting fast rankings is as much a function of putting up many pages targeting different keywords as picking good ones.