The SEO industry is notoriously competitive and ranking for keywords can be exceptionally difficult. With the massive number of lead generation sites now ranking for local terms, thousands of local companies are struggling to bring in traffic.
Fortunately, with proper planning and execution, you can rank for keywords that bring in targeted traffic that is ready to convert. While the gardening niche is competitive, building links can be relatively easy when compared to other industries of similar difficulty.
Why Do You Want to Rank Higher?
Studies have shown that the top few positions in the search engines receive the overwhelming majority of traffic, meaning that ranking higher will bring in more visitors. In general, the more visitors you have to your website, the more customers you can sign on, and therefore the more revenue your business will generate.
However, ranking highly isn’t everything. You also need to ensure that you’re ranking for keywords that are relevant to your gardening business and will bring in targeted traffic that is willing to pay you for your services.
Perform Better Keyword Research
Rather than merely trying to force your website to rank for competitive keywords you will see better results from performing proper keyword research. In this process, you want to identify the keywords that your site already can rank for.
In many cases, these keywords might only have a small search volume, may be less than a hundred searches per month, but they will be incredibly easy to rank for. This helps you to rank higher and bring in traffic.
When most businesses say they want to rank higher what they want is to bring in more targeted traffic. But they might not understand that shifting to lower competition keywords is usually one of the easiest ways to do this.
If you can target keywords that others aren’t mentioning on their pages, you are practically ensured to rank on the first page.
Optimize Your Pages
Once you’ve figured out which keywords to target you can start optimizing your pages so that you can rank for them. Gone are the days of over-optimizing pages, in this day and age you need to be incredibly careful about where you use your keywords and how often you use them on a single page.
In many cases, it’s best to under-optimize rather than run the risk of being penalized for trying to manipulate Google. Rather than worrying about trying to hit a specific keyword density, just use the keywords naturally within the page.
However, it’s smart to avoid going over 0.5% keyword density. That means, use the keyword less than five times per thousand words. This should be considered an upper limit, in many cases, the keyword might only be used once or twice naturally.
Optimizing your page means including your keywords in the most powerful spots on your page, these are the title tag, header tags, and in the body of your content.
Build More Links
Although on-page SEO is important, especially for websites with thousands of pages, off-page SEO still rules for ranking specific pages for specific keywords. Even after multiple Google updates links are still one of the most important ranking factors and the more you can get from high-quality websites, the better.
The two best link building tactics for the gardening niche are guest posts and infographics. Guest posts work well because the gardening niche isn’t overflowing with a lot of technical marketing people. Instead, most websites are run by gardening lovers who have limited tech skills.
Start by reaching out to as many gardening websites as possible and offering to write a high-quality post for them about a topic that their audience would benefit from. Within that post, you can include a link back to one of your pages.
Secondly, infographics work well because of the lack of technical business owners in the gardening industry means that there are very few good quality gardening graphics. You can create an infographic and then share it with other site owners who will post it on their website with a link back to your page.
