How To Rank #1 in Google Search in 2022 And Beyond [LNIM234]

This week on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, I’m going to tell you about the key word strategy that you should use every time before you create a piece of content. 

Show Notes

Keyword research is something that I have been working on and around for more than a decade. When I first started working on online internet business, keyword research and search engine optimization (SEO) was a game that we played against Google. It was like a war of content creators versus Google and most content creators were in the business of trying to game the system so that their content would rank and be number one in Google search. 

Things have changed significantly in the last 15 years. Google has gotten increasingly smart about how to tell real content from content that’s trying to game the system. Google is using an increasing amount of artificial intelligence where they’re really trying to serve their core mission, which is that when a searcher puts a search term (or what we often call a keyword phrase) into Google, that searcher will be rewarded with whatever is truly the best content for their search intent. 

We need to pay attention to keyword strategy whenever we create content because there’s nothing better in the whole world than free traffic from Google, as Google is such a prominent place for traffic to come from.

With this in mind, here’s seven steps that you should go through each and every time you create a piece of content to bring you visitors without any paid promotion.

1. Understand what it is that you want people to do when they find your content. Spend some time thinking about the outcome that you want. Ask: 

• What is the purpose of my content? 
• What am I trying to accomplish with it? 
• Who is the ideal person for my content? 
• What is the reason why I am creating the content? 

2. Imagine what key word phrase you would type in order to find this content. Find 5 or 10 things that make sense for the content that you are creating (base keywords) and list these in a spreadsheet.

3. Expand those keywords to include long tail keyword phrases that are related to them. A long tail keyword phrase is a search phrase that has more words, rather than fewer. How do you find these long tail keywords? Go to Google and type in your base keyword and Google will auto complete that and tell you what some of the long tail keywords are. 

Consider the search intent of each one of these keywords. Think of what the searcher intends by typing that keyword as a match for the content that you’re creating. Once you’ve decided on a handful of these keywords, optimize your content around those keywords.

4. Assess the competition. Take a look at the other content if it is currently ranking for those keywords. Type the keyword into Google and look at the web pages that you will be competing with. Use their content as a benchmark, an inspiration to make sure that you don’t forget any key topics and make sure you’ve got a really good piece of content that could be objectively considered the best piece of content for those related long tail keywords. 

5. Write the content and put it out there. Directly incorporate the relevant keyword phrases that you identified in a very natural way. None of the crazy keyword stuffing that we used to use 10 years ago, where you put keywords into content even if they didn’t make sense. The most powerful places that you can put your keywords are in the title tags and in the section headers. 

6. Promoting the content. Push the content out on social media and participate in conversations on the internet where you can offer this content as a helpful answer to a question that someone might be asking. 

7. Refresh your content periodically. Note this at the top of your article and add some additional content. Not only does this make your content stronger, but since Google has a signal that this is a well taken care of piece of content, that they should continue to move up in the rankings. When you do this refresh, take a quick look at your competition for the keywords that you care about. See what they’re doing, and that’ll give you some fresh ideas of how you might want to refresh this content, how, what you might want to add to make it a better piece content

Links Mentioned In This Episode

• Subscribe in iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher or Spotify

Help Me Help You Succeed Online

The more I hear from you about your struggles, trials and tribulations, the more I can help. So, be sure to leave comments on this post to reach out to me on Twitter or in the Late Night Internet Marketing Private Facebook Group

Tell Me What You Think

I’d love to hear what you think about the podcast. Better yet, I’d love to answer your question about Internet marketing on the show. Just drop me a line here on the blog or on the digital recorder at 214-444-8655. Don’t worry, there are no stupid questions. Unless you tell me not to, when you ask a question or leave a comment, I might even use it on the show.

Help Me Help Others

Thanks so much for your reviews on iTunes. We get a ton of exposure from iTunes, and we really appreciate the reviews there. At last count, we were over 100 reviews worldwide and counting. Reviews help us get new listeners — so I really appreciate you taking the time to leave a review on iTunes (link).