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What is a Good Rank?

If we think of the ranking in the global sense: a site is on the first page of Search Engine Page Rank (SERP) results when it ranks in the top 10, give or take. This is stacked against ALL websites globally. There are millions of sites out there and that number is only growing. The scale of sites out there also include massive ecommerce players such as Amazon, Walmart, Wish, and others with equally vast resources. Ranking within the top 100 for any period of time is no small feat, especially if your site doesn't have very many pages or hasn't been around establishing trust and authority for years.

Can I Snag the #1 Spot from Super Big Site^(tm)?

The elements that go into ranking within a global search context have a variety of factors, of which we handle the technical pieces such as structuring a page's metadata and page speed for sites we host. The factors with the biggest impact correspond to how a page's content lines up with the searcher's intent. What this means is: if I am searching for "best price for vacuum model ML12345" I am probably looking to compare prices or complete a purchase. In that context, the pages I would want in my results would include price aggregations, reviews on purchases, or maybe product page listings for that particular vacuum.

I Want Visitors to Purchase; Can I Just Rank for Searches Looking to Buy?

Ranking for purchase/conversion queries is doubly difficult as the competition for queries in the final step in a sales funnel is way steeper than catching the traffic earlier and building awareness to get a return visit conversion. To work that longer funnel angle means you would need enough content to generate repeat interest over time. This can take the form of data summaries for reference, some sort of calculator, or, what is often the best and easiest: fresh related content. Having fresh content for your visitors helps keep their interest over time and build their familiarity and comfort with you and your brand.

"TLDR; Q: more rank? A: more content"

What Type of Content Should I be Creating?

Zooming back in a bit to our original question, the basic answer to more ranking is: more content. The more content your site has that corresponds to search intent, the higher the page will rank and thus, the more traffic it will have. This doesn't mean that all traffic will hang around or complete a desired action (such as buying something), known as "conversion", so we need to be more strategic than just putting anything out there. Try identifying topics that hit the sweet spot of things that you can show you are knowledgable & authoritative about that also could lead to conversions with your target audience. Be careful about just putting random content out there as it can make ranking worse, if bad quality content is created in an attempt to artifically inflate rankings. Crafting higher quality and authoritative content leads to more people sharing that link, which reinforces the content's authority in future ranking. Basically, once your content breaks through and become recognized as an authority on a topic/query it is much easier to maintain.

How Can I Decide Which Topics to Work on?

One of the best ways we have found to organize and prioritize what content to work on is by mapping out the customer journey for our target segments. This journey mapping typically includes: attributes around the target segment (such as demographics), each stop along the sales/brand funnel (awareness, consideration, conversion, loyalty, advocacy), expected queries, and other elements such as sentiment. Then each of those steps can be connected to and prioritize content ideas for generation and adjusting for a more specific target audience. This gives us a way to prioritize our list of ideas we want to tackle next.

Wrapping Up

I hope you learned something helpful from this article on ranking a site's content. There is a lot of information about SEO, ranking, and content strategy available out there. The biggest takeway we hope you get is that yes, "Content is King"; however, being strategic and prioritizing your content can help you get better results. Put in the effort to craft quality content and give it some time to get results and be seen!