4 Ways to Increase Your Chances of Ranking for Any Keyphrase

Unfortunately, it’s not possible to rank every post you write at the top of Google search results. Depending on how competitive your niche is, you might rank in search results for between 20% to 70% of the content that you write.

The good news is that there are plenty of things you can do to up your chances. It often takes just a few simple tweaks to make ranking much more likely.

Here are 4 concrete actions you can take to increase your chances of ranking for any keyphrase.

1. Include an infographic in your blog post

As you probably know, acquiring quality backlinks to your content matters. Even with a high domain authority, it’s still smart to proactively drive backlinks to your posts after you launch them.

There are two very popular strategies to drive backlinks to your posts: guest posting and backlink outreach.

Both of these strategies are more likely to work if you have a really high-quality infographic in your post. Why? Editors of the site you’re contributing to are more likely to allow you to link back to your infographic if you pull a stat from it and need to add a source for the stat. So, even if you put the source in fine print at the bottom of your infographic, you can still link back to your post that includes the infographic in your guest article.

And when it comes to backlink outreach, you’re much more likely to have success if there’s a quality infographic in your post.

If you email someone asking them to link to a plain blog post, they might ignore you. But if you have a useful infographic, they’re more likely to want to use it in one of their posts for their audience and link back to you for attribution.

Digital Information World collects dozens of backlinks to their post on evergreen content, in large part because of their valuable infographic.

2. Add proprietary stats and quotes that can’t be found anywhere else

Remember: more backlinks equals a higher chance of ranking.

This second strategy for upping your chances of ranking for any keyphrase also has to do with backlinking.

When you write a post for a competitive keyphrase, you should try to include proprietary statistics or quotes that can’t be found somewhere else. Maybe you could ask someone influential in your industry a question on social media and then quote them in your article.

Maybe you could survey your audience to come up with your own statistics and findings.

When you create your own stats and quotes, then other bloggers will link to your post to credit your work. You can promote your post on social media and with backlink outreach to get more bloggers linking back to your content.

In their post on business travel statistics, TravelPerk included proprietary stats from surveying their own customers and pitched the survey results to the media to get more backlinks for the post.

3. Zig where others zag

Have you ever noticed that Google doesn’t like to rank identical content on the search results pages? Google’s goal is to remain the favorite search engine and keep people coming back for more searches. If Google showed people similar results in the top 10, people would get bored with the redundancy and start using another search engine that provided more options in the top 10 results.

The top three headlines for “SaaS ideas” are slightly different. They’re not all “X SaaS ideas.” Instead, one is “SaaS product ideas.” Another is “micro SaaS ideas.” And the third is “best ideas and examples of SaaS startups.”

This is why, when you’re considering what headline to use for your target keyphrase, you shouldn’t copy exactly what other bloggers are doing. Find a way to use your target keyphrase in your headline in a different way. Take a different angle or approach. Add more value, such as examples or templates.

As a SaaS copywriter, I’ve ranked hundreds of posts for SaaS clients using this strategy. Oftentimes, when I see a lot of listicles in the search results, I will write a “how-to” article instead. Or if I see a lot of articles titled “ultimate guide” that are ranking for my target keyphrase, I will write a listicle instead.

Whatever you do, don’t follow the crowd.

4. Choose keyphrases that you have a chance of ranking for

Choose keyphrases that are the right competition level for your domain. We’ve all heard this advice a thousand times before, right? But are you actually implementing it?

If you’re not ranking for the majority of what you write, the chances are that you need to target keyphrases that are less competitive.

Use an SEO tool like Mangools to filter out keyphrases for a lower competition score.

You should also match the competitiveness of the keyphrases to the level of promotion you plan to do for that post. For example, if you plan on making an infographic and doing backlink outreach for a certain topic, you can match it to a competitive keyphrase.

If you don’t have the bandwidth to do promotion for every post, then make sure the ones you’re not heavily promoting are less competitive keyphrases, to increase their chances of ranking without promotion.

While you can’t rank every post, you can increase your chances of ranking by a considerable amount. Implement these strategies and see the results.