Sometimes when we are working, and we’re Super Hyper focused on a specific aspect of the task we forget that things are happening in the peripheral. I just experienced the perfect example of that.
It is important to remember that there are a lot of keywords that an article can rank for besides the one that you’re trying to rank for.
I forgot about that!
This forgetting is where exciting things happened that I didn’t even anticipate.
About three or four weeks ago, I was working on updating an article for Cooking Chew. When we bought this website, it had well over a hundred articles on it already, but some of these articles were truly sketchy in their writing. We knew this, and we knew that we would need to update this content as we went along. This is why I try to divide my time between writing new material and updating old content.
So I went about trying to update an article about the best-canned chili. Now, this article was horribly written, and I was hyper-focused on that one keyword phrase. I want to compete on that phrase without question that is my goal. So I went through, and I spent about 4 days of updating this article focused on that keyword phrase, and then I set it aside.
Now when I did, this wrote down some benchmarks such as where it was on Google currently for that keyword phrase how much traffic it was getting and what the click-through rate for the article was. I went back yesterday and reviewed the report to see where it was at, and something really fascinating had happened.
In SEMRush, which is a tool that I use for SEO, I can see the long history of an article and how many keywords that article had ranked for month by month. After I spent some time writing the article and updating it, I guess I made enough changes that now it’s ranking for an additional 36 keywords. It is not ranking on the first page yet for the keyword phrase that I wanted it to, but it has climbed significantly. Getting an additional 36 keywords is a huge deal. The funny thing is that it’s not something I was thinking about I was not thinking in any way about those additional keywords.
I know better.
A solid article can write for hundreds of keywords over time. This is really great news but news that I don’t think we think about often enough. This is why we need to think about semantic keywords and LSI keywords and the power of these kinds of things. Your article can end up on the first page of Google and position 0 for word phrases that you never expected. It’s also interesting because in this case my article is starting to rank for a keyword phrase that I didn’t expect and it’s even better than my original keyboard price. That keyword phrase has a higher search volume and a higher competitive number. So the fact that my article is starting to ring for something more competitive with the higher search volume means since this article is now headed in the right direction.
In a future piece, I will talk about some of the changes that I made and how I made the decision to do that. so the moral of the story is if an article is not doing well on Google that doesn’t mean you can’t turn that article around and get it into a better position