The phrase “SEO Keyword Strategy” has over 9 million results in Google. The Travel Virgin has immersed in research on the various SEO keyword strategies that a website can use to rank higher on Google. There are so many articles online, with so many strategies, that it can leave you pretty confused. We are here to make your reading efforts simple. If there is one article to read on SEO keyword strategy, this is it. We have essentially summarized all that is articulated on the internet into 3 clearly defined keyword strategies. The strategies are Circle, Pyramid, and Low Hanging Fruit.
The names were created by The Travel Virgin, however the concepts are what others have been articulating in a rambling unstructured way.
Table of Contents
Definitions
Before we commence in discussing the strategies, there are a few words to be defined.
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Circle SEO Keyword Strategy
The goal of all websites should be to rank on the first page of Google. Ranking on the first page of google can be very difficult without a tried and proven strategy. The Circle SEO Keyword Strategy is a concept that is articulated by SEO gurus as being highly successful.
Think about the last time you did a search on Google, was it a long sentence or a short sentence that you search for? If you are like The Travel Virgin, most likely you asked a question. The Circle SEO Keyword Strategy, entails identifying a short tail keyword that you would desire to rank for. This short tail keyword usually has a high volume of searches. After identifying the short tail keyword, then a search is done to find long tail keywords that have a lower search amount. These long tail keywords have a greater possibility of ranking for in Google. Long tail keywords are a better target for SEO as they are more specific and are the natural language that we use daily to ask questions.
Example
The word ‘Amsterdam’ is a short tail keyword which receives about 246,000 searches monthly. It would be great to get even 20% of all searching for Amsterdam going to our website. This would be possible, if when a search is done for Amsterdam in Google, an article from our website with Amsterdam as the keyword is seen on the first page, in the first three results. This goal however would be hard to achieve if we hardly have any articles on Amsterdam or anything related ranking on Google.
Additionally, if we search Google for the word ‘Amsterdam’, there are over 500 million results. That is over 500 million articles that we have to compete with. As seen above, the SEO difficulty score is 61 which is pretty high. 61% of 500 million is 305 million. This means that we have a chance at ranking possibly by beating out 300 million articles.
The Competition
The level of competition highlighted above, may seems depressing for a new website. There is hope however, if we work towards achieving high rankings for Amsterdam related long tail keywords. So essentially, we would research on Moz or Ahfers for long tail keywords like the ones below and create articles that are easier to rank using these long tail keywords. Don’t mind the dollar figures, that is if you would want to advertise on search engines like Google, the possible cost per click. SEO keyword strategy is avoiding these cost so that your website appears on the first page. The “Amsterdam to Paris Train”, has 4400 search results and a SEO difficulty of 7. This is a good long tail keyword to target in an article.
There are several long tail keywords for Amsterdam. The picture above is only a snapshot. So the Circle Strategy is writing articles that have long tail keywords as the focus but the long term goal is to rank for the short tail keyword. This effort would look like the diagram below.
We are not done as yet, as an important part of the Circle SEO Strategy is connectivity, to strengthen the Amsterdam connection. Strengthening our website’ ability to rank for Amsterdam is done by linking the articles. This would look like the diagram below. This would be our internal linking structure. Strength to eventually rank for a higher searched short tail keyword (Amsterdam) is achieved by the compounding effect of the internal linking structure.
Internal Linking Structure
This Strategy would not be complete without backlinks, which we will discuss at the end of the article as all 3 strategies needs backlinks.
Pyramid SEO Keyword Strategy
The Pyramid Keyword Strategy, is similar to the Circle Keywords Strategy. Instead, the aim is to build blocks (articles) of long tail keywords that have minimal search results. These long tail keywords will have a very high chance of ranking. This strategy can be time consuming to achieve the desired results . It requires writing many related articles, that are connected. Building from low volume keywords to higher volume long tail keywords is the aim. So lets look at ‘Amsterdam’ again, and examine some low search volume long tail keywords. So when we look at this list we may decide to use the focus keyword of “Is Amsterdam in Denmark” as its SEO difficulty is 5 and it has a monthly search volume of 140. This is building rank using low searched long tail keywords.
In the pic below you see the bricks which are the low volume long tail keywords which will eventually add up to 1 million visitors monthly. There needs to be an internal linking structure between all articles in the pyramid.
Low Hanging Fruit SEO Strategy
This strategy is not as structured as the other two strategies. The other strategies requires producing articles surrounding one topic or short tail keyword. This can feel monotonous if your website has one content writer. In the Low Hanging Fruit SEO strategy, you randomly pick long tail keywords and use it as your focus in your content. This is for those who want to have more creative freedom to write on anything whilst using strategy to rank in Google. In this strategy there is an internal linking structure, however content may or may not be related.
Related Article: Write Long Articles and Use H1 Tag To Rank On Page 1 in 2021
External Linking Structure Strategy
Now that you have your content on your website. It is important that your website is connected to other websites through backlinks. SEO is not SEO without backlinks. This is not something to neglect. Below is a sample letter written to us requesting a backlink. It would be a good strategy to send out a few letters like these weekly or bi-weekly.
Conclusion
All strategies can be successfully used to rank on the first page of Google. Remember that “Content is King” in the world of SEO. If you need help with creating any of these strategies for your website and direction on what to write on, please email us a [email protected].
